In Yussef El Guindi’s Plays, Personal and Political Are in Bed Together
The Egyptian-American playwright Yussef El Guindi has a lot on his mind these days.
His new play, “Threesome,” is having a six-week run Off Broadway, the first time his work has been performed in New York City since 2006. The play is a sexually charged reckoning with what he calls the “failure” of the 2011 revolution in Egypt, a country once again ruled by a former military officer whose political opponents are largely dead or in jail.
It begins as a bawdy bedroom comedy whose main characters, a heterosexual Egyptian-American couple, invite a white American man into their bed. Over two acts it transforms into something darker, as all three grapple with the fallout of sexual assault, infidelity, war and the pain of lost hope, both political and personal.
Unlike many of Mr. El Guindi’s earlier works, which deal with what he describes as the unmoored feeling of “weightlessness” so often found in the immigrant experience, the political and cultural questions at the heart of “Threesome” exert a visible weight on both the playwright and his characters. Speaking with a faintly lilting British accent about the script on a recent afternoon, Mr. El Guindi, 55, put his head briefly in his hands. “This feels like a therapy session now,” he said.
Source: www.nytimes.com