The show is as technically impressive as it is masterfully executed. The stage is perfectly set with a first-rate design team. This show is as polished as the shoes of a fledgling Federal Agent.
Read MoreThe play manipulates us to sympathize-against our better judgment and reason-both with the twisted reasoning that guides the Kafka-esque interrogation and the sense of injustice and oppression that motivated the attackers. This is not a comfortable experience, but it's gripping and worthwhile in a way that few plays manage to achieve.
Read MoreIt's harrowing to the point where it's difficult to watch, and not because the performances are anything less than excellent or because Stuart Carden's direction never misses a step... With a cast capable of moving in a blink from hilarious absurdity to horrifying intensity and a story that is tragically timely, Back of the Throat deserves a place on the must-see lists.
Read MoreTheatre Profile, PerformInk, April 14, 2006
Read MoreIt's part of local theatre lore that Steppenwolf started out in a church basement. If the same status one day affixes to Silk Road Theatre Project, the story will be slightly different. It will be a cross-cultural theatre company that got its start in a "lower level."
Read MoreThis special performance of Back of the Throat was followed by a discussion featuring Edwin C. Yohnka, Director of Communications for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, and Artistic Director Jamil Khoury.
Read MoreMultiple and conflicting narrative strands (all fluidly directed by Stuart Carden) and an ambiguous ending make El Guindi's politics clear: Khaled's guilt or innocence is not the point--illustrating the degrading experience of being mercilessly prodded and emotionally plundered in the name of our security and this country is.
Read MoreYussef El Guindi's pitch-black exploration of the domestic war on terror opens, like Kafka's Trial, with an Arab-American man confronted in his home by investigators whose strained politeness barely covers an underlying menace. The first half of the play is bitterly funny, an apt and chilling depiction of the corporate-minded police state: Writer Khaled (Bandealy), accused of shadowy links to the perpetrators of a recent, unspecified Tragic Event, may not have access to a lawyer, but he's more than welcome to fill out an evaluation form about his interrogation.
Read MoreIt is the company's inaugural show in its revamped space at the Chicago Temple, which is now the classiest church basement theater in town. Stuart Carden's crisp direction lives up to the expectations of the troupe's new venue.
Read MoreCinderella Story: Silk Road Theatre Project's Sweet Deal, Chicago Reader, April 7, 2006
Read MoreEl Guindi presents two sides of a tricky equation, balancing the country's need to protect itself against future terrorist attacks with the importance of an individual citizen's rights and freedoms.
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April 7, 2006
BY HEDY WEISS
It is not often that a theater company with just three productions to its credit (Precious Stones, Tea, and Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith), manages to set up shop in a newly rehabbed space in a historic building in the heart of the Loop.
But that is precisely what the Silk Road Theatre Project and its founders -- Malik Gillani, 35, and Jamil Khoury, 40 -- are now doing. This weekend, they not only will bring up the lights on their fourth production, Back of the Throat. They also will inaugurate their new home, a 99-seat theater on the "concourse" level of the First United Methodist Church of the Chicago Temple Building -- the 1924 architectural gem by Holabird & Root that stands at Washington and Clark, and is instantly recognizable by its cathedral-like spire.
And consider this neat trick: The church has footed the bill of $1.4 million for the major construction, with Silk Road itself contributing just $100,000 (coming in the form of an interest-free loan from Gillani's brother) to pay for such things as lighting and sound equipment, risers for the theater's flexible seating and box office software.
The Silk Road Theatre Project was established as a direct response to the Sept. 11 attacks and what Gillani and Khoury sensed to be a period of chaos for Americans like them. Gillani, who describes himself as "a gay Muslim," arrived in the United States at age 7 -- the Pakistan-born child of Indian parents. Khoury, his life partner, is an Orthodox Christian with Syrian and Polish-Slovak roots, and has a master's degree in divinity sciences.
"We really believed in the American dream, and the power of the immigrant, and the idea that individuals could make a difference," said Gillani, a former software specialist who tends to be the loquacious spokesman for the company. "At first we did a lot of public speaking and videotapes, but we realized we weren't changing too many hearts and minds that way. Eventually we decided that the best way to get information out was through theater. The resistance threshold is just lower when people go to be entertained. And we thought we could bring greater understanding of the Eastern world by means of storytelling, which is really what all the great books behind the world's religions do."
To date, the company has presented plays about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, about Japanese war brides and about an Egyptian patriarch's response to a homosexual son. Back of the Throat, by the Seattle-based playwright Yussef El Guindi (who also penned the latter play), is a black comedy about an Arab-American man investigated for presumed terrorist ties. Coming up in the fall at Silk Road will be Caravaggio, Richard Vetero's drama about the bad-boy Italian Renaissance painter.
A literary manager will soon be brought on board to develop more connections to playwrights, but productions of works with Chinese, Korean and Indian roots already are in the planning stages.
Silk Road's greatest challenge to date? Finding actors who fit the roles, as well as nurturing directors who can help them through the process during unusually long rehearsal periods.
"We are committed to casting ethnically appropriate actors," said Gillani. "It's not always easy; this is the first time that many of these actors are playing leading roles. But in creating opportunities we are developing talent. And it has now gotten to the point where casting directors and talent agents are coming to our shows in search of actors."
Silk Road Geography
Just what was the ancient Silk Road? Think of it as the Route 66 of the ancient world -- the vast network of trade routes that began in China, stretched across Central and South Asia, spread into the Middle East and then went on to Mediterranean Europe, culminating in Italy. Thriving from the 2nd century B.C. to the 16th century as a major artery for the silk trade and the exchange of other goods, the Silk Road also served as an intellectual and cultural marketplace.
Trace the many paths of the ancient Silk Road on a modern map and you will discover that it traverses more than two dozen entities including: Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, North Korea, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Mongolia, Pakistan, Palestinian territories, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Two government officials pay Khalid, an Arab-American man, a seemingly innocuous visit. What begins as a "friendly" inquiry soon devolves into a chilling, full-blown investigation of Khalid's presumed ties to terrorists.
At times surreal and comic, Back of the Throat examines the way in which facts, evidence and (mis)perceptions are used to distort the truth and how notions of cultural "otherness" impact the relationship between the accusers and the accused.
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March 30 - April 6, 2006
BY NOVID PARSI
Last fall, when Silk Road Theatre Project produced Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith-about a Muslim family in which one son questions his sexuality-a leader in the local Muslim community told company founders Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury, "I'd rather be represented as a terrorist than the father of a gay son."
"We were constantly being told [by the Muslim leadership], There are no gay Muslims," Khoury says. To which Gillani responded, "You don't speak for me. I'm a gay Muslim."
The same leaders who objected to Acrobats raised no concerns about the company's new play, Back of the Throat (penned by Acrobats' Yussef El Guindi). No gays here-just an Arab-American interrogated and beaten by government officials.
Life partners Gillani, 35, and Khoury, 40, started their company as a response to the aftermath of September 11, 2001. An employee of Gillani's software firm quit because he couldn't work for "someone like you," Gillani says; meanwhile, Khoury chaperoned female friends harassed for wearing the hijab. In 2002, the couple formed Silk Road, named for the historic trade route stretching from China to Italy, to represent areas of the world that were "totally underserved" by Chicago theater, Gillani says.
"Two thirds of the world, essentially, their stories were not being told," Khoury says.
Helping Silk Road tell those stories is an unlikely partner: the First United Methodist Church of the Chicago Temple Building, the chapel-topped skyscraper at Clark and Washington. From their first meeting in 2003, Pastor Philip Blackwell says he saw an affinity between the company and the church: "Their vision of telling stories to create a better understanding is what we want to do, too," Blackwell says.
For Gillani and Khoury, the story got better. The church spent $1.4 million (and Silk Road contributed $100,000-an interest-free loan from Gillani's brother) to transform the church's basement into a flexible 99-seat theater for Silk Road. Inaugurated by Back of the Throat, the small theater is no small milestone: Other than its august neighbor, the Goodman, Silk Road is the only company with a permanent residence inside the Loop.
Clearly, a congregation (the city's oldest) that partners with a company that produced a "Jewish-Palestinian lesbian love story," as Khoury quips about his own play Precious Stones, isn't exactly conservative, and both Blackwell and Gillani make it clear that the church won't influence Silk Road's programming. Even so, a Methodist church and a nonreligious multicultural troupe isn't the most expected of unions.
But Gillani and Khoury know about unexpected unions. The son of an immigrant Syrian father and a Polish-Slovak mother, Khoury was raised in the Syrian Orthodox Christian church. Gillani was born in Pakistan of Muslim Indian parents, who moved to the U.S. when he was seven. When the two met ten years ago, "he didn't believe I was Jamil Khoury," the fair-skinned Khoury laughs. "He heard it as Jimmy O'Corey."
With their mix of religions and ethnicities, Gillani and Khoury embody the diversity they want to stage, a diversity they find sorely lacking in Chicago theater. "Chicago stages are among the most segregated spaces in the city," Khoury says. "There are so many opportunities to cast non-Caucasian actors, and those opportunities are just being squelched. There's a race problem in Chicago theater, and I don't think it's being addressed sincerely.
"This is a city that does not have a racial majority," Khoury adds, "and you would not know that going to the theater in this city." Getting nonwhite people not just on the stage but in the audience is crucial to Silk Road's mission. About a quarter of its audience is represented by Silk Road ethnicities, and about the same percentage are first-time theatergoers; almost half its audience is under 35.
For Gillani and Khoury, such artistic diversity translates directly into social change. According to Gillani, after a performance of Acrobats, a white audience member said to him, "I didn't realize Muslim families actually have husbands that love their wives."
Set in 17th century Rome, Malta, and Naples, Caravaggio is the story of the great Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the father of the Baroque, whose daring art and volatile personality attracted the favor and wrath of the church he both loved and reviled. Whether undertaking commissions from the Vatican or confronting the cruelties of the Inquisition, Caravaggio's short life was charged with artistry, violence, and passion.
Read MoreThe title of Yussef El Guindi's new play, Back of the Throat, refers to an attempt by the lead character, an Arab-American writer named Khaled, to tell the government agents who show up at his door how to pronounce the first syllable of his name.
Read MoreA full-length one-act somewhat cryptically titled Back of the Throat, it bristled with the fears and anguish many Arab Americans felt in the wake of the terrorist attacks on American soil. And it turned out to be a surprise underground hit-exactly the right play, in the right place, at the right time.
Read More[After] the first reading, several people told him they’d recognized their own (Irish, Jewish, Southern Baptist) tumultuous family backgrounds in the piece. To El Guindi this was welcome evidence he’d written what he’d intended: “a big American immigrant story.”
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