Sports Drama ‘American Fast’ Scores at Theater Alliance
Theater Alliance's taut drama "American Fast" captures the high-pressure life of a women's college basketball sensation.
Religious freedom doesn’t just mean having the choice to worship who and how you want, but also, crucially, having the choice not to practice any religion at all. Kareem Fahmy explores that choice with urgency in the sports drama American Fast, making its D.C. regional premiere in a charged Theater Alliance production directed by Reginald L. Douglas.
Khady Salama (Gigi Cammarato), the college basketball phenom at the center of American Fast, prefers to exercise her freedom to not care about religion and just play ball. Though she was raised Muslim by her Egyptian immigrant parents, she doesn’t practice Islam and doesn’t particularly identify with the faith. She identifies with winning on the court, where her team is on a roll to the NCAA tournament, a.k.a. March Madness.
Her hair braided into tight, sporty pigtails, Cammarato wields a controlled intensity as the hellbent-on-winning Khady. Not necessarily possessed of the stature or imposing physicality of an elite baller, she still exudes the assertive aura of a player prepared to hustle harder than anybody else.
Khady, we can be sure, cares more about being an NCAA champion than being a religious role model. The fact that March Madness coincides with the holy month of Ramadan won’t faze her.
But then, in the lead-up to the tournament, her devout mother Suzan (Raghad Makhlouf) crashes a press conference to announce that Khady indeed will honor their faith by fasting for Ramadan. The team’s savvy Coach (Renee Elizabeth Wilson) seizes the opportunity to hype Khady as potentially the first Muslim woman to lead her team to an NCAA championship.
Fahmy’s script shrewdly scopes out the current college sports landscape where media hype and outsized expectations fuel a star-making machine that both enriches and exploits young people like Khady. Laser-focused on her future success, she’s more than willing to play along, even if it means faking her faith.
As the tournament progresses, only her boyfriend Gabe (Travis Xavier) knows where she truly stands on religion. He’s much less confident, though, about where she stands on their relationship, with Xavier conveying the guy’s supportive, good nature shadowed by doubt and insecurity. The strain on both sides, at one point, spills out in a heated argument played with bracing honesty by Xavier and Cammarato.
The cast digs into those serious moments with gusto, maybe too much in Makhlouf’s case. The play allows relatively few outlets for humor. Much of the comedy is carried by Wilson’s Coach, who matches Khady in hubris and ambition, and to the credit of Wilson and costume designer Cidney Forkpah, is utterly credible as that combination of drill sergeant, sports psychologist, and TV televangelist that constitutes the showboating star coaches of today’s NCAA.
The actual gameplay is interpretive rather than realistic, presented as mini dance solos, choreographed by Siani Nicole, and performed adequately by Cammarato. While the observation on athletes’ balletic prowess registers, the dancing doesn’t produce much emotional effect, and the games, accompanied by play-by-play commentary, aren’t so suspenseful.
It’s the action off the court that’s most compelling and revealing about how, as Khady asserts, men in sports get to be hailed as gladiators and heroes, while women often are treated like a sideshow. But a woman, just as well as a man, can play hard and strive to win at all costs, for better and for worse, whatever her spiritual beliefs happen to be.
“I believe in myself,” Khady insists. That’s the American way.
American Fast (★★★☆☆) runs through April 13 at Theater Alliance, 340 Maple Dr. SW. Tickets are $40, with discounts for students, seniors, and military personnel. Call 202-241-2539, or visit www.theateralliance.com.
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