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Our Enemies
Diametrically opposed media pundits who wake up dazed and hungover in the same bed is a tale as old as TIME. Yet playwright El Guindi treats the phenomenon as if it were as recent as the latest Newsweek, laying it out for us in painstaking detail, lest we miss any of the key details. However, even with the didactic approach the playwright takes to a scenario Preston Sturges could have set up in his sleep, the He Said/She Said/Then They Boinked Anyway plotline of his new work is still the freshest provocation in this otherwise furrowed-brow look at how Arab Americans are often pitted against one another on post-9/11 soil. (The actors playing a chauvinist jihad analyst and an attractive young Egyptian writer of bodice rippers help a lot; cunning Navarro and Lopez, who gives a meaty breakout performance, play as guileless a postcoital scene as you’ll likely ever see in Chicago.)
At its core, Our Enemies bears uncanny stylistic resemblance to the political works often seen at Stage Left, pieces in which characters exist solely to mouth a strident point of view in a wildly contrived scenario. (The irony, of course, is that this is what El Guindi criticizes American news media of doing to commentators with nuanced opinions.) As he weaves the lives of three people cherry-picked by white media to perform Muslim minstrelsy—they all have the same menacing stalker in common, a role even the magnetic Bandealy struggles to make credible—Acerra and her appealing cast do what they can to invite us in. But the wealth the actors bring to the event isn’t matched by richness in the text.
