Torture, Nudity, and Family Betrayal

If worldwide anger with American foreign policy is weighing heavily on the minds of most concerned liberal Seattle theatergoers, imagine how it feels to be an Arab-American playwright.

Yet Yussef El Guindi, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and a Seattle resident since 1994, is calm and contemplative, quick to laugh, as we sit down at Café Septième to discuss his newest play, Language Rooms, which is chock full of torture implements, sexual taunting, nudity, and family betrayal.

"Even now, I'm loath to call my plays political," says El Guindi in an accent that reflects the country (the U.K.) to which he immigrated at age 4. "I don't want the play to become an illustration of some theme. There are certain loaded words I'm never going to use, like 'waterboarding.'"

Though Language Rooms is set in a detention-interrogation facility clearly inspired by Guantánamo Bay, it's not named or located in any particular country. Two of the main characters are Arabic speakers employed by the U.S. military, considered precious for their language skills, but also suspect for their country of origin (also, in this case, Egypt).

The setting is generic, with minimal props specified in the script—hammer, rope, baseball bat, dildo. El Guindi says he wrote the two-act piece quickly last fall, without reference to current news or events (he doesn't own a TV). Submitted to ACT's New Play Award program, Language Rooms won him $2,500 and two workshop readings next month. After that, says El Guindi with practiced fatalism, "It may just stay in my drawer."

El Guindi has had plenty of experience with "big, heavy, serious plays" that never got produced. But the former actor and drama teacher has lightened his touch since he first started writing in the '90s. "I rebooted," he says. "I started writing these short plays and comedies. And then I moved up to one-acts." The new goal was not to write weighty epics like Brecht or Tony Kushner, but to be "absurd, slightly surreal, and hopefully funny." His Back of the Throat, about an Arab-American writer being questioned by the feds after 9/11, was a hit for Theater Schmeater three years ago. That and other works have since been staged in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. Yet at age 47, El Guindi is still seen as a playwright of "promise," possibly because he hasn't yet achieved a big, Brechtian breakthrough.

Or possibly because American theatergoers still aren't prepared to laugh at our Gitmo follies the way we are about, say, the Nazis cavorting in The Producers. (What is it they say about comedy equaling tragedy plus distance...?) El Guindi has been featured in The New York Times, and that paper's 2006 review of Back of the Throat praised its "very funny lines" and topicality, while fretting about the oversimplification of "plugging the Bush law enforcers into that old J. Edgar Hoover mold: hyperparanoid and sexually disturbed and not very bright."

It's a balance Language Rooms, in its present form, is also struggling to achieve. Scenes between the two Arab interrogators are rife with mistrust and rhetorical evasion. Scenes of them being coerced and surveilled by their American boss are more blunt, even silly. And when it comes to the climactic interrogation, it's more Pinter than Molière—haranguing, not farce.

El Guindi insists, "I think cruelty can become so absurd that there's despair and there's laughter." But we aren't the Nazis in The Producers or Hogan's Heroes; the bad guys brandishing the club (or dildo) are the Germans, which makes it easier for us to laugh. And drama, not absurdist comedy, has thus far been the more successful route for bringing such raw topical issues to the stage (see George Packer's Betrayed, based on his book The Assassins' Gate and now being performed in New York) and screen (see the Oscar-nominated documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, with a cameo by Dick Cheney).

Before gaining citizenship in 1996—which he sought in order to vote against the new Mariners stadium—El Guindi had been an immigrant in not one but two successive countries. "In England," he recalls, "you'll never be quite English." Now he's a stakeholder, as it were, writing from within the club and in a position to explain to outsiders the cost of admittance.

Seattle and the United States have been more welcoming than Britain, he adds, but citizenship doesn't guarantee freedom from insecurities and doubts about "belonging and notions of identity, American identity, and how tenuous that feels sometimes."