Atra Asdou Photo by Ricardo Adame

Asdou's primary mission certainly seems to be to entertain and make good on the latter part of the show's title. She absolutely succeeds in this. But the first act (which is the tighter and more enjoyable of the two) demonstrates that she is also invested in telling the intimate story of her own family while more broadly informing an audience that is depressingly likely to be uninformed about (or, at best, partially and vaguely aware of) Iraq's history as a nation.

The play's text and its conventions work beautifully in many ways. Asdou herself, credited as Actor 5 but really playing the show's narrator, The English Gentleman (TEG), shepherds the audience through the first quarter of the twentieth century in the region almost as a solo act. Even as this early material secures the audience's buy-in by establishing TEG as a clear (and clearly comedic) villain, Asdou introduces some not-so-fast complexity via gendered tensions regarding what resistance looks like and generational struggle. This manifests as Actors 1 and 2 (Susaan Jamshidi and Gloria Imseih Petrelli, respectively) and 3 and 4 (James Rana and Sina Pooresmaeil) serially morphing into their own parents, and thus history repeats itself not just politically, but also at the level of the family.

But as the play approaches Asdou's own (presumed) timeline, it falters to some extent. Certainly, it is almost inevitable that comedy improves as more and more temporal distance is added to the tragedy plus time equation. But even beyond this unavoidable baggage, the later parts of the play are somewhat muddled on both the domestic and political levels.

For example, although the younger female characters fight for the story to include the everyday lives of people (especially women) in the early 1970s, this comes at the end of the first act, which is already a touch overlong. The decision to insert the characters' rebellion late in the first act is complicated by the fact that the second act begins with a boxing match between the Ayatollah (Actor 1, Jamshidi) and Saddam Hussein (Actor 2, Petrelli) that slathers a broad layer of comedy over a rapid-fire, breezy history of the late twentieth century and somewhat muddies the waters of the generational handoffs among actors that enriched the fist act.

But, imbalances aside, the story is well and entertainingly told. Furthermore, it is effectively and pleasingly rendered. Omid Akbari's scenic design sets the action on a level below the audience, which surrounds the thrust on three sides. "Piers" of wooden planks provide a ground-level frame at stages left and right, and a deeper platform of planks sometimes travels downstage to expand the literal space the characters have to move within and other times recedes to force them into retreat upstage until they are flush with one of the staircases that lead off into the wings. The rear wall of the stage suggests crumbling brick and plaster with tall sliding doors in the center.

This upstage wall serves as the ideal backdrop for Michael Commendatore's projections, which range from static archival scenes to newspaper clippings to animated projections of characters eager to break onto the stage or weigh in on the action from a distance. These provide excellent support for both the comedic and informative elements of the the show as well as supporting the show's overall brisk pacing.

Christine A. Binder's lighting, the sound design by Christie Chiles Twillie, and the music composed by by Avi Amon also support the show's success. Binder and Twillie time booms and blooms of light precisely with the snap of TEG's fingers whenever he decides to bomb something on a whim. Amon's compositions blend humor, authenticity and pathos, whether they are simply providing background or accompanying a character as they sing. Finally, Mara Blumenfeld's costumes do very capable work visually distinguishing the characters across time periods while maintaining throughlines that emphasize the generational connections.

The performances are strong across the cast. Asdou's comedic chops are razor sharp, and she is disturbingly charming as TEG, which comes back to bite the audience on the ass every time the character reminds us that we might genuinely identify and be on the side of the Assyrian family, but we are certainly most comfortable with TEG being in control of the story.

As the author, Asdou is most invested in the family's women, and Jamshidi and Petrelli repay that investment many times over. Jamshidi, in particular, infuses the humor of her roles with a thread of weary mournfulness that lends poignancy to the performance without compromising the funny part. Petrelli's work is most successful when playing off other family members, and she deserves credit for carrying the weaker second act as well as she does and for inviting curiosity about how her performance would have sustained a greater investment in the idea of Assyrians taking control of their own story.

Rana and Pooresmaeil both embrace the role of the family's hapless men. They lean into what could be stereotypical about these roles and in so doing, deftly elevate the roles above those stereotypes. The two are especially impressive in their attentiveness to one another's performances. This makes the most of the convention of the younger characters inevitably morphing into their elders and expands the show's comedy space productively.

Iraq, but Funny runs through July 20, 2025, at The Joan and Paul Theatre at Water tower Water Works, 163 E. Pearson at Michigan Avenue, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, visit LookingglassTheatre.org.