The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

While Arabs and Arab Americans are regularly featured in the news, the opportunities for them to be in the spotlight on the stage of American theaters have been much less frequent. This inequality in representation could be resolved by nontraditional casting, but a superior solution is to generate more new plays with Arab roles. Yussef El Guindi, a contemporary Arab American playwright, has been writing plays for American stages for more than three decades. This compilation of his plays highlights the complexity of transnational identity, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and other complications of polycultural identities. The selected plays are Back of the Throat, Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat, Language Rooms, Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World, and Threesome.One of the strengths of The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi is its inclusion of contextualizing materials that provide the reader insight into the implicit and explicit bias Arabs and Muslims face in everyday life and in the American theatre. It also provides a comprehensive look into the nuance of El Guindi's work. The book includes a foreword from Torange Yeghiazarian, the Founding Artistic Director of Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, CA; a preface from Founding Director of Programming and Mission Trustee at Silk Road Rising in Chicago, Jamil Khoury; an abridged timeline of El Guindi's life and play production for the works included in the book; and an introduction written by editor Micheal Malek Najjar. This material broadly but succinctly guides readers into the anthology's plays and their relevance, even those readers who otherwise might feel they lack a point of entry.The impact that Yussef El Guindi has had as a contemporary playwright is made immediately clear in this volume. This is exemplified by the fact that the first sections in the book were written by founding artists of theaters known for their instrumental and ground-breaking support and amplification of Arab-American voices. In Yeghiazarian's foreword, she describes the impact that El Guindi's work has had on Arab-Americans and notes that his plays have helped “define … the Arab American experience particularly post 9/11” (x). Khoury outlines several notable aspects of El Guindi's work, including the fact that he doesn't “affirm [the audiences'] fears about Arabs and Muslims,” but he doesn't paint them to be perfect, either (xi). Khoury underscores the cultural importance of El Guindi's work by stating, “He doesn't claim to ‘represent’ [the Arab American experience], but he's vocal in insisting that our stories be told. Our community's complexity, our almost desperate longing to be heard, punctuate Yussef's choices…. Yussef writes from a place of nuance, contradiction, and self-awareness in order to challenge, to disrupt complacency, to entertain us without letting us off the hook” (xi).In Najjar's introduction to the five plays that follow, he provides a brief but illuminating background on Yussef El Guindi's life. His grandfather was a famed Egyptian theatre director, his grandmother was an acclaimed actress, his uncle was a writer, and his father was a film producer during the “golden age of Egyptian cinema in the 1950s” (xvi). Najjar also reveals that El Guindi was an actor before he became a playwright and provides context on how that has shaped the plays he writes. El Guindi writes that characters “so often come to [him] as personas and pieces. [His] experience as an actor helps [him] anchor those sometimes spectral voices in flesh and movement” (xvii). Najjar ends the introduction by providing information that is dramaturgical, historical, and personal to the playwright, while placing them in the specific times they were written.Back of the Throat was written soon after September 11 and includes an Arab American named Khaled and two officers who are intent on investigating him and consider any and all information they procure as evidence of guilt. Reading it in 2020, especially considering the recent political organizing against police brutality, makes this selection feel like it was written last week. El Guindi forces the reader to question what sacrifices in policy and procedure have been made under the guise of safety and security for all; it also begs the question, who is “all” anyway?In Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat, El Guindi examines the relationships between Muslims, including second-generation Arab Americans, imams, and writers. The questions of “selling out,” gatekeeping, authenticity, and aspects of identity one chooses to perform versus those that are projected onto a person, are all explored in this play.Language Rooms is set in the same political landscape as Back of the Throat. The play takes place in a secret prison where those who have been deemed dangerous to the state or can provide information on sought-after targets are held, questioned, and tortured. One of the interrogators/translators, an Arab Muslim named Ahmed, is having his loyalty called into question. When he has to interrogate his own father, we see him torn between worlds he doesn't quite fit into; he states that he hates “the country [he] came from” and “[hates] the country [he was] raised … in for making [him] feel that way” (184).Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World feels very different from the other plays in this collection. Najjar calls it a “move into romantic comedy territory,” and indeed the label seems to fit better than any other might (xxv). Pilgrims offers a diverse range of ethnicities and characters from all ends of the Muslim piety spectrum. Any preconceived notions one might have about Muslims living in America are washed away by the complexity of the characters in this play.In Threesome, what starts as a planned sexual encounter reveals itself to be much more. After suffering physical and emotional violence during the Egyptian revolution, Laila, the female protagonist, discovers what it means to reclaim her own power. This play also provides a fierce critique of Orientalism—both in how it is deployed in a capitalist sense, and how it affects men's perceptions of women.Following the last play in the book, Threesome, there is a short article written by Yussef El Guindi himself called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet Abdallah and Ahmed: Musing about Arabs and Muslims in American Theater,” which serves as an important note on why Arab plays are often seen as “political” and therefore excluded from theatre seasons, and what it means to move forward from that as a community.Though the plays are presented in chronological order by production in the book, I suggest that the reader of this anthology read Back of the Throat and Language Archive together, as their shared themes of surveillance, Islamophobia, and the concept of national security make a natural pairing. The themes of authenticity, emancipation, and discovery tie Our Enemies, Pilgrims, and Threesome together, while providing surprises at each turn. Still, each character in all five plays is given a strong point of view that will leave the reader questioning their own stance on the subjects raised. As a whole, The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi challenges common assumptions about plays concerning Arabs and Arab Americans, beginning a dialogue that is often neglected in 2020. This collection illustrates the critical nature of conversations about Arab American identity and contributes to the broader subject of all representations of complicated, polycultural identities in the American theatre. These plays serve comedic moments in heaps while also shining a bright light on what it means to be human. The deep complexity of the characters in all five plays, and the playwright's ability to allow audiences to see themselves in them, makes this book a welcome contribution to a theatre landscape that is sorely in need of it.