You Don’t Know Abulkasem
Invasion! is a puzzling play. Written by Tunisian-Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri and translated from the original Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, it touches upon themes of youth culture, anti-Islamic xenophobia, language, and identity, but in a fragmented, scattershot way that almost but not quite comes together to form a rough mosaic portrait. But of what? If anything it’s of the mysterious Abulkasem, and he’s ultimately unknowable, apocryphal, based on faulty premises. But even if it’s hard to know what to make of it when all’s said and done, Crowded Fire Theater’s sharp West Coast premiere makes the saying and doing tremendously entertaining along the way.
Through the Cracks
Who hasn’t wondered what his or her life would be like if, well, everything were different? It’s the sort of reflection that nobody really indulges in when everything’s going well, but that tends to consume one’s mind when one’s life seems to be going nowhere. That certainly describes the siblings in Lauren Yee’s new play Crevice: Liz is a jobless 27-year old Ivy League grad who recently caught her fiancé cheating on her and now never leaves the couch (a strikingly similar situation to that of a character in Kim Rosenstock’s dark comedy Tigers Be Still, but that’s a very different story). Rob, 29, is supposedly an actor but hasn’t worked in years, and both of them are still living with their mom, waiting for something to happen. And something does. Liz and Rob get a taste of what might have been when they slip through a crack in the floor into a parallel world in which their every wish has come true, and that’s not necessarily good news.
