Muslim women square off in ‘Faceless’
SKOKIE, Ill. - As of 2015, more than 250 U.S. citizens and residents — white as well as people of color and women as well as men — had joined the Islamic State group. Why do they do it? Riffing on the wellpublicized case of a 19year-old white woman from a Denver suburb — now doing time after trying to join ISIS — that’s among the questions posed by 22-year-old playwright Selina Fillinger in “Faceless,” receiving its world premiere at Northlight Theatre under BJ Jones’ direction.
But Fillinger is after far more in this ambitious play, which introduces a second woman alongside Susie Glenn (Lindsay Stock), convert to Islam and would-be jihadist.
Claire Fathi (Susaan Jamshidi) is a practicing Muslim as well as a recent Harvard Law grad who works for Uncle Sam as a prosecutor.
Ten months into her job as an assistant district attorney, her boss tags her as his second for Susie’s upcoming treason trial.
A dead ringer for Eliot Spitzer, Scott Bader (Timothy Edward Kane) is aggressive, smart and politically ambitious as well as outrageously racist and sexist.
In a script where all three men — all older — border on caricature, Bader is the least credible, even though the characteristically excellent Kane does his best to sell this testosterone-fueled part.
While Bader bullies Claire at one table located at stage right, defense lawyer Mark Arenberg (Ross Lehman) is patronizing Susie at an identical table located at stage left.
Mark should know better than to call a client “kiddo,” and it’s not believable that he does so here, in a play continually suggesting that Fillinger’s grasp of lawyers, court procedure and the law doesn’t much extend past what she’s seen on television.
But Mark isn’t wrong when he tells Susie that she’s “sheltered and naïve” — any more than Bader is wrong in advising Claire that she has a thing or two to learn about lawyering and life.
For all that, both of these men and Susie’s dad (an overly fraught Joe Dempsey) fail to grasp what’s most important about Susie and Claire — and most interesting and intriguing about this play.
Susie and Claire’s parallels extend far beyond the scenes in which they face us and pray — unaware of each other but nevertheless mouthing the same words, Susie in English and Claire in Arabic.
Susie began chatting online with a jihadist (voiced from offstage while projected as a looming silhouette) in the year after her mother’s death.
He offers her a sense of family and makes her feel important, in the way virtual connections often do — even as they ultimately leave us more isolated than ever.
Fillinger is spot-on in assessing how Facebook (through which Susie becomes engaged to her Islamic mystery man) can render one faceless; Stephen Mazurek’s projection design, filled with Twitter symbols and emoticons, drives that point home.
Claire also desperately wants to belong.
Completing a red, white and blue outfit with a red hijab, she thereby embodies her need to square her faith with her insistence on proving she’s a good American (costume design by Izumi Inaba).
It’s among the reasons Claire overcomes her initial reluctance to work Susie’s case with a determination to win and put Susie away. Whatever the cost. Is it worth it? Claire insists she’s doing what she must as a loyal American intent on defeating ISIS.
But is prosecuting a naïve and misguided teenage girl really going to make the world safer for democracy?
Or, Fillinger trenchantly asks, should we focus instead on why so many young Americans like her feel lonely, lost and faceless in the first place?