"Language Rooms' at the Wilma (2nd review)

The truth of it is, terrorism's a virus for us. We don't know where it comes from, who the carriers are, or why it's singled us out. It's not that the answers to these questions are so hard, but that we're averse to asking the right questions—which we'd best pose to ourselves. Since we'll look everywhere except in the mirror, we've raised interrogation into a fine if futile art.

If you think about it, half our public discourse over the past decade has been about how questions should be asked and, specifically, whether torture is permissible in extracting answers. Some people think this is a moral question (is torture ever justified?); some think it an instrumental one (does it yield reliable answers?).

The short answer—for me—is no in both cases. But in a sense the issue, though indeed important, is secondary. Deep down, we can't trust any answers, no matter how obtained, because we can't conceive the truth of our own situation.

Fanatics and "'truth'

In the contemporary West, this isn't just a matter of politics but of philosophy. Truth, we've been told, is the product of language games, and therefore inherently self-referential. It gives no access to an objective world beyond the domain of our imaginings. A contented consumer world (if such a thing exists) might abide thus, but this luxury is not ours.

On the contrary, we find ourselves confronted by groups who believe truth to be the absolute property of certain sacred texts, which they are prepared to follow even to the death. We call the members of such groups "fanatics," but that doesn't tell us anything useful.

Because we've elevated security into a transcendent value (or, perhaps, metaphor) we've turned a tricky but manageable police problem into a war, a mission, a crusade and finally an ontological quest. We seek not truth about our adversaries but, in a perverse way, from them. This they cannot give us, but our frustration only spurs us on the more.

The insecure interrogator

This is by way of introduction to Language Rooms, the new work by the Arab-American playwright Yussef El Guindi now onstage at the Wilma Theater. Its protagonist, Ahmed (Sevan Greene), works for what appears to be a private contractor whose job is to interrogate terrorist suspects. Ahmed, the son of Arab immigrants, is supposed to speak Arabic but doesn't, a fact known only to the one genuine Arab speaker (J. Paul Nicholas) working for the company.

This doesn't really matter, since Ahmed's superiors read only the English transcripts of what are essentially imaginary conversations. Ahmed's problem is that he fails to socialize adequately with his colleagues. Such bonding rituals are far more important than the output of the interrogations themselves, since they are the means by which the interrogators, no less enclosed in a hermetic world than their captives, assert their distinction from them.

In fact, the interrogators know little more than their prisoners, from whom they are separated only by an operating manual and a set of instruments and procedures they apply as necessary. The action of the play charts Ahmed's transformation from the role of the questioner to that of the questioned, but its real point is the interchangeability of the roles themselves. Where no common language exists, nothing can be ascertained, and role reversal is the sole option. This is the very definition of the absurd, as in Beckett, Ionesco or Genet.

Superfluous masseuse

I would by no means put El Guindi's play in the class of these authors. His devices are often transparent and banal, his writing drags— particularly in the first act— and the script includes an entirely superfluous scene with a masseuse (Julienne Hanzelka Kim, who deserves a better role).

There's something not quite resolved about the mise en scène, too. The company's gamesmanship is, in only slightly exacerbated form, that of many American businesses whose "products" (for example, exotic financial instruments) don't bear much scrutiny, and where company loyalty is accordingly the real standard of performance.

There is certainly a fine satiric point to be made here, but El Guindi wants to combine it with a much more conventional drama of immigrant acculturation that belongs in a quite different play. The banality of evil is one thing; that of mixed dramatic styles is another.

Just another job

If Language Rooms does tell us something important, it's about how normative torture (always the end-state of failing imperial regimes) has become to us, and how similar our much-reviled war contractors are to our ordinary ways of doing business— how much, indeed, they are its product. Ahmed and his colleagues aren't swashbucklers in fatigues riding shotgun and blazing away at checkpoint crowds, but ordinary guys in civvies who might be doing lab work on animals for Revlon.

Ahmed's superior, Kevin (Peter Jay Fernandez), is a willowy African-American whose doubletalk is distinctly Obamaesque. The contractors and their world seem to take place in a private space unconnected to the rest of us except by our tax dollars (a point underlined by Ola Maslik's Francis Bacon-inspired sets), but they're really the house next door— or the basement of our own.♦


To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.
To read another review by Jonathan M. Stein, click here.