Invasion!

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg. Photo Caption: Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte in The Play Company's production of Jonas Hassen Khemiri's INVASION! at The Flea - September 6 - October 1, 2011.This month's CUNY Graduate Center Advocate includes my (belated) review of Jonas Hassen Khemiri's fantastic play Invasion!, as produced by The Play Company at the Flea Theatre in September:

For Khemiri, even though he allowed and even encour­aged his col­lab­o­ra­tors in New York to change the set­ting, and to adjust cer­tain cul­tural and top­i­cal ref­er­ences accord­ingly, Inva­sion! is a play about Swe­den. That it feels so top­i­cal, timely, and rel­e­vant in a set­ting 4,000 miles from Stock­holm, is cer­tainly a credit to trans­la­tor Rachel Willson-Broyles and direc­tor Erica Schmidt, who have suc­cess­fully made the play sound like New York, or like a ver­sion of New York envi­sioned by a play­wright with a bit­ing sense of humor and a love of lan­guage. It is also, of course, a credit to Khemiri him­self, who has writ­ten a prob­ing, intel­li­gent play that is at turns funny and alarm­ing, chal­leng­ing and engag­ing, polit­i­cal and heart-wrenching

It also includes a few thoughts on a couple of recent visits to Broadway shows Hair and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

But here’s the thing. I know some drag queens. And I know some hip­pies. And they don’t all look like Aber­crom­bie and Fitch mod­els, or like they’re audi­tion­ing for the next sea­son of True Blood. The decades-long quest to address images of women’s bod­ies in pop­u­lar cul­ture hasn’t resulted in more real­is­tic images of women; it has instead resulted in less real­is­tic images of men. I guess that’s a move toward equal­ity in some sense (we’re all objec­ti­fied now), and again: I’m not entirely against the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of bod­ies and the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of sex. But I do wish that in the the­atre, of all places, we might make some effort to rec­og­nize that there is more than one way to be sexy, and that there are kinds of diver­sity not reflected in Benet­ton catalogues.

You can read the full article here.