"Faceless," the lively new drama at Northlight Theatre that deals with the recruitment — over Twitter and Facebook — of a young American woman to join the jihad, is the work of 22-year-old playwright Selina Fillinger. It is a notable achievement for a scribe so early in her career.
This is what Fillinger does uncommonly well.
"Faceless," directed by BJ Jones in an impressive mainstage commitment to new Chicago work, is focused on a middle class, 18-year-old white woman — vulnerable, bereaved and susceptible to guys on the internet promising love and commitment to person, as well as to cause.
This fictional Susie Glenn, movingly played by Lindsay Stock, is written with the authority and compassion of one who seems to understand why you’d be deluded by some distant male with promises. It’s not a sentimental characterization; Susie is not some needy loser. Rather, she’s genuinely committed to radical Islam, or so she thinks, which has the effect of challenging the audience. Fillinger has not written a young woman whose allegedly criminal acts need to be cured; she has written a young woman who needs to be understood, which is always a sign of a writer worth following. Susie, you feel as you watch, is known to the writer, as is her father (played by Joe Dempsey), a man consumed by that agonizing combination of frustration at his daughter’s actions and his own complicity therein. Their scenes together are touching and arresting, as are the scenes between Susie and her lawyer, played, paternalistically, by Ross Lehman.
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But "Faceless" is a courtroom drama — Susie has been charged by the government with terrorism — and the other side of the table is written with less surety and authenticity. There is a prosector, Scott Bader (Timothy Edward Kane), who is your standard-issue, career-minded suit familiar from countless TV procedurals, replete with the skeletons. The type was worn out before Fillinger came to the table. This Bader has decided that it would be better for his case if a Harvard-educated Muslim woman named Claire Fathi (Susaan Jamshidi) were to be the face of the prosecution, and he brazenly tells Claire that is why he is putting her on the case. She wears a hijab that serves his purpose.
That moment is emblematic of what Fillinger needs most to work on in this play — people like this Bader certainly exist in all professions, but they generally don’t state their mercurial motivations with such directness, so out in the open. The wisdom of age teaches you that these ethical bankruptcies reside in subtext. They prosper in the unspoken and the oblique. They flourish in that which is implied, but not directly said.
I had a similar resistance to the characterization of Claire. We’re told she went to Harvard Law — a hotbed of personal ambition, God knows. But she reacts too much in "Faceless" like the preparations for this prosecution are her first rodeo. Any such graduate of color would be well aware of what others can gain from tokenism, and fully cognoscente of the likelihood, the certainty, of being trotted out as a symbol of use to others. And such a lawyer would quickly arm herself against such an eventuality. The character’s uncertainty and hesitation seems more in service of creating an empathetic character — one who can relate to Susie, which is what the playwright wants to explore. But at the cost, I think, of the credible reality of Claire, whom you do not feel the writer knows as she does the woman in jail.
Fillinger can tell a dramatic story — she can really tell a story, and I suspect any TV network in receipt of this script would have its interest immediately perked. You can see that she can pack more moment-by-moment tension into a play than most playwrights ever manage in their careers and Jones responds by forging a heightened production that holds your attention easily and lets Stock’s performance take hold of the show, as it should.
Things fall apart at the end. These kinds of courtroom dramas need resolution. Fillinger does not want to provide one. And the production, at that last moment, hasn’t figured out how to handle that desire, since it proceeds up until that point like a train headed for a station.
Here’s the ideal solution for the near future. Fillinger, a whopping talent, lets go of anything to do with genre or formula for a couple of years — those TV deals will be waiting for her — and she takes one risk after another.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
Review: "Faceless"(2.5 stars)
When: Through March 4
Where: Northlight Theatre at North Shore Center for the Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $30-$81 at 847-673-6300 or www.northlight.org
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