A Matter of Trust

By: Steve Sierra In the opening scene of "Homeland Security," the new play by Chicago writer Stuart Flack, Raj, an Indian American doctor in his 30s, and Susan, his Jewish girlfriend, are seated in a small room at the airport.

Besides the two of them, it contains only a table, two chairs, a desk lamp and an FBI agent.
Raj and Susan have just returned from a vacation. But, as the agent, Benjamin, an African American, asks Raj where he's traveled and who he's associated with in recent years, it becomes clear that Raj is suspected of involvement in terrorism--perhaps because of his race and ethnicity. In the beginning, Susan believes Raj is being questioned unjustly.

As the play progresses, however, she starts to wonder whether the friends Raj invites to her house are who they say they are.

"She's like the surrogate for the audience," said Flack, 43. "We're her and we just say, 'What should I believe? Who should I trust?'
"The play is totally about trust and … how the politics and race and the situation are able to unravel that trust, and how fragile that trust is."

Flack, who is Jewish, became interested in the subject of national security in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some of his friends who are of South Asian descent kept telling him stories about being racially profiled by security personnel at airports and receiving distrustful looks when they were out in public.

Overall, Flack spent a year and a half working on the play, which is being performed through Nov. 23 at Victory Gardens Theater in Lincoln Park.

Flack has been writing since he was a student at Evanston Township High School in the late 1970s; five of his plays have been produced, and this is not the first to take on a controversial topic or address the subject of terrorism.

His 2001 comedy "Jonathan Wild" tells the story of two men in their late 20s who suspect a friend from high school has become what Flack calls a "Unabomber sort of figure." When the friend asks for their help, they don't know if they can trust him.

Still, he said, "Homeland Security" is "more edgy and overtly political."

Flack talked with The Chicago Reporter about his play and the relationship between race and national security.

Did the topic of national security always appeal to you?
I've always [been] very interested in doing a play that was about the kind of ambiguity of racial, ethnic and immigrant populations in the United States. And this sort of gave me an opportunity to go after that material, and it gave it immediacy and put kind of an engine into it. It kind of raised the stakes enough, because I've always been very interested in how people perceive those populations.

How did you research the play?
I talked to a friend of mine at the [American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois] after I'd written the play. He helped me understand the legal situation, which helped me kind of refine the situation and the stakes. I didn't research the play in that way, but after I started to work on it, it needed to be--accurate isn't exactly the word, but [realistic] to a sophisticated person who really knew this world like an ACLU lawyer. I would want them to see it. I would want someone who is really inside the problem to see the play and it feel right to them, so it wouldn't feel like I just made stuff up.

What made you decide Raj should be of Indian descent?
I wanted to position [the play] in a way that highlighted the racial assumptions that people make, as well as religious assumptions, and it offered me more as a writer, creatively more latitude and ambiguity in the relationships. I didn't want it to be this sort of black and white--like he's a Muslim, he's either being unjustly accused of being involved, or maybe he is involved and maybe he sympathizes with the cause or whatever the cause is. I didn't want to get into the specificity because I think the world is more complicated than that.

I thought using the character the way I did allowed me to touch on the immigration theme and the themes of ethnicity and the themes of race in a more subtle way than making him Muslim, which I think would've [suggested] guilt or innocence immediately. It's about the interweaving of the political, the personal and the emotional.

Why did you write the FBI character as an African American?
I really wanted that dynamic, the African American and Indian, with [the African American] doing the questioning and him being a representative of the U.S. government, because it makes it harder to digest politically. Again, I didn't want it to go down the easy, pre-conceived channels. Let's say I chose this big Waspy, white FBI guy and a Muslim guy to interrogate. Where our sympathies lie--well, of course they lie with the guy being interrogated. It would be like the guy who represents the establishment of the country beating up on the disenfranchised guy. If he's guilty, we feel one way, and, if he's innocent, then we feel like the government is unjustly beating the crap out of him, out of disenfranchised people--which I am not saying is not true, but, as an artistic experience, there's not much to that. It doesn't challenge our beliefs. It doesn't open the topic up in any way and make the audience withhold its judgment and make people question their misconceptions. I was trying to make choices all along the way that always make you go, 'Huh.'


Part of writing the play is the process of discovery. You don't know really what you're going to write about. You don't know what exactly you are going to say. And then you start making choices. I will always make the choice to make things more complex and harder to sort of pin down.

After talking with your friends who were racially profiled, what was your feeling about how the federal government looks at immigration?
There's something you do in nature as a social creature that [moves you to] generate a kind of trust in a community. It's very easy to generate the flip side of that: What about the people who aren't part of the community? And how do we view those people? And the answer is, sometimes, very often, we deal with those people as not even being human beings, whether it's the people in Al Qaeda, who view you or me that way, or whether it's the people in the Justice Department. So, to me, that's scary. It's a deep-set part of human nature. It's not going to go away. It's not an anomaly of any kind; it's sort of the way people behave.

In a crucial part of the play, there's a strange, scary dream sequence.
I knew there was going to be some sort of dream sequence there at the center, with a lot of the elements that people feel about the present situation in this country--that kind of weird feeling of a lack of trust, not understanding what's going on and not understanding what the truth is. It does devolve into a kind of weird nightmare. It was like, 'I am anxious and not quite sure who to trust and not sure even what evidence I would get that would cause me to trust anyone.' You have all this conflicting stuff in your head and you're not processing it in a rational way.

What do you want your audience to walk away thinking?
To be in this heightened state where they log all that uncertainty about everything, where things they thought were concrete are not concrete anymore. Everything gets simplified so much in public and political discourse. I want to re-introduce that complexity and ambiguity, and I think only by doing that are people really gaining that full appreciation of the complexity of the situation we're in. Maybe people will reflect on the value of trust and will reflect on how much of it we have lost in the last two years, and how costly that is.