Yussef El Guindi is one of the most exciting playwrights in the country, and he happens to live in Seattle. His 2015 play at ACT, Threesome, was so good, it’s imprinted on my mind, so good, it left audiences dazed. That same year, the playwright won a Stranger Genius Award.
His newest piece, People of the Book, will have its world premiere at ACT on September 6. It’s a play about art, jealousy, sex, and war. It is a work of constantly escalating tension, and it has only four characters, two of whom are European American, one of whom is Middle Eastern American, and one of whom is Middle Eastern.
And the center of the story is a memoir written by a soldier, a memoir that someone else in the play suspects is not true. When ACT recently won a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to help produce this work, ACT’s managing director commented that the play, like El Guindi’s previous works, “will once again have audiences leaning in and questioning what they know.”
