I had just finished reading the script of Yussef El Guindi’s newest play, The People of the Book—a short, funny, stereotype-subverting work about art, jealousy, sex, and war—when the news crossed my desk that ACT had won a grant from the NEA. The $20,000 grant will help pay for the world premiere production of The People of the Book at ACT this coming September.
El Guindi is a phenomenal playwright with a fascinating life story. As Brendan Kiley wrote in The Stranger a few years back:
El Guindi has lived a peripatetic life, shuttling between North Africa, Europe, and the United States, and most of his plays feature geographically disoriented characters trying to navigate new circumstances. “The plays are quintessentially American,” he says. “They’re about that journey of coming to a new place and trying to make a home of it.” Sex is the other persistent theme in his work, both as dramatic device (the thing that propels us through the scenes) and as metaphor—even his characters’ most intimate moments are qualified by economic and political forces beyond their control.
El Guindi’s previous play produced at ACT, Threesome, was so good it’s imprinted on my mind, so good it seemed to make some of the audience members dazed.
It’s so good that during the intermission on opening night, audience members looked a little wild-eyed, like they didn’t know what to do, like they weren’t expecting this, like they’d never felt this way at a play before. I overheard an older woman, grinning, saying to an older man, “A very different play,” and laughing, and the man responding, “VERY different,” and the woman, even more wild-eyed than she was a minute ago, saying, “I don’t know where it will go.”
The People of the Book also has that “where will this go?” quality—although it’s shorter than Threesome was, and it’s told in a single act of continuing escalating tension. No intermission. It’s like a bullet: it gets under the surface quickly and then it’s all over.
As for El Guindi’s life story, here’s a snapshot:
El Guindi was born in Egypt, moved to England for boarding school during his formative years (where he dreamed of becoming an actor), started college in Paris, and then returned to Egypt to finish college in Cairo. “I left Egypt at such an early age and was brought up in a country that didn’t really accept me,” he says. “Then I went back to a country that said, ‘This is your home,’ but my Arabic was so broken, I couldn’t really function.” He came to America, earned an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, was a playwright-in-residence at Duke University, and eventually became a US citizen. The ceremony, he says, was surprisingly emotional. After years of suspension between countries, he’d found something like a home.
As for the NEA grant, NEA acting chairman Mary Anne Carter says such awards “are a testament to the artistic richness and diversity in our country. Organizations such as ACT are giving people in their community the opportunity to learn, create, and be inspired.”
Becky Witmer, ACT’s managing director, says about this grant and about El Guindi’s work, “It is very affirming to have the NEA award this grant for the world premiere of his latest play that will once again have audiences leaning in and questioning what they know.”
The People of the Book opens at ACT on September 6. The Stranger will publish a Q&A with the playwright in our next issue of our quarterly magazine, Seattle Art and Performance.
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