Yussef El Guindi, one of Seattle's more successful playwrights, rarely has his plays produced in Seattle.

He sits in an apartment on Summit Avenue, sending his scripts around the country, getting lavish praise from The New York Times, The New Yorker ("an Arab-American cousin of the young Woody Allen"), The Chicago Tribune, the Humana Festival, etc. etc. in return. "That wasn't intentional," he told me over the phone yesterday. "It just kind of happened that way."

El Guindi is a carefully articulate and witty man with a British/Egyptian accent. And he's impeccably politic. "Regional theaters are like vending machines," he said at one point in the conversation: "you always get the same plays from them. But, really, I don't have a complaint about that. I like to see a Neil Simon or an Alan Ayckbourn or a Tom Stoppard. They're intelligent voices and I like to hear what they're saying. But I do wish some of the regional theaters with secondary spaces, like ACT or Seattle Rep, would use them to show more experimental, cutting-edge work."

See that? In just a few sentences, he offers sharp criticisms, adds qualifiers, and pays everyone a compliment, from regional theaters that produce Neil Simon to under-produced experimental playwrights. For the theater world, that's Madeleine Albright-level diplomacy.

El Guindi's last play produced here was Back of the Throat, five years ago in the tiny little basement of Theater Schmeater. This weekend, one of his newish plays—Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes—opens in the tiny little basement of >Theater Schmeater.

It's exciting—anything could happen on that stage.