fixture at the formerly-known-as ACT Theatre<\/a> (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.\u00a0<\/p>\nProbing the anxiety of existence as an undocumented immigrant and challenging our increasingly intrusive technocratic surveillance state, \u201cWife of Headless Man\u201d exists in the same thematic arena as much of El Guindi\u2019s oeuvre. But here, he dives headlong into surrealism in content and form, with a looping structure, perpetually unmoored.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s just how Salwa, a journalist who\u2019s 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\u2019s that in the shower?<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 is that a miniature look-alike puppet on his knee that\u2019s doing the groping?\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s confusion into a more disconcerting lather.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
Bassem, who is in the process of securing his U.S. citizenship, became headless after working on a data-mining contract for Owen\u2019s Cortex Solutions. Naturally, Salwa was opposed to this idea. When she finds him, sans head, her \u201cI told you so\u201d moment sees simmering resentments in their relationship suddenly tip into a rolling boil.\u00a0<\/p>\n
El Guindi, whose dialogue frequently dances on the knife\u2019s edge between heightened theatricality and a more effortless naturalism, is rarely better than when he\u2019s crafting scenes of people who know each other well working out their issues. We get a glimpse of the full picture, but there\u2019s an entire universe of unspoken history lurking beneath the surface of these interactions, which is why his plays always feel so rich.<\/p>\n
In \u201cWife of Headless Man,\u201d there\u2019s some plate-spinning involved in keeping the plot machinations moving, including Salwa\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s murky handle on reality, even though the revelations themselves only escalate his premise\u2019s outrageousness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking of outrageous, there\u2019s a sight gag in the one-act play\u2019s back half that is startlingly funny, sprung on the audience with precise comic timing. El Guindi has explored the ramifications of a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois before, in \u201cThreesome,\u201d<\/a> but um, not like this.<\/p>\n\u201cWife of Headless Man\u201d is a compelling swerve from one of the city\u2019s finest playwrights, pushing his gift for meticulously structured drama into weirder, wilder places.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Theater review When her husband emerges from another room without his head, Salwa (Coco Justino) doesn\u2019t seem terribly surprised. It\u2019s not the strangest thing that\u2019s happened to her lately. The title of Seattle playwright Yussef El Guindi\u2019s newest play mirrors its structure. \u201cWife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance\u201d is a twisty, unnatural phrase, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2354619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2354618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Seattle-playwright-returns-with-compelling-wild-new-show-Entertainment.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2354618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2354620,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354618\/revisions\/2354620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2354619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2354618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2354618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2354618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}