Early on in Atra Asdou’s Iraq, But Funny, a character proclaims, “Where there’s a genocide, there’s England.” And indeed the, British Empire, embodied by Asdou as our narrator and tour guide, the English Gentleman (TEG for short), shows up in all the “teensy-weensy genocides” that unspool over the course of this story of five generations of Assyrians in what is now Iraq— from right before World War I to the present day. “Ripe material for a comedy,” TEG proclaims.
As promised by the title—it is.
Iraq, But Funny
Through 7/20: Wed 7 PM, Thu 1:30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 1:30 and 7 PM, Sun 1:30 PM; also Tue 6/17 and 7/1 7 PM; no shows Thu 6/19 or Fri 7/4; Lookingglass Theatre, 163 E. Pearson, lookingglasstheatre.org, $30-$90
Asdou’s world premiere at Lookingglass Theatre, directed by Dalia Ashurina, draws loosely on her own family’s history as well as the larger history of Iraq and what we Westerners call the Middle East, emphasizing the matrilineal as one woman after another finds herself caught in war, displacement, and yes, genocide. Each tries to protect her daughter, often through arranging marriages to seemingly safe men and reminding them, “Your life isn’t for you. It’s for the next generation.”
We’re also reminded that Assyrians are not to be confused with Syrians, and that their cultural and ethnic heritage is distinct from those of the Arab, Persian, Kurdish, and Jewish populations that also historically lived in the region. It’s part history lesson, part family drama, and part clown show (the clown, of course, being TEG, who makes Vivian Stanshall’s louche British twit Sir Henry seem like a model of thoughtful introspection and moral rectitude). And it all adds up to one of the most exhilarating, thought-provoking, and truly witty shows I’ve seen in a long time.
Asdou, a vet of Second City and iO, knows the craft of creating shorthand routes to big satirical laughs. The script is largely concise at laying out the historical timeline, but also gives improvisational vibes as Asdou’s TEG cajoles, declaims, mugs, feels sorry for himself, and tries to enlist the audience on his side of the story. You know—the way all imperialists do. (If we find ourselves occasionally charmed by him, that in itself drives home the uncomfortable realization that so much of what we learn about colonized nations comes from the conquerors.)
If your knowledge of Iraq history mostly begins and ends with the first and second gulf wars, you’ll probably learn something here, though Asdou doesn’t spend a lot of time on the latter, opting for a video montage of the war that unspools as two of the characters sing Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” It’s an effective choice that essentially decentralizes the U.S. perspective as curated by cable news, as if to tell us, “This is all a lot of Americans know about Iraq. Now maybe you understand more about the country you invaded.” By this point in the two-plus hours of the show, we do see that, while the U.S. isn’t off the hook for what happened to people in the region, we’re definitely not the Only People Who Matter to Iraqi history.
If you want to get to know people intimately, you learn about what makes them laugh, and I think that’s one of the best things that Asdou’s script delivers. She is defying narratives that turn colonized people into cardboard victims (or cardboard villains) for Western sympathies and is giving them their own voices—raw, raucous, and sometimes plaintive, but never without agency or insight. Rage and humor blend seamlessly, as when one character tells TEG, “You rape the world for spices—and you don’t even know how to use them.”
Susaan Jamshidi and Gloria Imseih Petrelli play multiple generations of mothers and daughters, with the latter’s turn as a daughter in 1970s Baghdad being particularly memorable, as she insists on showing us what the city was like for her as a restless teenager. She’s the one who goes to the U.S. (ending up in Chicago) with her film-loving boyfriend. Sina Pooresmaeil and James Rana play the younger and older versions of the loving but generally hapless men we meet as the timeline moves forward; the latter is particularly funny with his obsessive need to quote scenes from blockbuster movies.
Asdou works in a dizzying array of comic interludes, including a game show, Spin Your Fate, where Pooresmaeil’s character has to spin a wheel to figure out whether or not he can leave Baghdad under Saddam Hussein’s rule, and another chapter of Iraq’s history delivered by Jennifer Coolidge (Asdou again). The 1980s war between Iran and Iraq unfolds as a boxing match between Ayatollah Khomeini and Hussein. At one point, TEG perches on top of a crate of stolen artifacts (including one that looks a lot like the winged bull lamassu that greets visitors entering the Museum Formerly Known as the Oriental Institute), and uses an overhead projector to explain the intricacies of shifting borders and alliances.
Omid Akbari’s simple but stately white-painted brick setting provides a suitable backdrop for Michael Salvatore Commendatore’s projections, which blend archival footage and images with the characters in the play waiting offstage to join the story. The sound design by Christie Chiles Twillie and the original music by Avi Amon provide an aural environment that enhances the cartoonish and grotesque events and adds poignance to quieter and more intimate scenes.
Both Asdou’s script and Ashurina’s direction mostly succeed at balancing the satirical elements with the domestic interludes, which again are funny in their own ways, because they allow us to see the repetitions of family stories (and similarities in personalities) across generations, while also showing the evolution of the women who are trying to hold it all together. Iraq, But Funny pays off in a rich emotional climax in the present day, leaving us with one of the most creative and openhearted takes on the history of a people and a region I can remember seeing.
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