Reviews

Yussef El Guindi’s LANGUAGE ROOMS is a nearly perfect work of art.

It commands this very challenging art form, the legitimate theatre, with mastery. I was gushing.

My teacher Edward Albee called it “levitating.” You had to levitate the play for two hours. 

In my opinion, levitating starts with the actual language. Can the writer levitate a dramatic line? Can they levitate a beat? Then it goes on to the full two hours. Here is where I say my hat’s off to this writer, for he can levitate every second of it. 

LANGUAGE ROOMS concerns United States government interrogation of Muslim terrorist leads and was done as a reprise reading of an earlier production with the same actors. 

Now, there was one issue with the play. Audience members have one set of aesthetic emotions for family dramas, and another for large, sweeping stories of social justice. There was a place in this play where the two worlds collided, and it was jarring to me at first. I came around by the end of the play, but the genre shift in the middle of so much technical proficiency was felt to be a violation of the agreement of genre, and I suppose that was part of the entire gizmo. It rested upon that violation. So the playwright had to ride it out for ten minutes. I didn’t get up and leave — it was not at the end of the first act — but I did kind of harumph, and in the end was okay. 

I won’t give away the surprise, but I will say that even though I didn’t really like it, I did pardon it for the exquisite calibre of the play itself. 

I did like the irony of how the leads are trapped from the get-go, seduced in their places of sanctuary, radicalized in the manner of a sting by the very government that should be directing them into honest labor. 

I did like the ending. I liked where it ended. I liked the final image. It was impeccable. 

The entire experience reminded me of the role of resident theatre as a shaper of the communal aesthetic bodymind of the upper-middle class. This is a critical aspect of a functioning democracy. 

So our playwrights should be nurtured.