“Got plans for pride this weekend?” an email asked. “In between the marches, parties, darties, DJ sets, and drag brunches, join us at HERE for some queer belly laughs at E. Zaalan’s Syrian Soap.”
As it happens, that’s exactly where I went just a few hours later, an hour-long solo show that was the last of the three plays presented at the eighth annual Criminal Queerness Festival, which ended today. I’m not sure how many belly laughs there were; Zaalan’s funny focused more on feet: One of the three characters was a human-sized Traditional Wooden Syrian Bathroom Slipper. The other two characters were the Ancestor, cavorting in a bathhouse in the afterlife, wearing little more than a fake mustache, a Middle Eastern headdress, and…bubbles; and his Descendant, who seemed clearly (and queerly) the writer and performer of the show, a Syrian nonbinary standup, clown, and conflict mediator. (This last is what the Ancestor tells us at one point his Descendant does for a living; “so basically, nothing,” he comments, all judgy.)
There was more obvious clowning than conflict mediation in “Syrian Soap,” with the characters nursing an oak tree, giving birth to a Syrian flag, doing a little strip tease, roping in – and lounging on top of — volunteered audience members along the way. All of which, on first impression, might have made the show seem an unusual selection for the festival, which since 2019 has showcased playwrights from countries in which queer artists are treated like criminals (which is how the festival gets its name.) A project of of National Queer Theater, the shows I’ve seen in the festival in the past have tended to be more earnest in tone.
But there are an unusual number of queer-inflected shows even on Broadway this year that are using camp and clowning as weapons of resistance. And Zaalan turns out to be crafty in employing her anarchic antics to reflect on the effects of exile, and the violence of the Syrian Revolution, in ways that were at times as poignant as playful. They enlisted an audience member to chase them around the stage shooing bubbles at them from a bubble gun and shouting “You have to leave” At several points, they used two of those traditional Syrian shoes, this time in miniature, and engage in a kind of puppet allegory that involved bopping them on the heads of a couple of audience members, and then losing one of the shoes. “So, that was a metaphor for exile,” Zaalan tells us. “When the shoes were over on that person’s head, they got uncomfortable, which is like hostile border policy.
