Arts & Events

"I know we're of different religions here, so I will refer to a generic god." 

The paternal--or oddly avuncular--African American chief of a detention center, located somewhere (in a "green zone" overseas? Or stateside?), is "communicating" with his two American muslim translators-cum-interrogators about who's keeping who under surveillance in the semi-porous, second-guessing environment of the center. 

"When I accuse a man of treachery, I think we should be on a first name basis!" 

The Arabic translators, Ahmed (James Asher) and Nasser (William Dao), become more and more nervous as their boss, Kevin (Mujahid Abdul-Rashid), straight-faces it through his further exhortations for them to do their job--and to relax! Because they're at home: 

"In America, we leave family to find family. We don't do blood feuds. We evolve." 

Yussef el Guindi's stage satire dealing with the human warfare that underpins the War on Terror, 'Language Rooms,' co-produced by Golden Thread and the Asian American Theater Company, is his best play yet--no mean accomplishment, after works like 'The Back of the Throat,' 'The Monologist Suffers Her Monologue,' 'The Review' (perhaps the first international play, performed in Cairo and San Francisco via Skype), 'Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes,' and his adaptation to Egypt of Chekhov's vaudeville 'The Marriage Proposal,' all staged in the Bay Area by Golden Thread. It's a rare play dealing with the most serious of subjects which can combine in a short scene hilarity and the hair-raising. 

James Asher, who's played here in several el Guindi plays, turns his comic talents as a kind of latter-day antihero to the portrayal of the Arab American loner Ahmed, out of touch with his family, distant from his peers at the center (he's not a sports fan, for one thing) and maybe suspected of fraternizing or at least sympathizing with the nebulous "enemy" of Homeland Security concerns. Asher can make the audience feel Ahmed sweat, as he listens in agony to what might be interrogation masquerading as a confidential briefing or casual explanation, or awkwardly attempts to act out his loyalty to his country. His scenes with Dao, who at one point asks him to "pass the bat and the honey," as he takes away the strange array of interrogator's "tools," as well as those with Abdul-Rashid--or with both--are the most absurd, provoking laughter and sympathetic paranoia, a kind of burlesque of corporate office politics times twenty. 

But it's the scenes between Asher and Terry Lamb as Samir (who was memorable as a wily but drunken Odysseus in Central Works' 'Penelope's Odyssey') which take 'Language Games' to a different level of seriousness and absurd humor, something almost embarrassingly humane and inhumane at the same time.  

The strange tableau of the last scene, turning a gentle, nostalgic Strindbergian monologue Samir delivers to a silent, almost unrecognizable Ahmed into the final irony of the play, is a brilliant moment, a perfect conclusion. 

The whole cast with Evren Odcikin's direction brings el Guindi's satire hauntingly to life, emphasizing the lives of countless individuals, changed by the vagaries of American policy, strangers thrown together, with the lines between coreligionist, colleague, friend, stranger, antagonist--and, yes, family--irredeemably blurred. 

Thursday through Saturday, 8 p. m., Sunday at 7, through December 11. $15-$25 (Thursday, pay what you can at door; advance tickets $20.) Thick House, 1695-18th Street (between Arkansas & De Haro), Potrero Hill, San Francisco. goldenthread.org