"The thing about stereotypes is there's always a grain of truth in them. That's why they're so insidious," said Seattle-based playwright Yussef El Guindi, whose newest work about Arab-Americans begins performances Thursday in a production by Silk Road Theatre Project.
Writing with a satirical edge, El Guindi incorporates swaths of irony-laced humor into "Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat," which focuses on the ways in which modern-day Arabs and Muslims are portrayed in the American mainstream media.
The play centers on three young Arab-American writers and their conflicting views about whether or not it is damaging to acknowledge -- in public -- certain problems within their community.
"How do you air dirty laundry without one's dirty laundry being used against you?" El Guindi said during a trip to
Dangerous strategy
"It perpetuates a certain stereotype -- like Arabs are prone to violence, they're backward, they keep their women down, they're oppressive, they have no democracy -- all true. But that is one layer of a thousand-layer portrait."
On the flip side, denying that there are problems is insincere. "If you won't name it because of what other people are going to think, then how are we helping ourselves?" said Jamil Khoury, Silk Road's artistic director.
With a $500,000 budget and a rent-free theater space in the
Plans for the future are ambitious and seemingly attainable if the trajectory continues. The company hopes to become a major national hub for minority playwrights, with a $1 million budget within the next four years.
El Guindi, who became a U.S. citizen in 1996, is looking for a spirited debate, and he doesn't let audiences off the hook (this sentence as published has been revised in this text). That's not to say his technique is instructional. Identifying the absurdity of a situation is key: "I have to see the humor in things," he said of the comic underpinnings in his plays.
Raised in suburbs
Khoury, who was raised in the western suburbs, is the product of an American mother and a Syrian immigrant father; the theater's executive director, Malik Gillani, emigrated at age 7 from Pakistan to suburban Chicago (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Their initial goal was to focus on the Middle East and the broader Islamic world.
"But we ran into these historical references to the Silk Road and 18 centuries of trade," said Khoury. "And we thought, well here's this terrific model of what we today would call multiculturalism. So why not use that as a metaphor and a geographic guide for the stories we want to tell?" For their purposes, the map spans from Italy to Japan.
Decidedly American
Make no mistake, this is not about folkloric or classical works. These aren't "issue" plays or "ethnic" plays. This isn't good-for-you theater. The shows produced by Khoury and Gillani are decidedly modern -- and decidedly American. Stories, in other words, about your friends and neighbors.
"It's not celebratory," Khoury said. "It's not about, 'Isn't it great to be Korean?' or 'Isn't it great to be Middle Eastern?' No, these are American plays."
Or as Gillani put it, "This is about: What are we thinking as Americans?"
Certainly this is a tense time in America's relations with the Arab world, and El Guindi's plays not only reflect this tension, but have prompted what Khoury termed "enormous pushback" from certain audiences.
It was El Guindi's "Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith," (staged here in 2005) that prompted negative reactions from some local Arab-Americans -- including a verbal death threat--because of its portrayal of an immigrant Egyptian family and the rebellion and Americanization of their teenage children.
"The purpose of theater is not to present Arabs as angels," said Khoury. "The push-back was people who said, 'Well, you should be presenting us as angels because we're otherwise presented as villains or demons.'"
El Guindi walked this line in another of his plays, the hilarious-horrific "Back of the Throat," which Silk Road staged in 2006. In it, an Arab- American writer is interrogated by government officials, and it is left unclear whether he is being unfairly profiled or is a legitimate terrorist threat. The play suggests that either scenario might be true.
The fact that El Guindi leaves things ambiguous has unnerved some audiences.
"He leaves a lot of gray area," Khoury said, "and this new play, he poses a lot of questions about the representation of Arabs and Muslims in U.S. pop culture in a really smart way. It's not about hitting you over the head about, this is bad representation and this is good representation."
Sex part of writing
"Yussef also always injects sexuality in his writing," said Gillani, and according to Khoury: "We're a community that is still very uncomfortable talking about sex, so I think Yussef is very much ahead of his time. He's trying to engage the Arab- American community in a conversation that a lot of people are not ready or willing to have."
But Khoury anticipates many of these same audience members will come to see "Our Enemies."
"I think there's this feeling of, 'Well, at least they're telling our story --no one else is.' This play is going to certainly upset segments of the Arab community. I think other segments will appreciate it.
"Once again, it's that whole thing of, we don't feel secure enough to be having these conversations aired before non-Arab audiences.
"We're conditioned with that idea of you don't want to hurt people. And yet our inclination at Silk Road is very much for social change."
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"Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat" begins previews Feb. 21 and opens March 1, through March 30 at the Chicago Temple Building, 77 West Washington St. Tickets are $22-$32 at 866-811-4111.
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