Marriage unravels in MTC's `Egypt'
A Midwestern housewife gets an unpleasant surprise in Yussef El Guindi's “Hotter Than Egypt” at Marin Theatre Company. A “rolling” world premiere produced in cooperation with Seattle's A Contemporary Theatre, the show runs through April 24.
Jen Taylor stars as Jean, wife of a successful Wisconsin businessman Paul (Paul Morgan Stetler), who has brought her along on a trip to Egypt to celebrate their 24th anniversary. He's visited there before, but this is her first time. Their relationship becomes rancorous almost immediately when he berates her for wearing a bikini to the hotel pool.
Their Egyptian guides, Maha (Naseem Etemad) and Seif (Wasim No'mani), offer little more than disinterested shrugs at this affront to Islamic values. Their jobs put them in contact with ignorant Westerners all the time. The bikini incident is little more than a fading blip on their radar, but it's a triggering incident for Jean and Paul, one that presages trouble to come.
Maha and Seif are also a couple engaged to be married and have their own private difficulties, which El Guindi cleverly, if somewhat predictably, weaves into the plot. Maha is a graduate student in design and has ambitions to go into the fashion industry, something that doesn't sit well with Seif despite his generally forgiving nature. In some ways, their relationship is a small-scale reflection of that of their older American visitors, which grows more complicated and contentious with each scene.
Director John Langs gets excellent nuanced performances from all his actors, but especially from Etemad, Taylor and Stetler, whose character is equal parts intelligent charm and doltish stupidity. In one pivotal scene, he confesses to Jean that he's had affairs — none of them
serious, he assures her — then almost absentmindedly gives her an anniversary gift. It's a gesture of astounding but totally plausible cluelessness.
Jean then faces reevaluating her entire life up to that point, including the inevitable issue of what to do with moving on from there. Badly wronged by the man she loved and trusted, and devastated by the fact that their life together has been a lie, she rises to the challenge of reinventing herself, a process that consumes almost the entire second half of the play.
The play's title, “Hotter Than Egypt,” is deceiving. It implies torrid, bodice-ripping affairs, but nothing of the kind transpires. Other than mutual resentment, there's no heat in the exhausted marriage of Jean and Paul, minor friction but little heat in the relationship of Maha and Seif, and only nonvolatile warmth in the friendship between Jean and Seif, who's depicted as almost a self-sacrificing martyr.
Seif is Jean's only friend in Cairo, but one who does not take advantage
of her vulnerability. The plot is basically Lifetime TV fare for the stage — “middle-aged divorceé finds new purpose” — with allusions to the evils of cultural insensitivity and the residue of colonialism.
It's not, however, an insult to our intelligence, all of it beautifully performed on a stunning set by Carey Wong. Scenes shift without apparent effort from hotel to major museum to Cairo street. The production sails along at a satisfying pace despite its almost twohour no-intermission run time. Wong's set and Jeff Rowlings' evocative lighting are wonderful, as is incidental music composed for this show by Nihan Yesil.
Altogether it's a lovely production about ordinary people caught in unintentional webs of their own creation, and is especially about one woman's valiant effort to deal with a devastating blow in a positive, life-affirming way, it's an old theme, but one that cannot be repeated too often.