‘Heartland’ at InterAct Theatre Company: Struggling across the divide, in ourselves and with others

“Jihad,” we learn in InterAct’s production of Heartland, by Gabriel Jason Dean, “is not war — it is internal struggle.” In this interesting and moving drama, all three of the characters struggle, and all three actors bring that struggle to vivid life onstage under the fluid direction of Evren Odcikin. It seems clear that the play’s agenda is contained in one line: “To be a man and say Islam is a religion of mercy is the struggle.”

We first meet Dr. Harold Banks (Tim Moyer), an aging professor of Afghan studies in Omaha, Neb., the heartland of America. He can still sling around the professorial language, although he knows that he’s slipping into dementia, and Moyer’s portrayal of his deterioration is very courageous. Harold is in mourning for his daughter, Getee (Nazli Sarpkaya), an Afghan baby he found abandoned in a battlefield in Pakistan. As an adult, she had returned to her birth country to teach young women there, and to find out more about her roots.

We learn about the past through flashbacks. Into her classroom and into her life comes Nazrullah (Yousof Sultani, with a very nuanced and impressive performance), a mathematics professor who writes poetry. They fall in love, as we knew they would. Their courtship — and the script — depends on their linguistic difficulties as they translate for each other and learn, through storytelling and sometimes funny mistakes, the texture of both Afghan and American cultures.

Nazrullah also comes into Harold’s life when the former arrives in Omaha after Getee has been killed in an airstrike. His generosity to the failing old man is both believable and touching.

At the symbolic center of the drama are books: The Diary of Anne Frank she is using as a text to teach her students English; Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Harold’s favorite book; and, most crucial, a school textbook written during the cold war with Russia, using word problems as war propaganda. In a play where books are the keys to all the ideas, the set (cleverly designed by Dirk Durosette) is built of stacks and piles of books.

Much of the interest, at least for me, was in listening to Heartland’s language (Dari is one of the Arabic languages in Afghanistan, and Sultani seems to be fluent) as we and they struggle across the cultural divide.

Through April 21 at InterAct Theatre Company, Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St. Tickets: $35-40. Information: 215-568-8079, interacttheatre.org.