Samir (Terry Lamb) goes from interrogation victim to estranged father in a single scene in Language Rooms.

PHOTOS BY DAVID ALLEN STUDIO

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER The immigrant experience has some familiar familial dynamics across the board. Parents, for instance, can easily discover their Americanized children becoming embarrassed by the older generation's "foreign" ways. Un-hip parents are the bane of any child's existence, but dad walking around the mall in a gallibaya doesn't make it any easier (as hip as that may sound to you or me). Allegiances potentially strain much further, however, when the immigrant story gets entwined with a little narrative called the "war on terror."

That's the volatile mixture at the center of Yussef El Guindi's Language Rooms, a somewhat uneven but ultimately worthwhile new play that leverages absurdist comedy to interrogate the perversion of basic human sympathies post-9/11. Seattle-based playwright El Guindi (whose other Bay Area productions include Back of the Throat and the hilarious Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes) well knows that the transformation of nightmare into bureaucratic routine is a reality sometimes best broached in a comic vein, since comedy has such a ready taste for the contortions of Orwellian doublethink.

Set in 2005 (when Guantanamo and CIA "black sites" were still a Bush thing, not an enduring bipartisan shame), the play, directed by Evren Odcikin for co-producers Golden Thread and Asian American Theater Company, takes inspiration from the 2003 case of James J. Yee, the Muslim Chinese American and US Army chaplain accused (but never convicted) of espionage while ministering to Guantanamo detainees.

El Guindi centers the action on a bad day in the otherwise workaday life of Ahmed (James Asher), a second-generation Arab American working as a translator and interrogator for an unnamed department in the vast multi-agency American security state. It's not a glamorous job. The workplace is comprised of bland rooms (courtesy of scenic designer Mikiko Uesugi): white panel walls and mismatched furniture dingy under fluorescent tubes, a metal filing cabinet in the corner, some hulking box cloaked by a sheet, and a metal rolling tray piled with the ordinarily harmless contents of your average utility drawer. The only relief to the eye comes from a plastic container of honey shaped like a bear, which sits merrily beside the other clutter atop a small wooden desk.

In a rude awakening from his somnambulant occupation, Ahmed has learned from colleague Nasser (William Dao) — the only other Muslim working in their unit — that he's under suspicion for his failure to adequately meld with his American fellows. This suspicion apparently rests on Ahmed's noted reluctance toward public showering as well as his failure to show up at a recent Super Bowl party. Ahmed, playing ingenuously to the cameras he knows are fixed in every corner of every room, is taken aback and increasingly worried. When he's called into a meeting with his boss, Kevin (a winningly subtle Mujahid Abdul-Rashid), the older African American man seems to be both interrogating Ahmed and trying to relate to his nervous subordinate with a paternal regard — assuring him he's experienced divided loyalties himself during his teeth-cutting days as a COINTELPRO provocateur among black nationalists.