Adrift.

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

This short play, based on a novel by Naguib Mahfouz, depicts the interaction between several 40-something people who have been friends since university. They spend their evenings smoking hashish, discussing politics, and working out their complicated love/sexual relationships. They represent liberal, secular, upper-middle-class Cairo. They are served by a Nubian. When he is not supplying them with marijuana, he watches TV and spouts the scores of MLB games or the hanging of Saddam Hussein. He symbolizes poor and disenfranchised Cairo, as well as the indiscriminating and levelling effect of Western media. Into the group’s midst comes a young woman who wears the hijab. Although she works at a fundamentalist newspaper, she stands in for moderate Islam. There is also a whale that appears to one of the liberals every so often, and perhaps emblematizes the futility of the social, religious, and political situation in Egypt. Clearly this play is overcrowded; it is trying to do too much in too little space, and it fails.

The back flap describes Adrift as “about a group of people at the epicentre of conflict between the West’s ever accelerating and utterly ahistorical imperial culture of commoditization and capital, and its Doppelganger: the tide of religious fundamentalism.” This noble goal does indeed seem to be the play’s intent, but not successfully. Using Egypt to represent the Middle East is reductive. Other complex issues also become one-dimensional because of the brevity; the conflict between cultures and classes is heavy-handed, and the clash of and within faiths simplistic. In addition to secularism and fundamentalist and moderate Islam, Youssef throws in Christianity. But a Coptic man named Ali is as likely as a Muslim named Jesus, and the playwright neither explains this anomaly nor enlarges upon the presence of Christianity per se. The dialogue between the characters is likewise choppy. The Mahfouz novel is about nihilistic decadence shaken up by youthful activism. This play sacrifices the novel’s development, subtlety, and depth to offer a rather “hip,” sound-bite version of how Middle Eastern countries negotiate their media, class, and religious cultures with each other and with the West.