NIGHTLIFE MAGAZINE REVIEW 9/22/08'Palace
of the End'
By
Willy Rogue Donaldson NIGHTLIFE MAGAZINE THEATRE CRITIC
This is a superlative first production in the new Manny Fried Playhouse,
it presents three monologues about Iraq:
a U.S. soldier made infamous at Abu Grabh, a British scientist, and a member
of the Communist Party in Baghdad
before the fall of Saddam Hussein. The writing is imaginative, the
performances most compelling.
Three actors are presented in a line-up across the wide stage against a gray
background, stark, linked, but isolated by distance and lighting for each
monologue. Each is based on a real person, Thompson's created words and
the inner life for them has provoked some controversy in the larger world in
which they were known.
In the theater world, they speak truth to power. And they show the
reactions to confrontation with powerful expectation and force: 1.
Confusion, 2. Regret and Correction, 3. Courage.
Kelly M. Beuth plays "Soldier", a woman who participated
in the torture of prisoners as she was instructed, as she was expected to do.
She is astounded at the picture of herself she sees when she faces the
condemnation of the outside world.
She thought she would be applauded by the American public, just as she was
by her military cohorts, she goes into her own history to show how her
attitudes and behavior developed, how cruelty perpetuated among one's peers
can curl around an individual and come back at the world intensified,
normalized. She is loud, crude, pregnant, demanding, indignant, lower
lip starting to tremble. Beuth steps her from the pages to reality.
Lawrence Rowswell plays Dr.
David Kelly, a scientist in Great
Britain who originally corroborated the scientific evidence for the
possible development of atomic weaponry in Iraq. He painfully describes
his own cowardice in not resisting the pressures of the government and the
military to urge his evidence, to ignore other possible interpretations, and
his late denunciation of his government and his own participation in the
justification of the war. He leads us through his mindset to his
determination to commit suicide, and to his request that we witness this for
him. A long but powerfully written mea culpa, Rowswell takes us
through this with fine nuanced transitions and affecting restraint.
Dana Block plays Nehrjas Al Saffarh, a woman married to the leader of the
Communist Party in Iraq. She is acutely aware of the importance of being
an inspiration to others in the Party after her husband goes into hiding after
Saddam Hussein comes to power.
The Communists are hunted down and tortured like all the other minority
political oppositions, she claims this communism was not like the Russian or
Chinese Communists, it was simply all the intellectuals in the country.
She also points out that it was the American C.I.A. who trained the military
who carried out the torture, as they did around the world, notably in South
America. And that these people were the ones you might suspect
they would be, those who didn't do well at school, who maimed small animals,
were cruel in their youth.
She tells her story standing on her balcony facing a date tree. This
tree is a source of beauty for her, becomes her truth and her comfort in the
times that follow her captivity. She tells of her arrest and torture for
the whereabouts of her husband, of this happening to others in her family,
including her 8 year old son.
It is a very painful story. Dana Block tells it for her with a great
sorrow, yet also a terrible dignity. And of her death in the initial
bombing of Baghdad under the first
President Bush.
This monologue, beautifully shaped and burnished by Block, leaves a
spreading hush at its end, like a great rip in the fabric of the known world.
Brilliant and moving theatre, a room cooled with a spinning fan, how many
different kinds of date trees, how many daffodils. Directed by Virginia
Brannon.
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