Sometimes, Yussef El Guindi feels like a Seattle secret. The Egyptian playwright has been quietly typing in his apartment on Summit Avenue for years, writing plays that regularly get produced—just not produced here. His Back of the Throat (the title refers to the opening scene, as two federal investigators try to pronounce the main character's first name) ran here five years ago, in the tiny fringe basement of Theater Schmeater. Seattle audiences haven't heard from him since.
But the rest of the world has. Back of the Throat went on to the Flea Theater in New York, where it earned glowing reviews from the New Yorker and the New York Times, and other El Guindi plays have been produced in cities from San Francisco to London and have won awards from the LA Weekly and the Humana Festival. But Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes, now playing at Theater Schmeater, does not stretch to match El Guindi's growing stature. The actors are partly to blame: Their performances contain a few lucid, strong moments, but they didn't seem entirely at home in the material, thrashing around with a few flubs here and some histrionic overacting there. But part of the blame lies with the material itself.
An Arab-American actor named Ashraf (Zaki Abdelhamid) stands in the office of his agent (Daniel Christensen), heatedly turning down a role. The film project is prestigious but deeply offensive—its villain, a terrorist who invades an American home on Thanksgiving and takes its family hostage, is a caricature from colonialism's darkest dreams. He's greasy, smelly, and rapacious, and ends the film with his balls shot off.
The high-strung agent (who actually calls people "baby") and the sanguine director (James Weidman) try to cajole Ashraf into taking the part by offering him money, fame, and the chance of scoring with the film's surly but sexy leading lady (Miriah Caine Ware). Meanwhile, Ashraf grows increasingly hysterical that nobody else can see through the script's racism. "You're participating in the pumping of crap into the world!" Ashraf shouts. "You're a polluter!"
El Guindi keeps raising the stakes and broadening the comedy until a gun comes out and Jihad Jones reaches the ironic destination we could see on the horizon from miles away: a righteous actor who, at least superficially, begins to resemble the very stereotype he's railing against. Jihad Jones isn't a bad play, it's just an okay play about a dilemma as old as professional art-making: when to stop struggling and just sell out. 
