Faceless

An Interplay reading at Northlight Theater.

Or: Areopagus

I don’t think, dear reader, I have ever seen a play quite so … the word that jumps to mind is “structurally sound” but that’s not merely bright enough to illuminate the artistry of Faceless.

Yet it is an exact phrase, for the play is Sound in the way a great cathedral or mosque or temple is Sound. It is the trial of Susie Glenn (Lindsay Stock) a young, white, middle-class girl who converted to Islam and attempted to join ISIS and Clair Fathi (Susaan Jamshidi) the Muslim-American lawyer sent to prosecute her. It is a play holding up one ideal that seamlessly joins together the pillars of that story, echoing and reflecting questions of Fatih, Prejudice, Justice, Race, Feminism, Mental Health, Media, and Fathers (which reflects, as it always does, back to Faith).

Playwright Selina Filinger (gearing up the play for its full run this winter) has created this shadowy Areopagus to try a modern day traitor. She has devised it as a delicately balanced crucible that never for a minute dips in its rising pressure or slows in centrifugal motion. She has gifted her characters with heartfelt, intricate Sorkinesy speech, brutal in their eloquence, but who, when cut, bleed and flinch and snarl without a drop of artifice. The games they play, the battles they fight (both with the unseen press, and with each other, and the demons in their heads) are masterfully crafted. Even as the story unfolds you can watch the ripples of ideas, words either repeated as weapons or subsumed as an unconscious symbol of allegiance, sink and surface again.

There are times when the reverses (and there are so many of them) slam into us with such force that the cart of our understanding is tipped up on two wheels. And others where an iron bound stance will suddenly twist or melt away (though these are rare as Filinger puts so much work into making each character fight for their beliefs and truly debate with each other rather than the typical push-pull of an “idea play,” and never occur in Susie’s case, who remains a moral conundrum.) But if the play is not quite fully fledged, it’s wingspan already darkens the sun, and it will soar to awesome heights, once it’s ready.

Jamishdi’s heroics in navigating Clair’s path (and Clair herself) present us with a sunset of skills: from cool shades of sorrow, to scarlet rage, to smokin’ hot fires of victory and challenge, to circus daubs of compassion, and a pressing strata of righteousness, all blended and shining together. Timothy Edward Kane plays Clair’s co-council and employer United States Prosecutor Scott Bader, and lavishes in his awful charisma and his charismatic awfulness. No outright villain Bader tempers his outrageous sayings with moments of kindness and the knifelike justifications Fillinger has provided for Kane to dazzle us with. Both Ross Lehman (Mark Arenberg, Susie’s avuncular, tough-love lawyer) and Joe Dempsey (Alan, Susie’s distraught father, grasping for answers as to how his girl could have gone so far) sometimes slip into caricature (for the one) and over zealousness (for the other), but both manage to, before the verdict, summon touching and tender and True performances that blurred my eyes with tears. For Stock herself, she keeps Susie simple, or as simple as a grieving, faith-filled girl from the Chicago suburbs looking for G-d— in all the wrong places— could be, which is to say, dizzyingly complex. Stock is the picture of youth, in all its righteous exuberance, gone horribly astray, and never looses that spark as, without any theatrics, she destroys Susie’s soul.

Faceless is a courtroom drama. It is built on argument of five souls, the wrong and the righteous in each of them, crying out what they believe to be the Truth and nothing but, while we are left to judge for ourselves. Though still in need of fine-tuning, it stands a gorgeous, breathtaking work; each facet supporting and mirroring the beauty, the Soundness, of the whole. I cannot wait to see what the story and its cast make of it when it rises to its feet. I enjoin you, dear reader, to seek it out when February comes around and follow the beacon of The Northlight to view this staggering work of Faith.