有一些关于喜怒无常。当他是一个青少年r, it’s obvious: He’s the ringleader and the daredevil, the one blithely unfazed by sensible qualms, the one who knows how to dance and what CD to play from his boom box (Britney Spears, obviously). He knows what to order in gay bars, and he pretends, convincingly enough, to know how to clink beverages.
But as he ages into his 20s and 30s in “Drowning in Cairo,” Moody (Amin El Gamal) still has an unbreakable hold over Khalid (Wiley Naman Strasser) and Taha (Martin Yousif Zebari) — even when Moody is broken himself.
In Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s play, whose Golden Thread Productions world premiere opened Monday, April 11, at the Potrero Stage in San Francisco, the trio were part of the real-life 2001 raid on the Queen Boat, a floating gay club on the Nile. Egyptian police arrested and tortured 52 men they found, though among the play’s three characters, only Moody suffers the full brunt of the law; Khalid’s powerful father gets his son out of prison, and Taha serves some of his time in a juvenile facility.
In theory, “Drowning in Cairo” has everything going for it. It marks the Golden Thread directing debut of new Executive Artistic DirectorSahar Assaf,who took over from founder Torange Yeghiazarian last year. It tells a story that will probably complicate many American audiences’ mental images of gay men and Arab men. It richly envisions its characters, each with his own full narrative arc, embodied by a group of actors who never strike a false note, whether they’re playing jejune adolescents or their older jaded selves.
Strasser is a riot as the hormone-laden Khalid; it’s as if, out of other options, he’s always trying to use telekinesis to get himself, El Gamal’s Moody and a bed in the same location.
Zebari’s Taha is the perfect complement as the credulous junior of the bunch; he’s willing to accept and absorb anything, like a stone and a sponge at the same time, as long as he gets to keep tagging along.
And then there’s Moody, whom El Gamal plays with diva swagger worthy of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. He preens. He pouts. He reigns. He demurs. As a youth, he brims with sass, but as his world saps it of him, all at once and gradually, El Gamal’s sharp performance anatomizes violent oppression’s effect on mind, body and spirit.
Yet “Drowning in Cairo” is overstuffed. Elsayigh’s dialogue keeps requiring the characters to talk around what they’re talking about — pouring each other drinks, say — but in a way that crumples rather than inflates the tension.
A story line about Moody writing a memoir, one that might show the world what the raid did to them and maybe make things better for gay men in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, doesn’t pay off; it’s never clear whether Moody’s actually a good writer or whether we should care about a manuscript he himself puts so little stock in. Then it becomes grounds for an out-of-nowhere, late second-act character twist in Taha, but one that induces more shrug than shock.
All the while, Elsayigh keeps the show’s broader political context very explicit, with references like notches on a timeline to where the characters are in the buildup to, experience of and aftermath from the Arab Spring.
When “Drowning in Cairo” focuses on its love triangle, it works stupendously, its perfectly calibrated relationships thrumming with energy that’s just as likely to erupt into a kiss as into a shove. When it stretches into that timeline, it falls flat.
L“Drowning in Cairo”:Written by Adam Ashraf Elsayigh. Directed by Sahar Assaf. Through May 1. Two hours, 20 minutes. $20-$100. Potrero Stage, 1695 18th St., S.F. 415-626-4061.www.goldenthread.org