Playwright: Jamil Khoury
At: Silk Road Theatre Project at the Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St.
Phone: (866) 458-3401; $15
Runs through: March 2
Andrea is an American-born Jewish lesbian. Leila is an immigrant Palestinian lesbian. Andrea is a career activist currently affiliated with an advocacy group for Jewish causes. Leila is a volunteer at a social service organization providing aid to Arab refugees. Andrea's tribal memories are largely inherited. Leila has personal recollections of families, includng her own, forced by ever-changing borders into a cycle of exile and resettlement. Andrea struggles with filial guilt and chronic penury. Leila now enjoys a comfortable life in the U.S., made possible by wealthy parents and a marriage-of-convenience to a gay man.
So is Precious Stones meant to be a symposium on international relations illustrated by a Juliet-and-Juliet romance, or is its focus the stormy course of true love, with centuries-old political turmoil supplying the rocks and reefs? Playwright Jamil Khoury attempts to assign equal gravity to both subtexts, reducing his provocative premise to a kissy-face comic book sandwiched between long passages of lugubrious documentary. (Did I mention the two newsreel-slide montages? And the running rumination on the 'stones'? Hurled by Palestinian children at Israeli soldiers. Slung by David at Goliath. That Jesus dared sinless men to cast. And—of course—STONEwall.)
But pillow-talk that reads like summit conference transcripts cannot distract us from Khoury's own tendency to favor one side over the other. Though played by uniformly capable actresses under the direction of Michael Najjar, Roxane Assaf's cosmopolitan Leila is permitted repeatedly to articulate logical arguments that Nicole Pitman's puppy-like Andrea cannot rebut except with idealistic ranting. This same bias is reflected in four stereotypical supporting roles—Leila's effete spouse and xenophobic cousin, Andrea's butch sidekick and bigoted boss, all likewise portrayed by Assaf and Pitman—whom Khoury nevertheless contrives to assemble in one scene for the sole purpose of having them offend each other.
However lofty the Silk Road Theatre Project's goals, what emerges after nearly three hours are not whole, recognizable characters caught up in unfortunate circumstance, but a debate as rigidly structured as double-entry bookkeeping, with the totals never quite coming out even. And while that might be the current situation in the Middle East, it's not a play.