Broken Nose Theatre, a non-Equity company whose ensemble and staff include several Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department alumni, presents the Midwest premiere of Yussef El Guindi’s dark comedy Language Rooms. The show opens Monday, April 22, and runs through May 18 at the Den Theatre, located at 1331 N. Milwaukee in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.
Kaiser Zaki Ahmed
The show is directed by Columbia alum Kaiser Zaki Ahmed ’08, a graduate of Columbia College’s Theatre Directing program. Tickets are “Pay What You Can.” For tickets, click here.
The play concerns an Egyptian-American Muslim man working as an interrogator at a CIA “black site,” whose loyalty to the U.S. is called into question. To prove his devotion to America, he is assigned to interrogate a suspect — who turns out to be his own father.
Ahmed was interviewed by Columbia College Chicago’s student-run newspaper The Chronicle. “The reason I love this play is that it’s not your typical post-9/11 interrogation play,” Ahmed told Chronicle reporter Yasmeen Sheika. “It’s all very much about personal loyalty [and] testing the torture you put yourself through, whether you’re conscious of it or not. . . . It’s written perfectly, and it’s poking at something in the Muslim American diaspora that’s perhaps un-poked.” To read the full article, click here.
Rose Hamill
Sasha Smith
Besides Ahmed, Columbia College alumni working on the production include Conchita Avitia ’18 and Annaliese Voci ’18, both graduates of the Columbia College Theatre Department’s BA Program in Theatre Design. Avitia and Voci are the show’s lighting and costume designer respectively. In addition, Columbia alum Rose Hamill ’16, a graduate of the Theatre Department’s BA Program in Theatre Technology with a Teaching Artist Minor and a Live and Performing Arts Management Minor, is the show’s production manager as well as managing director of Broken Nose Theatre. And former Columbia College Theatre Department student Sasha Smith is the production’s fight director and intimacy coordinator.
