NYT review: documentary play "Guantanamo," nightmare w/out hope and logic

[DeepModem Mom]

Richard Termine for The New York Times
Joris Stuyck, Aasif Mandvi, Robert Langdon Lloyd (standing) and Waleed Zuaiter in the documentary play "Guantánamo."

Nightmare Without Hope or Logic
By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: August 27, 2004

ON an anxious night, in a paranoid time in your life, you have probably had a dream that goes something like this. You are arrested by uniformed officers for a crime that is never specified but that you know you did not commit. There is no logic, no rationality at all that you can perceive, in the questions you are asked in the interrogations that follow. Which means there is no way to answer your persecutors in your defense. Which means there is no way out.

Such a scenario was immortalized by Franz Kafka in "The Trial" in the early 20th century, and it has since been the basis for countless cold-sweat action movies and films noirs. It is also the real-life situation described by Jamal al-Harith, Bisher al-Rawi, Moazzam Begg and Ruhel Ahmed. Their stories are told with a bafflement that shades into gut-level despair in "Guantánamo: `Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,' " the deeply moving documentary play that opened last night in a Culture Project production at the 45 Bleecker Street Theater.

First produced in London by the Tricycle Theater, which specializes in topical theater assembled from transcripts and interviews, this calmly condemning drama considers the plight of some of the British detainees at the prison established for suspected terrorists at the United States naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no question that "Guantánamo" is a partisan work, unlikely to lure delegates from the Republic National Convention. But it exerts an icy visceral charge that is never achieved by flashier agitprop satire like Tim Robbins's Bush-bashing "Embedded."

"Guantánamo," created "from spoken evidence" by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, arrives in New York just as the war crimes trials for the detainees in Guantánamo Bay are beginning, nearly three years after many of them were first sent there. Hence daily news accounts are available to reflect the obscuring cloud that still hovers over the lives of men whose exact status, under established international and military law, has never been made clear....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/theater/reviews/27GUAN.html