Acting coach Jeff Goldberg in Khar. Karma Sonam Bhutia
At the very outset, it is made clear that the story of David Coleman Headley’s life will be one about forgiveness. Even before the audience can wrap its heads around that unexpected announcement, the man in the prison cell, orange overalls and handcuffs says, “I lied. This is not a story about forgiveness. This is a story about lies.”
It is a sign of what is to unfold over the next hour and half as Jeff Goldberg snarls, screams, stomps, swears, chest thumps and wisecracks his way through the convicted terrorist’s life, ending with the lie that has resulted in a lengthy incarceration.
The one-man show with Goldberg playing 57-year-old Headley had a run at Goldberg’s studio in Bandra all of April, with a final show on Sunday night. It is slated for a performance at the Royal Opera House on November 24 and 26, to mark ten years since the 26/11 terror attacks of 2008.
The American writer, director and actor, who runs an acting studio, initially wanted to make a film on Headley’s life.
“Then I looked at the story and thought, ‘I can’t make a film out this. This is huge. Let me do it in a way where I can tell the story through one man. So I’ll tell the story of David Coleman Headley.’ Then I thought I’ll just do it from prison because that’s the place where he is now. And the whole idea of the show is that he’s talking to himself,” Goldberg says.
He adds, “David is the kind of person who was traveling through Pakistan, America, Indian, Denmark, the U.K… I could not imagine what being in prison for 23 hours a day must be doing to him.” Headley, the son of a former top ranking Pakistani official and an American woman, is serving a 35-year prison sentence in an American prison for planing the 26/11 terror attacks.
Born Daood Geelani, he began a career in crime in the 1980s after got addicted to heroin and become a drug supplier. After two arrests by America’s Drug Enforcement Agency, he worked for the agency and supplied information to the FBI post 9/11. However, in the mid-2000s, he got involved with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba during his visits to Lahore to meet his family and was tasked with identifying and scoping out targets for the attacks which would claim the lives of 166 people.
Goldberg says of the three years he spent researching and writing the show. As a white American man living in Mumbai for the eight years, Goldberg says that Headley’s story also resonated with him. “This is also a story about a white person in Bombay and how he used his whiteness to fit in. A lot of people don’t understand that when you’re white in Bombay, people open doors for you. I have stories where the police have been nice to me when they have been mean to everyone else. And I can imagine that David used that to his advantage,” he says.
Goldberg also tapped into his own New York City roots in his quest to portray the terrorist. “I kept thinking, ‘how am I going to make this story and informative emotionally interesting to an audience? And I thought and I thought and then it came to me. David Coleman Headley is older by 20 years but he was in New York in 2001 and so was I. I protested against the war on Iraq and Afghanistan. And I thought that I was a soldier in the war on terror in the peace army and he was a soldier in the terror army. And I thought that he and I lived the same experience but on different sides of it. And I thought may be I can tell his story through my story. May be the anger and frustration that I feel is the anger and frustration that he feels.”
While unable to physically resemble a man a lot bigger than himself, Goldberg was able to compensate for Headley’s heterochromia by wearing a blue contacts lens in one eye and hoping his naturally green one would pass off for Headley’s brown one in the dark during the performance. But Goldberg’s original thought behind tackling Headley was because of stereotypical acting roles coming his way. “As an actor the only roles I get in Bollywood are these Gora roles. You’re going to play a Britisher who hates Indians. I’m not British and I don’t hate Indians. So I thought let me tell a story that I want to tell,” he says.
A deep psychological study of Headley has led Goldberg to some conclusions about his subject. “David is really a great example of the late 20th century. He represents drugs, sex rock and roll, the loss of religion, the discovery of religion. David was an addictive person. He was first addicted to booze, then drugs, then women, then Islam, then jihad, then terror and then power”.
At the end of the show, Goldberg apologises to the audience for dealing with “such terrible material”, aware of the emotional connection that audiences have to the events of ten years ago. “I think the story of David Coleman Headley is representative of our times and I hope people walk out of there thinking, ‘we’ve got to be better. We have to wake up now. Its time to do things better,” he says.