"Language Rooms' at the Wilma (3rd review)

Despite the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the documentary evidence out of Guantánamo Bay, our country's embrace of torture still remains a marginal abstraction to most Americans. Do concepts like the banality of evil or the amnesia of evil help us to explain this national response to the brutality we've unleashed? Has Orwellian language of "extraordinary rendition" (i.e., international kidnappings) and "enhanced interrogation" techniques (torture) created a fog for the war on terror that has obfuscated its realities? Or is there something else?

Muslim culture and Arab-Americans as well exist in the shadows of a national paranoia much like the various "alien" immigrant groups who, over many decades in American history, threatened an assumed American monoculture with their otherness and seeming unwillingness to belong to the mainstream. This was not only the paranoia of fringe groups from the Know Nothing Party of the 19th Century to our current Tea Party, but official governmental policy, whether expressed in an Alien Exclusion Act against Chinese immigration, the post-World War I Palmer Raids against "hyphenated-Americans," or the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

Weaving this rich and contemporary subject matter into a new, brilliant dark comedy, the Egyptian-American playwright Yussef El Guindi addresses these issues as perhaps only a talented outsider/immigrant artist could do— with, I should add, an equally inventive immigrant/theater director, Blanka Zizka (a fugitive from Communist Czechoslovakia).

Pinteresque confusion

The opening words of Language Rooms— "I'm sorry, what?"— suggest the Pinteresque confusion of feeling and language that plays out in the setting of an anonymous U.S. outpost of the intelligence industry, where official interrogation and torture seek out truths from detainees, but where everyone is fair game for interrogation and spying, and where the only certain goal for interrogators is a "full pension plan" at the end.

Caught in the web of interrogator and detainee is Ahmed (Sevan Greene), a first-generation Arab-American who is "one language skill and a beard trimmer away from the people they bring" to this facility. His failure to attend a Super Bowl TV gathering or appear naked with fellow males in the showers (a prudity he sheds when he describes interrogating blindfolded nude detainees), sets him apart from others, as does suspicion generated by his too facile and successful embrace of radical beliefs to win the trust of those he interrogates.

His counterpoint and bureaucratic embodiment of the intelligence industry here is Kevin (Peter Jay Fernandez), cast per the playwright's direction as an African-American who can play off his own otherness and his assimilation into America, and who employs the psychology of love and brotherhood to play with Ahmed's mind, replacing an immigrant's belief in loyalty with the fashions of belonging to the group. The play romps satirically with this confusion of what and why people are torturing others for, whether detainees or fellow employees.

Shades of Eastern State

The blue scuba-type isolation suit that Ahmed eventually is required to step into is described by Kevin as a "kind of time out for people to reflect" on what it means to say, "I belong." This reminds one of the solitary reflection imposed on inmates in Philadelphia's "progressive" Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1830s.

The play aptly avoids the direct depiction of torture, yet darkly suggests it with suggestive, domestic props wheeled around on a small cart containing a garden hose and water planter, telephone books, milk (just the recipe for lactose intolerant Middle Easterners), honey, a jar of hot peppers, a rubber dildo, bats and diapers. The banality of implements of torture.

Although the play's first half could use some editing to move it more felicitously toward its dramatic focus, the second half successfully realizes the connection between the personal and the political in a way that only great theater or literature can manifest. Ahmed, the believer in becoming American through the "instant conversion" of U.S. citizenship, "which means never ever having to say I'm sorry for being foreign-born," is required to interrogate his own father, Samir (Nasser Faris) who has been implicated, farcically or conspiratorially, with a radical sheik on the run.

Like the Irish and the Jews

The father-son drama here is searing in the ways of an earlier, classical American theater of the 20th Century that addressed the failed dreams of different generations of other immigrants, whether Jewish, Irish or African-American. El Guindi lays aside his sharp wit, to bare the pain of both the dislocations of immigration and the effort to assimilate: the father who wants his son to speak American, not Arabic, yet who himself prays at the shopping mall he visits with his son; the son who hates the country he came from and also the country he was brought to for making him feel that way.

The cast convincingly inhabits the playwright's roles. Greene as Ahmed evolves as the dedicated dreamer dissolves into anger and self-hatred. His comrade in interrogation, Nasser (J. Paul Nicholas), smartly portrays a more apt assimilator and survivor. Completing a cast of "others," the Asian masseuse character, Esther (Julienne Hanzelka Kim), aptly confronts Ahmed's asserted identity as an American with her own intuitions about who he is underneath, while adhering to her own personal dream to become an American.

Fernandez nails the Kevin character, a seamless blend of hypocrisy and authentic feeling. In the father/detainee character of Samir, Faris adopts a dramatic style that edges on melodrama but powerfully weaves the ardor and naiveté of the paternal immigrant into a compelling and memorable dramatic figure.

Menacing stage design

Zizka's direction gave coherence to a play that wanted to inhabit different styles of theater. Wilma's dependable, high-quality production supports were manifested through tempered, laconic elements like Ola Maslik's spare institutional setting (with a touch of silhouetted basketball players overlooking the "language rooms"), Russell Champa's lighting design and Jorge Cousineau's sound and video design, offering menace through subtlety of design.

As our politics and political leaders continue to fail us, we need more theater like Language Rooms. And since such theater doesn't appear to emanate today from American playwrights, we need more American theaters embracing the international playwrights who, although not necessarily born speaking our language, understand so well our language and the rooms we ply it in.♦


To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.