If you're made for something, you always come back to it.
Mermaids slip back into the sea, Muhammad Ali climbed back into the ring, and this Tuesday night Camyar Chai returns to Neworld Theatre.
When the curtain rises on Doost at 8 p.m at the Cultch, it will represent not only Chai's 11-year journey back to the theatre company he founded, but the culmination of a lifelong spiritual quest.
A storm has just passed when the playwright and actor answers the phone in his Burnaby home to talk about high school, getting a part on The Beachcombers and the three years he spent crafting the story of Doost, a Farsi word for friend.
"That's always a good story to tell when you have one individual who can galvanize and create a movement," he explains.
For Chai, that one individual is Javad Nurbakhsh, a master of the Nimatullahi Sufiorder, a mystical path to divine love.
The Sufiorder was something Chai gravitated toward after years of reading sacred texts and seeking transcendence behind the words.
He studied the Bible, Torah and Koran. He puzzled through gnostic works and pursued both Buddhism and the Bhagavad Gita before coming to a realization: "They all said the same thing but in different languages."
After years of spiritual wandering, Chai found a home in the order of Sufi. The order is about oneness, kindness and unity — three words that tend to precipitate a pronounced roll of the eyes, Chai acknowledges.
"People are very suspicious of any kind of spirituality or religion because there's so many negative things attached to it," he explains, mentioning the extremism some associate with the Muslim faith.
Other reject spirituality as something corny, "Kumbaya stuff," Chai notes.
"Why are we rejecting those things right now?" he asks. "Why do we tend to be drawn... to things that are about fear and negativity?" For the theatre to be valuable to a community — not merely a diversion — it has to be about what's going on in the community "or maybe what's not going on in the community," Chai says.
The challenge of creating a linear story cloaked in non-linear mysticism sparked Chai to pen Doost.
"To say I'm doing it for everyone would be disingenuous, because how can you do a play that's going to please everyone? Impossible," he says. "There's going to be a fusion of Persian music, flamenco and jazz. So that should whet somebody's appetite to come and see what we're up to."
Ever since putting on plays in the family living room in Iran, Chai has been enamoured with the illusion and substance of theatre.
"I've just always enjoyed that live audience connection and the feeling of living and breathing with a group of people in the same room," Chai says.
"There's an immediate magic element of theatre where you have to convince people to suspend their disbelief," he says. "There's a bit of a rush to that as well, because you could fail quite easily."
His understanding of theatre was shaped in part by Gary Zimmerman's tutelage during Chai's days as a student at Windsor secondary in North Vancouver.
"I wasn't a jock and I always was very expressive," Chai explains of his attraction to the drama program.
Watching Zimmerman take care with every aspect of the school's theatre productions helped Chai with the founding of Neworld.
"I didn't see the kind of theatre that I was interested in," he says of founding the company. "I quickly realized that as assimilated as I want to be, there are other people who will still see me as the other because I have immigrated, I'm Iranian."
During Chai's tenure with Neworld, the company produced an adaptation of Crime and Punishment and Devil Box Cabaret.
After nearly a decade with Neworld, Chai decided to move on.
"When a company becomes about one person it can get quite stale and not be inclusive in the way that I liked it to be," he says. "It was hard, it was very hard leaving something that you've built."
On Tuesday night, Chai is scheduled to return, bearing a message from his journey down the Sufi path.
"I'm just a student on that path, I certainly can't speak for that order," he says. "But what I do know is that one of the big lessons is that this is not about convincing anybody that our path is the right path. ... As long as the destination is love and kindness then however you get there is a Sufi path."
Neworld Theatre presents Doost, March 22 to 26 at the Cultch. Tickets and info at .
