List of this year's "Top 5 New Plays" according to Newcity Chicago.
Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat (Silk Road Theater Project): A sparkling cast nailed the diamond-cut dialogue in Yussef El Guindi's very contemporary play about terrorism, the media, ambition and sex.
You start out thinking that El Guindi's sympathies lie more with the guy who respects his homeland (and you'd be right), but by the end of the play, you smell some politically incorrect and potentially dangerous ambivalence. And in the theater, that's tremendously exciting.
On March 7th's Dueling Critics segment on WBEZ’s (NPR) 848 show, critics Kelly Kleiman and Jonathan Abarbanel discuss the new play HEAT WAVE. At the end of the discussion when each critic speaks about a show they’ve seen this past week that they highly recommend, you’ll hear Kleiman speak about Our Enemies.
“The play,” [playwright Yussef El Guindi] says, “is really about the representation of Arabs and Muslims in the mainstream in the American media. And about how negative narratives in the mainstream media affect how the rest of America sees us. They think all our women are oppressed and all our men are oppressive. In part this play is about struggling against that.”
[The] outlet the arts provide is giving voice to a culture that has been so often negatively portrayed through the Silk Road Theatre Project’s world premiere of Yussef El Guindi’s Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat.
Next Theatre and the Silk Road Theatre Project are coming together tomorrow to present a discussion between Arab-American playwrights Yussef El-Guindi (author of Silk Road’s world premiere Our Enemies, opening March 1) and Heather Raffo (the writer-performer of 9 Parts of Desire, coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art in May as a co-production of Next and the MCA).
The initiative, spurred by Silk Road, which focuses on Asian and Middle-Eastern American works, “aims at cross pollinating audiences and expanding the makeup of the art from the ground up,” says artistic director Jamil Khoury.
Two playwrights, two plays, two theaters. The sum is not six, but one: a celebration of Arab-American drama in Chicago that will last through the spring.
