Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Just when you were starting to stereotype repressive conservatives as members of the Christian right, along comes Ahmed Rehab from the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Chicago to slap down Yussef El Guindi’s new play about a troubled Egyptian-American family, Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith. Rehab said in a Sun-Times story that he thinks it’s “unfair when a play with a subject matter that is distant from the classic struggles of the American-Muslim community, and is moreover not endorsed by it, uses the ‘Muslim bridge-building’ card to market itself.” What subject is it that Rehab imagines the evidently monolithic Muslim-American community would condemn? The struggle of Tawfiq, a 20-year-old college student, to understand his dwindling belief in Islam? The struggle of his brother, Hamza, to purge himself of all homosexual impulses? The struggle of their sister, Huwaida, to enter into an arranged marriage? Or the struggle of their father, Kamal, to accept and love his children and keep his family together at any cost?
Apparently Rehab would prefer a script that presents Muslims as the only religious practitioners in America free from secularizing forces, ambivalence about doctrinal teachings, and spiritual doubt. But that sort of reassuring fantasy is deadly in theater, which is after all a communal forum that arose some 2,000 years ago so that audiences could confront issues threatening their culture. There can be no theater without doubt. Great drama provokes, challenges, and transgresses; Hamlet, after all, offers compelling justifications for matricide and self-slaughter.
