CHECKMATE and
The theater practically invented the thrill of the unknown: you never know what may happen when you enter–or how you’ll feel when you leave. Maybe this time, a part of you hopes, you’ll be changed, shaken up, reminded why you got hooked in the first place. Although the odds for that are worse than in the new Lotto, you can’t win if you don’t play.
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The curtain raiser to Portrait is Al-Oboudi’s translation of Iraqi playwright Maath Yousif’s 1972 Checkmate. Here Al-Oboudi plays Frederick, an apparently disturbed young man. While playing chess, he tells his companion (Ron Wells) about a terrible dream he had–of the eyes of a murdered man staring at him like a hideous prophecy. Remembering the horror of other visions of corpses, Frederick screams that if only he had had a gun he could have done something–and produces one on the spot. Frightened by this nightmare confessional, his friend produces his own gun and, shaking as he forces himself to continue the chess game, tries to placate Frederick with increasingly frantic diversions.
As black-and-white slides depict the arrest (color ones later suggest the human side of the suspect, which the police ignore), Al-Oboudi is grilled by a couple of Chicago detectives (Ron Wells and Larry Grant). Calling him “camel jockey” and “rag head,” they accuse him of roughing up a woman on State Street and making obscene phone calls. He denies he knows the woman–he just struck back when she suddenly attacked him. But the classmate he’s dated (C. Wendell Cox in a voice-over) refuses to confirm his alibi, and the cops fulfill their own prophecy by twisting everything he says to fit their racist stereotype of Arabs.
Almost too loud for life, Wells and Grant play the interrogators in all three scenes. Right out of a Rat in the Skull nightmare, these cops need–as if it were a fix–to twist innocence into whatever hate image will set off their feeding frenzy; at that point every scream is just more proof they’re right.
