For this provocative inaugural offering by the Mo'olelo Performing Arts Company, its artistic director, Seema Sueko, appears in the premiere of her own play about a young Muslim-American woman incongruously enrolled in an overseas student program at Tel-Aviv University in 1993. Besides bringing her considerable acting and playwriting chops to this smooth and compact production, Sueko—a Hawaiian from a Japanese and Pakistani family—adds the perspective of her multi-ethnic background along with a graduate degree in international relations. Clearly far from naïve, Sueko has written and performed the central role of Laila Ahmed as a cheerful, innocent optimist, astonishingly ingenuous for a student of Middle Eastern affairs—a sort of Islamic Candide whose characteristic bright exclamation is, "So cool," but whose grand tour of historical, cultural, and political sites in the Holy Land proves a journey of gradual disillusionment and ends darkly in her mysterious unseen murder by unidentified assailants.
Layers of flashbacks create narrative complexity as Laila's grieving mother, Carol Ahmed, unpacks her dead daughter's effects and reads her diary. Linda Libby, as Carol, affectingly conveys the pangs of a mourning parent, though she must mute motherly grief to give emphasis to the unfolding of Laila's story, artfully varied as Libby and Sueko assume a range of voices and characters, Libby sometimes even entering into the persona of Laila. The storytelling ingenuity, enhanced by the clarity of Siobhan Sullivan's direction, somewhat serves to mask a relative dearth of dramatic movement, mostly just episodic progress toward a poignant but foregone and shadowy conclusion. A bit more tension is created by the mother's brief frustrating interviews with a brittle congressional assistant (Kathryn Venverloh, striking the right tone of false sympathy). The production is simple and good-looking, with scenic design by Robert Dahey, lighting by Kim Palma, sound by Paul James Kruse, and costumes by Megan Fraher.
Laila and her sad fate show the seething milieu of Israeli/Palestinian politics to be a dangerous place for an enthusiastic naïf. Doomed from the get-go, no other conclusion is possible. But Sueko has made her perky, idealistic character so sympathetic that we watch with a sorrowful wish that she might have been allowed to live and cultivate her garden.
"Remains," presented by Mo'olelo Performing Arts Company at ARK Center for the Performing Arts, 3554 Kettner Blvd., San Diego. Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Sept. 10-Oct. 3. $15-$20. (619) 342-7395.
