Tazeen Zahida once had investors lined up for a bakery shortly after she moved to Houston from Saudi Arabia in 2017. When she instead asked them to invest in a theater, the answer was always no. 

Although she loved baking, it was merely a hobby. Her true passion was theater. 

“Theater was something that gave me my voice,” Zahida said. “For some odd reason, the only time I feel heard is when I have a play and an actor is saying those dialogues that I have written.”

But in a city like Houston with a thriving theater scene, she was determined to pursue her passion. Roughly a year later, she started TeeZee Productions using her own savings and now operates one of the only South Asian-led theater companies in the Houston area that aims to confront nuanced narratives around race, culture, and stereotypes that are prevalent in communities of color and immigrant communities.

Born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia, Zahida came from a family of writers and poets, and fell in love with theater and written drama at age 15. She enjoyed the freedom and creativity it afforded her to express herself boldly.

Written in English and Urdu, her plays often are inspired by current affairs, social issues, family dynamics, and her combined experiences of living in the Middle East and America. One of her most recent works: “Forget Me Not,” is a production that shows the family dynamic when the strong, independent, self-made matriarch is suddenly diagnosed with Alzehimer’s disease.

“I am brought up with practicing Muslim values, but I don’t want to restrict myself to just that,” Zahida said. “I want to tell stories of all kinds.”

Her upcoming play “Papa Où T’e,” French for “Father, where are you?” chronicles the challenges of four high school friends – Ahmad, Aly, Zain and Maaria – second-generation Americans. In the play, they grapple with identity crises, clashes between cultural and religious expectations and their personal aspirations, and the impact of having both physically and emotionally absent fathers. It also tackles topics seen as taboo in the Muslim faith and South Asian culture, from alcoholism to drug use, teenage pregnancy and sexual assault.

“This is the most touchy subject matter she’s dealt with,” said Andrew Roblyer, intimacy director and dramaturg, or literary editor. “I give her so much credit for being willing to take that stance.”

While Zahida wasn’t exposed to all of these topics, she said as immigrants, “we cannot say that these are not our problems anymore.”

“Papa Où T’e,” debuts Saturday and Sunday with four shows at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center in Houston, known as MATCH. Each show is 90 minutes long without intermission and tickets are $60.

Lead actor, Khurram Hamid, is now performing his fifth play with Zahida. He’s never passed up an opportunity to work with her because he knows her plays are going to be unique and an accurate representation of South Asian stories, he said. 

“She’s probably now the only South Asian doing plays and representing our community,” he said. “If we don’t tell our stories, who (will)?”  

Hamid plays the role of Ahmad, the son of an imam who has an embattled relationship with his emotionally distant father who prioritizes his congregation over his son. 

“She’s tackling very timely, contemporary issues through her specific lens as a Muslim American woman,” said Michael Buening, the director of Performing Arts and Culture at the Asia Society Texas. 

The struggle to fill theaters

Since 2018, Zahida has written, directed and produced 16 plays, some that have been commissioned by Performing Arts Houston and performed at The Wortham Center. She has also received nearly $20,000 in grants, including those from the Doris Duke Foundation and the BIPOC Arts Network and Fund.

Despite the boldness and unique representation of her plays, Zahida said she still struggles to build an audience and fill seats. It has forced her to expend more of her personal resources and funds to produce plays. But she considers it a worthy sacrifice to tell important stories that otherwise would go untold.

“Filling houses is the biggest challenge, and making people realize that though I am a Muslim, my story has a Muslim background, it is not a Muslim story,” she said. “It is a human story.”

While she has seen an emergence of space for Black and Latino stories in theater in Houston, there’s still work to be done to create more space for South Asian stories, Zahida said.

“There is absolutely no room for South Asian stories except (if) they decide to dance. Dance is the only way, and maybe qawwali,” Zahida said. 

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Funding and filling seats has been a widespread challenge across the broader arts community, especially since the pandemic, Buening said.

But he’s noticed that theatrical performances in particular tend to be more difficult to get funding as opposed to music and dance, because they often take longer to develop or require more resources, he said. 

“I just don’t know if there’s that kind of tradition in the South Asian community as much,” he said. 

Rebecca Udden, executive director of Main Street Theatre who helps advise Zahida’s plays at times, said in her decades-long theater experience, the South Asian community is one that is typically not in the habit of going to the theater. But if there was more theater for that community, she believes more audiences will follow. 

“It takes a lot longer to kind of crack through the awareness in that community,” Udden said. She has tried, but has largely been unsuccessful. 

“It’s very important for (Zahida) to reach her community with these messages but also to open up the Houston audience in general to her stories and to (her) community,” Udden said. “There are a lot of topics I’m sure that people just don’t want to talk about, and I think the fact that she’s putting them on stage will force people to at least think about them and maybe even talk about them.”

That’s why it’s crucial for Zahida’s work to flourish in Houston, she said, a very diverse city that lacks a strong South Asian theatrical presence. 

“There are South Asian theatrical groups, but it’s not on the level that some other cities that have not quite the diversity that Houston has,” Udden said. “And I think we need it. It’ll make the theater community more robust if we’ve got these voices as a really active part of the community.”

Buening said that there’s a robust South Asian arts community predominantly based in Sugar Land and Stafford but he said Houston’s broader arts scene stands room for improvement in cross cultural interaction and representation. The South Asian population in the Sugar Land area, while still small, grew by 20 percent in the last five years from roughly 45,900 in 2017 to 57,400 in 2022, latest Census data shows.

Oftentimes, a lack of access and opportunities to perform in venues poses barriers of entry to South Asian artists, he said.

“I do think that’s starting to change, and I think a big driver of that is artists themselves taking the initiative to create works and get their works out there,” Buening said. 

That’s partly why he said Asia Society Texas wants to support Zahida’s work — to reduce some of those barriers. Asia Society is collaborating with Zahida and TeeZee Productions to restage a performance of her play, “And the Claypot Speaketh,” on Nov. 16 and 17 as part of its Muslim series, which showcases the work of Muslim Americans. The show is a hybrid musical pantomime and tableau about a tragic story of forbidden love presented from the perspective of the claypot, or “Gharya” in Urdu. 

“I love her passion and she’s a fighter,” he said. “She wants to bring her work to the world and other voices to the world. That’s just really inspiring to see.”

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