Review: “I Call My Brothers” at Interrobang Theatre Project
What it’s like to be a targeted minority: an all-too-timely tale
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I Call My Brothers review: An imperfect but highly useful guide to what it feels like to be a targeted minority
Theater review by Kris Vire
Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s play begins with a potential terrorist attack. By the end of I Call My Brothers, though, it’s hard to say who was under attack, and who was doing the terrorizing.
The event in question is a seemingly failed car bombing that ended up with no casualties apart from the car. But as reports emerge of a possible perpetrator with Arab features, a waking nightmare begins for protagonist Amor (Salar Ardebili) and all of his “brothers”—by blood or by association.
We follow Amor through a disorienting fever dream in the hours after the bombing, as he tries to go about his business while a vivid paranoia sets in; he “fits the description,” after all, and with the weight of suspicion bearing down on everyone who looks like him, by the end of the next day he’s nearing a breaking point.
While this scenario could be all too plausibly set anywhere in America at this moment—Interrobang Theatre Project’s Chicago premiere opened the night before President Trump’s primetime address on his manufactured “border crisis”—the actual backdrop is Stockholm. Khemiri is a Swedish playwright and novelist of partially Tunisian descent. Brothers is, at its core, a deeply upsetting portrait of what it feels like to be brown in a traditionally white country where an anti-immigration, nationalist political sect is resurging.
So, yeah, pretty relevant in the United States right now too.
Khemiri has had one other major production in Chicago to my knowledge. In 2013, Silk Road Rising staged Khemiri’s play Invasion!, which dealt with many of the same themes in a series of loosely connected vignettes. That production generated outsize attention thanks to then–Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss, who used her theater review to argue that racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims just made practical sense.
Leaving aside the fact that Weiss’s bizarre argument actually bolstered Khemiri’s whole point, I had some issues of my own with the meandering energy of Invasion!—but it was, to be fair, Khemiri’s first work for the stage, written in 2006. The more recent I Call My Brothers is more cohesive but also still a bit disjointed; Amor narrates in present-tense direct address, but the action frequently falls into flashback as he rings up his school chum Shavi (Chris Khoshaba), cousin Ahlem (Tina El Gamal) and old crush Valeria (Gloria Imseih Petrelli).
The revelation that Amor actually stalked Valeria for years goes uncomfortably underexamined, and recurring bits like, for instance, a young Amor assigning elements of the periodic table to all of his friends and relatives can make it feel like translator Rachel Willson-Broyles has glossed over some key details.
But there are also highly impactful set pieces, like that of Amor trying to run a simple errand downtown while a police tail (El Gamal) misinterprets his every move. The telemarketing intrusions from a solicitor (Petrelli) for a PETA-like animal rights group, hounding Amor for donations to ensure livestock is given more humane treatment than Amor himself is receiving at that moment, make for a truly stunning juxtaposition.
And director Abhi Shrestha smartly eschews the literal in their staging, which makes the dreamlike narrative (and Amor’s unreliable narratorship) easier to swallow. Ardebili’s all-out performance, as athletic as it is empathetic, so thoroughly impresses that you’ll want to keep an eye on this actor.
His high-voltage presence is the inverse of set designer Eleanor Kahn’s striking backdrop: an array of empty headscarves shaped, it would appear, out of aluminum foil. The standard Nordic Stockholmer, these negative spaces suggest, can’t see anything past the kaffiyeh or hijab. Ardebili’s Amor dares us not to see the damage that does to the human being behind it.
I Call My Brothers
Interrobang Theatre Project at Rivendell Theatre (5779 N Ridge Ave). By Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Directed by Abhi Shrestha.
Cast: Salar Ardebili, Tina El Gamal, Chris Khoshaba, Gloria Imseih Petrelli.
Scenic and props design: Eleanor Kahn. Lighting design: Michelle E. Benda. Sound design and original music: Jeffrey Levin. Dramaturg: Nadya Naumaan.
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes with no intermission. Through February 2. Tickets ($32, students $16) at interrobangtheatreproject.com.
Photographs by Emily Schwartz.
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