Theater review
When her husband emerges from another room without his head, Salwa (Coco Justino) doesn’t seem terribly surprised. It’s not the strangest thing that’s happened to her lately.
The title of Seattle playwright Yussef El Guindi’s newest play mirrors its structure. “Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance” is a twisty, unnatural phrase, and so is the play, which moves at oblique angles through scenes of disorientation.
“Wife of Headless Man” is onstage at Annex Theatre through April 11, in a production directed by artistic director Lucien Oberleitner. A fixture at the formerly-known-as ACT Theatre (now Union Arts Center) over the past 15 years, where he routinely premiered thought-provoking plays about political and interpersonal tensions, El Guindi returns with a work that feels right at home at fringe champion Annex.
Probing the anxiety of existence as an undocumented immigrant and challenging our increasingly intrusive technocratic surveillance state, “Wife of Headless Man” exists in the same thematic arena as much of El Guindi’s oeuvre. But here, he dives headlong into surrealism in content and form, with a looping structure, perpetually unmoored.
That’s just how Salwa, a journalist who’s written a series of articles criticizing tech billionaire Owen Allen (Brandon Tourino Collinsworth), is feeling after waking up in a hotel room with no memory of how she got there. Was she drugged? How long has she been in this room? And who’s that in the shower?
Justino, who is onstage for nearly the entire play, displays impressive stamina, locking in on an unflagging, exhausting state of perplexity as she tries to excavate a memory that will unlock the truth. Salwa remembers an unwelcome hand on her knee while interviewing Owen at a fancy restaurant. But wait — is that a miniature look-alike puppet on his knee that’s doing the groping?
Things get more mystifying in the hotel room, with visits from a CIA-adjacent operative disguised as a waiter (Collinsworth) and a green-skinned alien (Dylan Smith), whose putative explanations only serve to whirl Salwa’s confusion into a more disconcerting lather.
So, Salwa takes it in stride when she returns home and finds her husband, Bassem (Yousif Abouzgaya), missing a crucial appendage, but otherwise able to function and speak normally. (The effects of decapitation are rendered in several charmingly lo-fi effects.)
Bassem, who is in the process of securing his U.S. citizenship, became headless after working on a data-mining contract for Owen’s Cortex Solutions. Naturally, Salwa was opposed to this idea. When she finds him, sans head, her “I told you so” moment sees simmering resentments in their relationship suddenly tip into a rolling boil.
El Guindi, whose dialogue frequently dances on the knife’s edge between heightened theatricality and a more effortless naturalism, is rarely better than when he’s crafting scenes of people who know each other well working out their issues. We get a glimpse of the full picture, but there’s an entire universe of unspoken history lurking beneath the surface of these interactions, which is why his plays always feel so rich.
In “Wife of Headless Man,” there’s some plate-spinning involved in keeping the plot machinations moving, including Salwa’s best friend Aisha (Hannah Wang) discovering her partner, Firdous (Justin Tran), has also lost his head. Could this be some kind of attack targeting Muslim immigrants?
Back in that hotel room, El Guindi eventually spills the secrets in a perhaps too neatly delineated series of explanations, at odds with the play’s murky handle on reality, even though the revelations themselves only escalate his premise’s outrageousness.
Speaking of outrageous, there’s a sight gag in the one-act play’s back half that is startlingly funny, sprung on the audience with precise comic timing. El Guindi has explored the ramifications of a ménage à trois before, in “Threesome,” but um, not like this.
“Wife of Headless Man” is a compelling swerve from one of the city’s finest playwrights, pushing his gift for meticulously structured drama into weirder, wilder places.
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