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July 7, 2015
Three for the Road: Yussef El Guindi’s provocative “Threesome” journeys from Oregon to Manhattan
Quinn Franzen, Alia Attallah, and Karan Oberoi in Yussef El Guindi's Threesome presented by Portland Center Stage and ACT -A Contemporary Theatre; Photo: John Cornicello
Quinn Franzen, Alia Attallah, and Karan Oberoi in Yussef El Guindi's Threesome presented by Portland Center Stage and ACT - A Contemporary Theatre; Photo: John Cornicello

Rashid and Leila, a young Egyptian-American couple, sit propped up in bed together. They smoke fake cigarettes while they analyze their own psyches and behavior. (It’s something one imagines them doing on a regular basis.)

“I think we can be too clever for our own good sometimes,” says Rashid. “I think we can talk ourselves into doing all kinds of strange things.”

The thing they plan to do on this particular evening becomes clear a minute or two later when the bathroom door opens and a completely naked young man named Doug strides into the bedroom.

So begins Threesome, a new drama by Yussef El Guindi that commences performances July 11 at Manhattan’s 59E59 Theaters. The show is a transfer of a production from two collaborating Pacific Northwest companies, Portland Center Stage and A Contemporary Theatre (in Seattle). Directed by PCS Artistic Director Chris Coleman, Threesome arrives in New York following well-received productions in both West Coast cities earlier this year.

El Guindi himself currently makes his home in Seattle. He left his native Egypt at age four and grew up in the U.K. He has, however, spent time in the Middle East (he earned his undergraduate degree at American University in Cairo). He later received a master’s degree in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon. In the past decade and a half or so, his work—which deals in large part with the Arab and Muslim experience in America—has been performed regularly in such cities as San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago. But El Guindi told StageBuddy in a recent phone interview that New York is “a very specific market and not one I’ve been involved in.” Prior to Threesome, only one of his full-length works has had a Manhattan staging: the Flea’s 2006 rendition of Back of the Throat.

Yussef El Guindi
Yussef El Guindi

In 2013, the playwright submitted his just-finished Threesome script to PCS’s “Just Add Water” (JAW) festival. It was a blind submission—that is, the script readers for the festival did not know the names of the playwrights. When Coleman first read the play, he guessed that it was the work of an Arab woman. That’s understandable, as the emotionally complex Laila is at the very heart of El Guindi’s story.

Threesome was chosen for the JAW workshop, where it was enthusiastically received in a staged reading two years ago this month. “Frankly, it had probably the most robust audience response I’ve ever seen to a first act,” says Coleman. “I mean the first act is quite, quite funny. I had never quite seen an audience respond to a reading like that.”

But there were key problem with the initial script. The play, according to El Guindi, was “overwritten,” and the farcical tone of the first half didn’t match the much-more-serious sensibility of the second, in which the traumatic events that have led Laila and Rashid to invite Doug into their bed are revealed. “It kind of shocked the system, because I knew how much more work the play needed, in terms of cutting,” El Guindi says of the first JAW table reading at the start of the festival. He not only trimmed the play, but also began looking for ways to make the comedic and serious halves mesh more gracefully. One step was the decision to add an intermission to the work, providing a bit of a buffer between the two disparate sections.

El Guindi remarks that Coleman actually liked the shift in tone between the two halves. He himself, however, felt the need to smooth over the jagged edges between the uproarious and the serious.

He describes himself unapologetically as a “people pleaser” who crafts his work with the audience’s sensibilities in mind. “[Harold] Pinter famously said, ‘F— the audience,’” he notes. “I’m sort of more in the Neil Simon camp…. I am in the entertainment business.”

In fact, his attention to the audience’s needs is in part what has made him leaven his scenarios with humor in the first place. He explains that he has in the past written some dead serious, unsmiling plays. People have admired them on one level. But nobody has wanted to produce them.

The inclusion of comedy is also rooted in El Guindi’s own basic approach to the world. He says he finds life amusing “in spite of everything.” The comic elements in such plays as Back of the Throat, Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World and Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes can be dark, sardonic, and sometimes scathing. And his plays are politically charged in a way that would make no playgoer think of Simon’s Barefoot in the Park.

In fact, he has frequently encountered the complaint that his plays are “didactic” and/or “too political.” El Guindi doesn’t understand the first charge. He points out that he includes characters with diverse viewpoints on controversial subjects—not one of which necessarily represents his own beliefs. And the notion that his plays are excessively political is clearly irksome to him.

“It’s a privilege in some societies to ignore politics,” he explains. “But in a lot of places around the world, you can’t ignore politics. And domestic drama is political drama, because you’re usually talking about these political matters at home, around the dinner table. You come home and you talk about what’s going on. Because your life depends on it.”

He recalls writing a play years ago that dealt with a hostage situation. A friend of his took the script to England to see if a company there was interested in producing it. The answer was that the script was not political enough. El Guindi’s response was, “Yes, but I’m writing in America, and if I’m any more political, they’ll call me didactic!”

According to Coleman, some audience members and critics in Seattle had arguments with some of the thematic content in Threesome, but Northwest theatergoers were uniformly excited by the visceral elements in the play. Across the board, he says, people considered the production vigorous and “juicy.”

Chris Coleman
Chris Coleman

Coleman attributes part of the play’s success so far to the work of the Threesome cast members. Quinn Franzen, who plays Doug, recently appeared as Louis in a production of Angels in America at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre that Coleman describes as “a bit of a sensation.” Canadian actor Karan Oberoi (who now resides in Los Angeles) took over the role of Rashid for Threesome’s Seattle production when the actor who’d played the part in Portland had to drop out. Oberoi needed to learn the role in a matter of days and rose to the occasion beautifully, according to Coleman.

And, finally, there’s Alia Attallah as Leila.

“Nobody knows about her now, but they’re going to after this production,” Coleman says. Threesome, he notes, is Attallah’s first acting job since finishing graduate school at New York University. He finds her “striking,” “ferocious,” and “quite funny.” When he first saw her, he thought she looked “like an Egyptian Miss America.”

“It’s a tough little fucker of a play,” Coleman concludes. “It’s really brainy. And it has real layers of depth and ferocity in it. It’s not what I would recommend to be your first job out of graduate school. But what a fantastic way to jump into the deep end, as it were.”

"Threesome" will be performed July 11 through August 23rd at 59E59 Theaters.

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Written by: Mark Dundas Wood
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