2009 Season

Back of the Throat
By Yussef El Guindi

Directed by Mickey Lund

With Pete Garvey, Chris Haley, Mark Hildebrand, Dan Kavannaugh, Becki Placella, Niji Ramunas, Alicia Sweeney

Back of the Throat is the tale of a visit by two government officials, which soon devolves into a full-blown, no-holds-barred probe. Khaled, an Arab-American writer and the focus of their inquiry, finds himself suddenly accused of possible ties to terrorists. AS the interrogation proceeds, the officials reveal their evidence. But is it evidence, or ave innocent events been distorted through the lends of paranoid suspicion? Back of the Throat confronts bureaucratic euphemisms like “person of interest” and “extraordinary rendition” with the frightening relaity they aim to obscure.

If anything’s been lost amidst the rhetoric of the “war on terror,” it’s the human dimension. We talk about the intangibles, things like “rights,” “evil” and “freedom,” but lose track of how things like 9/11 and the paranoia that followed affect everyday people in everyday situations.

And so, it seemed incredibly fitting that, for a season in which we aim to explore the effects of military and ideological conflict on everyday people, we chose Back of the Throat as our opening play. Arab-American writer Yussef El Guindi presents us with an uncomfortable, up-close confrontation with what it’s like to be on the other end of post-9/11 hysterics through the eyes of an everyday Arab-American who is not only an American citizen, but an award-winning writer.

In this darkly rendered portrait of our current American condition in a time of war, Back of the Throat brilliantly captures a nightmarish vision of the consequences of unbridled authority, power without wisdom, and fear-driven law enforcement, the form of law enforcement we Americans for so long refused to openly question, with the opening of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility and the horrific images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It examines how our assumptions about the content of our character are sometimes summarized not only by the color of our skin, but by the seemingly meaningless objects we collect, and how in the name of national security we sometimes find ourselves least secure.

Back of the Throat makes us confront our own feelings and fears about our government’s actions in a post-9/11 society, even as it forces us to consider the varied complexities involved in our government’s crackdown on terrorism. And while the play’s conclusion confirms certain horrific facts about our culture post-9/11, it still leaves enough room to spark some debate on how our country, or any “free” country for that matter, should deal with “persons of interest” and “enemy combatants.”

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