WIFE OF HEADLESS MAN INVESTIGATES HER OWN DISAPPEARANCE Comes to the Annex Theatre

Annex Theatre continues Season 39 with the world premiere of Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance, written by Yussef El Guindi and directed by Lucien Oberleitner, running March 27–April 11, 2026. Preview performance March 26. Tickets are now available.

After publishing a series of critical articles about a powerful tech billionaire, reporter Salwa experiences a disorienting lapse in time following an interview with him. How did she end up in a hotel room after dining at a restaurant? Was she drugged? And why, when she returns home, does her husband appear fully alive, fully functioning… and entirely headless?

Blending sharp comedy with destabilizing surrealism, this new dark comedy vacillates from corporate power and surveillance to the intimate straining of a marriage. Beneath its mystery, but also spurred on by the inhuman darkness lurking within it, lies a human tale: a U.S.-born Middle Eastern journalist and her immigrant husband confronting stalled ambition, shifting identity, and the quiet erosion of the connection that once brought them together from across space and time. The play asks what it costs to follow one's drive, one's dreams, the nebulous “American dream”, and what is truly gained when you follow that dream beyond the heavens? How much of yourself do you lose trying to reach for it? Your memory? Your safety? Your head? Your heart?

In keeping with the story at its core, the production brings together a cast and creative team that includes many artists with personal connections to immigrant journeys, cultural displacement, and cross-border identities, grounding the play’s heightened reality in lived experience. This play was selected through Annex Theatre’s collective Request for Proposal process as a work we believed could fully engage our storytelling and artistic spirit, its layered structure offering deeply fulfilling creative challenges. Beneath its intimate portrait of a marriage, it speaks directly to our present moment: the expanding reach of the tech industry into every corner of daily life, the short-sighted bargain of surveillance and data-for-access, and the precarious humanity of immigrants navigating systems that can so easily render them disposable. In its intersection of corporate power and immigrant vulnerability the play felt urgent, immediate, and impossible for us to ignore.

Directing this piece is Annex Theatre’s current Artistic Director, Lucien Oberleitner (they/them). Lucien has been developing new work in Seattle for twelve years. Outside of being a Staff & Company member of Annex, they are a Teaching Artist with Freehold's Engaged Theatre Residency at WCCW and a proud alum of Parley Productions. They have had the pleasure of working in many capacities; as a performer, director, choreographer, dancer, writer, and producer. Lucien is a political artist, focusing on original work that undermines systems of oppression.