Yesterday some friends and I drove to Philly to see a new play by Yussef El Guindi at the Wilma Theater. Language Rooms is a brilliant, sly, witty, provocative play which deals with issues too numerous and complex to be adequately addressed in a blog, but suffice it to say: this play packs a powerful punch. In addition to being a moving meditation on the immigrant experience in America, it is also a brutal indictment of our government's paranoia and the recent unmooring of the idea of America as a beacon of liberty.
There were lines of dialogue in this play so biting, so sharp in what they uncover of our shared willful blindness, that I felt my body wince even as my throat erupted in uncontrollable laughter. But this is the sort of laughter that emanates from deep sadness; it's the laughter of Kafka and Gogol, Ionesco and Orwell. This laughter stands on a foundation built upon years of suffering.
I had a strange thought sitting in the darkened theatre watching the final moments of the play unfold. I wondered: What would it have been like to have been in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia and to have seen a play that basically says: We all share some culpability in the mess we're living in? Of course, it would not have been possible to have seen such a play in such repressive regimes. The executioner's gallows and trial by gunfire made it impossible in those places in our history.
But then I wondered: Is this play a threat? It certainly is a brutal indictment of much of what our government is doing. But is it a threat? And, sadly, I had to conclude that given the way in which lives and thought are now organized in our world, it most likely is not. And perhaps no play or film or book can ever really be a threat in the way that, say, The Life of Ivan Denisovich was. Perhaps those days are long gone.
Perhaps censorship is now something quaint -- something unnecessary in a world in which tastes are shaped en masse and with breathtaking efficiency by the likes of Viacom and Disney. I'm really not sure. What do you think?
