Interview with Playwright Yussef El Guindi

Yussef‘s play “Threesome” was recently produced at Portland Center Stage, ACT, and Off-Broadway with 59E59. His new play, “The Talented Ones,” was recently commissioned by Artists Repertory Theatre’s Table|Room|Stage Project and will premiere during Artists Rep’s 2016/2017 Season. Yussef‘s other productions include “The Ramayana” (co-adaptor with Stephanie Timm) at ACT; “Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World” (winner of the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association’s New Play Award in 2012; Gregory Award 2011; Seattle Times’ “Footlight Award” for Best World Premiere Play, 2011) also at ACT, and at Center Repertory Company (Walnut Creek, CA) 2013; and Language Rooms (Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award, as well as ACT’s New Play Award), co-produced by Golden Thread Productions and the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. His plays, “Back of the Throat” (winner of L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award for 2006), as well as “Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World”, “Jihad Jones and The Kalashnikov Babes”, “Such a Beautiful Voice is Sayeda’s” and “Karima’s City,” have been published by Dramatists Play Service. The latter one-acts have also been included in The Best American Short Plays: 2004-2005, published by Applause Books. “Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith” (winner of Chicago’s “After Dark/John W. Schmid Award” for Best New Play in 2006) is included in “Salaam/ Peace: An Anthology of Middle-Eastern American Playwrights,” published by TCG, 2009. “Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat” is included in the anthology “Four Arab American Plays” published by McFarland Books. “Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World” was included in the September 2012 issue of American Theatre Magazine. And “Language Rooms” was published in Rain City Projects’ anthology Manifesto Series Volume 3. Yussef is the recipient of the 2010 Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award. He holds an MFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and was playwright-in-residence at Duke University.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and why you started writing plays? 

Quick edits of my life so far: born in Egypt, raised in London, college/university in Paris and Cairo, graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University, stints at a couple of theaters in San Francisco (the Magic and Eureka), playwright-in-residence at Duke University, currently a playwright residing in Seattle.

Originally, I wanted to be an actor. I got hooked at 15 when someone dropped out of a school play and I was asked (being well known as a ham in class) if I wanted to step in. I did. Loved it. Wanted to be an actor from then on, much to the consternation of my parents (even though my mother’s family had worked in the theater). In fact, I didn’t really stop thinking of myself as an actor first and a writer second until late in my 30’s. But eventually — for whatever reason — I suddenly became too self-conscious to lose myself in a role. I became too much the observer of my own character’s actions, and of what was happening on stage around me. The joy of entering a world via the nerve-ends of one particular character evaporated, and the pleasures found in creating a world and characters from scratch took its place.

I should add that in conjunction with acting, my other passion was literature. My undergraduate degree was in “English and Comparative Literature.” I wrote poetry. I tried my hand at a couple of plays. I ended up studying playwriting when I couldn’t get into the acting schools I’d applied for. I taught playwriting at Duke University. So while I still thought of myself as an actor, the writing thing was always there. And when the acting bug finally left me, I started to think of myself, finally (at the ripe old age of 40), as a playwright.

That’s when my writing adventures really started to take off.

Your play Threesome received an Off-Broadway Production with 59E59 Theaters and production at Seattle’s ACT Theatre after premiering at Portland Center Stage. Can you tell us more about your journey with this play?

The play, begun as a response to the Arab Spring, received a workshop at JAW at Portland Center Stage. I had a wonderful bunch of actors and a very skilled director who helped me thrash the piece into something resembling a play… The first workshop of a brand new play is always a mild shock. You’ve been holed up alone with these characters for months. Just you and their drama. Suddenly you have a whole team of actors and a director cramming into this imagined world of yours. It is a very odd sensation. Almost like you’re a bride and groom meeting for the very first time on your wedding day. And here you are finally alone together in the bedroom. It’s something you want to have happened but now you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. It’s rare where I don’t feel slightly humiliated after a first read-through. Not always, but often. For me, that is usually because I have overwritten the play (which I give myself permission to do in a first draft). And because it is overwritten the play feels interminable. A play really lives in the rhythm and pacing of its dramatic arc (set-up, delivery, punch-lines, beats: all that stuff), and it’s rare that I’ve nailed the correct pacing in a first draft. I first have to hear the play before I know for sure where I need to cut.

JAW helped me get a better idea of that pacing issue and — with this play especially — with the play’s unique tonal shifts. Meetings with the director, Chris Coleman, and subsequent rehearsals for the production, further clarified and helped me get to the play’s internal rhythms/ pacing.

Your play The Talented Ones was commissioned by Artists Repertory Theatre as part of its Table|Room|Stage Project and will receive its World Premiere this season at Artists Repertory Theatre. Can you tell us about the process of developing this play?

The play began, as often my plays will, with a character’s simple declaration about something. As it so happened, that declaration turned out to be the play’s primary engine and overall thematic thrust. I’ve always found it strange how an innocuous comment or exchange between characters (whom I don’t yet fully know) will light up my imagination and drive a play to completion, whereas well-thought-out plots with theatrical potential may simply not register with whatever part of me (the unconscious, I guess) from which my plays emerge. It’s rather frustrating that the engineer in me that can structure a play can’t move forward unless the unconscious swamp is also engaged. Which is to say, I have to feel the nerve-ends of my characters before I know what they’re doing there, what they want, and how they’ll act.

The other thing about The Talented Ones: I had previously gone through a 2-year phase where I had been writing what I hoped were crowd-pleasing comedies. None of which went anywhere. A dangerous thing to do: pander to what you think an audience might like. Then, starting with Threesome, and especially with The Talented Ones, I decided to go all out and write at the “top of my lungs” so to speak, and not care how the play might come across. Which is ideally how one should always write: honestly, and without worrying how a play might be received. At least in the first draft. Once you have the heart and soul of a play down on paper (hopefully), then you can start working on the craft elements.

The play was developed at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s “Launch Pad” program, run by Risa Brainin, where it received a workshop production. Under her wonderful direction, I managed to hack away at a lot of the verbiage and settle on a decent structure. Then Luan Schooler and Damaso Rodriguez at Artist Repertory Theatre approached me and asked if I was working on a new play. I mentioned I was still trying to further develop and find a home for this new, weird play. They read it, liked it, brought me and the play on board, and, with the additional help and guidance of Jane Unger, they helped me further develop and refine the play. Now, hopefully, I’m within shouting distance of presenting a stageable play.

Your body of work frequently touches upon ideas about the immigrant experience and the American Dream. What do these themes mean to you, and how do you incorporate them in your plays?

I left Egypt when I was three. So the immigrant experience is part of the gristle of who I am. Even when I returned to Egypt for my undergraduate degree, I returned an immigrant — if not quite foreign, somewhat removed now, and not quite plugged in. When I continued on to America, I continued that immigrant journey. So that odyssey of the traveler, of someone who comes in from the outside to try and make a new home in a foreign place is central to my identity. It’s not something I even think about when I write, it just sort of comes pouring out.

Then again, given the unanchored patterns of most people’s lives, where people rarely stay in one place but travel to multiple places for work, the immigrant experience is one shared by many. Including native-born Americans who may travel from state to state in search of employment. (Doesn’t the surprise come when we find someone born, raised and continues to live in one place?)