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NIGHTLIFE MAGAZINE REVIEW 4/10/09 "Waterboarding
Blues"
By Kurt Schneiderman
Presented by the Subversive Theatre Collective
At the Manny Fried Playhouse
Review by Willy Rogue Donaldson
Here we are in Iraq, where the colors are dun,
taupe, olive, and putty. We are with the American military, specifically
the Intelligence gathering unit of the Marines. We see Captain Sterling
frantically searching in a file cabinet for some paper he can't find. We
see him do this a couple of times more thru the play, adding to a sense of
urgency.
Next scene Colonel Carnovsky is informing Captain
Sterling that a Special Committee is coming from Stateside to investigate the
recent death of an Imam in U.S. Custody. He wants Sterling to flummox
this investigation as much as he can, because it is Sterling's screw up that
has led to this. At least the specifics of that case are off limits to
the Committee, they can only ask him about the procedures and methods used in
general. The three members of the committee have heard of waterboarding
and want to know if it has been used here.
The committee meetings are preceded by and punctuated
by Captain Sterling talking with his assistant, Lieutenant Thorne, and his
daughter Merissa by email. Sterling and Thorne get together for beers
off duty and talk about what has happened and what is going on. Sterling
converses with his daughter with his laptop, they are presented onstage at the
same table. His daughter talks at her laptop as she types or into space,
Sterling talks to his daughter as he types, he looks upon her with great love
and affectation, and stays involved in her life.
These scenes establish that Sterling is competent,
interesting, and loving with his daughter. He is not portrayed as a
straw caricature of a sadistic torturer, he is a military man doing his job
and he agrees with its purpose and means.
Through Sterling's answers to the committee's
questions, we learn a lot about intelligence gathering and treatment of
suspected terrorists. They want to know about waterboarding, and he
tells them. It is a procedure first used in the Spanish
Inquisition in the 1500s, and first authorized for use by the American
Military in 2002. He is not authorized to tell them about its use on any
specific prisoners, and the Committee leaves without learning if it had been
used on the dead Imam.
We find out it had and why Sterling thought it
necessary.
Here the play veers smoothly into Sci-fi.
The next prisoner brought in for questioning by Sterling carries a German
Luger, and speaks only Polish. We see Sterling's questioning
techniques in this baffling situation, he eventually gets out of the man that
he's trying to kill Hitler, and he thinks Sterling is Hitler. A second
prisoner gets pulled in, he thinks Sterling is Pontius
Pilate, he pleads for the life of Jesus in Aramaic. Sterling has
each put in solitary, to get them to confess to their real intentions.
He has seen many weird people in this war.
Later, a third prisoner is brought in, claiming to be
from the past. He knows who Sterling is and confronts him more
personally.
This all leads to a crisis and disaster for Sterling.
His daughter is being forced to move to another state by his estranged wife.
These strange prisoners are not confessing properly. And he finally
finds the paper in the file cabinet, it has the last words of the Imam on it.
It sounds like a passage from the Koran
or the Psalms.
Well, you'll just have to go and see what
happens when the hordes of the oppressed return to accuse.
The author, local playwright Kurt Schneiderman,
has devised a very agile plot, whereby he indicts both the Individual (Captain
Sterling) and the Corporate (The U.S. government and military under Bush and
Cheney) as guilty of torture and war
crimes, and uses people from history to do this, in particular a
soldier from the American
Revolutionary War. He has done this with excellent dialogue,
establishing differing characters and modalities. And he has stayed in
focus, we do not see any Iraqis, the drama is all within American and Western
European boundaries. Captain Sterling is not accused by Iraqis or
Muslims or an International Court, he is powerfully accused and brought down
by his own history, the founding beliefs and actions of our Revolutionary
War.
Schneiderman starts with the premise that the
U.S. war in Iraq is totally wrong as is its use of waterboarding.
He doesn't address the question of what should come next and how, wisely he
didn't try to address that. The ending is a bit unsettling in
retrospect, why should that quote be any more important than all the other
imprecations shouted, and how did the Imam say all that while drowning?
Or is he saying that because the Imam said that, it came true? You'll
have to sort the sci from the -fi for yourself.
Also, Captain Sterling doesn't seem to regret
his actions so much as he goes mad after them. You can't blame the guy,
but I think some sort of mea culpa insert would enrich the play and provide a
clearer ending.
The military people are all believably
military, in stance, language, and hierarchy. Captain Sterling is played
by Gordon Tashjian in a lustrous performance rich with nuance, confidence, and
stage ownership. Another star is born this fertile theater season in
Buffalo.
Lieutenant Thorne is well played by James Wild,
he sturdily props up Tashjian's Sterling. Travis Hedland does a fierce
job as a couple of the prisoners from the past.
And wow, Jessica Stuber wails out Melissa as a
foregone conclusion. Daddy, Help!! A number of smaller parts are
admirably filled by Dennis Keefe, Robert Hodas, and John Vines in duplicate
and triplicate roles.
A superior play by author Kurt Schneiderman unwinds
on a flycast line into the murk, he reels and plays it back in with taut
assurance.
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