August 9, 2013
By Kerry Reid
Jonas Hassen Khemiri's "Invasion!," now in a local premiere with Silk Road Rising under Anna C. Bahow's direction, blends the classic nesting-stories structure of "The Arabian Nights" with contemporary riffs on the psychic damages incurred through racial and ethnic profiling. The result, though somewhat scattershot in its approach, is a clever and sometimes-wrenching kaleidoscopic journey through the looking-glass of prejudice, fear and internalized self-loathing that ends with an indelible and horrifying erasure of identity.
There is a whiff of "Alice in Wonderland" in Khemiri's world, too. Humpty-Dumpty's assertion that "When I choose a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less" gets a workout through repeated invocations and iterations of the name "Abulkasem," which takes on numerous shades of meaning.
From a character in a gratingly dull costume-drama-within-the-play to a dance-loving gay uncle from Lebanon to a shadowy counter-insurgent/insurgent who allegedly writes pro-American op-eds in the Arab press while burning Israeli flags at demonstrations, Abulkasem is whoever and whatever the characters choose it to mean — or choose to see in those who bear the name. In a funny bar scene, a young man of Indian descent calls himself "Abulkasem" rather than explain that his name is "Arvind" — and the woman he hits on later dismisses him as "a Turk in a leather vest," suggesting that knee jerk ethnic assumptions aren't just a problem for white Westerners.
Khemiri, a native of Stockholm with a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, wrote "Invasion!" (his first play) in 2006 with a specifically Swedish setting. Rachel Willson-Broyles' translation is further adapted here with references to Chicago and Wisconsin. Given that the play opened within days of the first anniversary of the slaughter of six Sikhs at Wisconsin's Oak Creek temple by a neo-Nazi former U.S. soldier, that relocation packs an extra gut-punch of relevance.
This is a show that tends to work better in parts than as a whole, which is perhaps the intent of its carefully fractured-and-reglued approach to storytelling. In general, the closer it adheres to relatable scenarios that carry their own ridiculous baggage, the more successful the satire.
So, for instance, a trio of white academics blithely condescending to their young Kurdish seminar mate (she who dismisses the “Turk”) captures the well-meaning racism of smug liberals, one of whom describes the Kurdish woman as “a suspension bridge swinging in the cold, neither one thing nor another.”
But a panel of “experts” on the “terrorist” Abulkasem (he of the op-eds and flag-burnings) devolves into a litany of sins laid at his feet, from Asian carp in the Great Lakes to Kardashianism, that becomes too self-consciously silly. Khemiri avoids direct docudrama shots at the myriad abuses suffered by Arabs and Muslims in America post-9/11, which include the unfortunate ignorance of Westerners who conflate the two or who simply have a broadly visceral, albeit irrational, fear of the Other. Rather than come out and say something as polemic as profiling is bad, Khemiri is more saying that profiling is part of a dangerously narrow worldview.
In one of the most affecting interludes, Kamal Hans plays a man seeking asylum in the U.S. who pleads his case in a variety of languages, while his English “translator” (Amira Sabbagh) interprets his words through a web of off-the-shelf stereotypes that clearly have nothing to do with his references to “Rosenkavalier” and ABBA. It's a sly condemnation of how easy it is to believe the worst of those who do not speak one's native tongue.
Bahow's quartet of actors, which in addition to Hans and Sabbagh includes Glenn Stanton and Omer Abbas Salem (an understudy who ably stepped in for an injured Dan Johnson), negotiate the hairpin twists and turns in Khemiri's caustic series of tales with admirable flexibility.
Not everything takes hold with equal power in this “Invasion!” but as a multilayered assault on the inherent unworkability of racial profiling, it makes a sturdy stand.