Reinventing the world
Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom and One Big Lie take aim at Bush's sham theater and real human rights abuses.

By Robert Avila

Dim Rummy: Donald Rumsfeld (Robert Langdon Lloyd) is portrayed with Stangelovian black humor in Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. Photo by Brian Michael Thomas.

It's hardly surprising. Those who rule rely heavily on drama – taxpayer-sponsored spectacles and blood-pumping story lines that flood and fixate the media. This, of course, ensures the bleary eye of the theoretical "informed citizen" stays anywhere but on the ball. And so, despite sinking opinion polls and rising bullshit meters, demagogues great and small continued last week to absent themselves, and distract as many others as possible, from the urgent human needs of the hour (or what's left of it) to take up the matter of a long-brain-dead Floridian. War, poverty, famine, global warming, health care – take your pick – these were trifles left to continue boiling over on the back burner and the back pages. That's not to mention (definitely not) the criminal catastrophes spawned by team Bush and its corporate sponsors, who quietly continue to draw in their profits.

On the assumption that those who wish to change the world must first honestly represent it, British journalist Victoria Brittain and South African-born British novelist Gillian Slovo have taken action, moving one of the most pressing issues of the day beyond the crowded margins of the frenzy-friendly news media and onto center stage. The West Coast premiere of their documentary drama, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which comes courtesy of Brava Theater Center and on the heels of successful London and New York runs, cobbles together the verbatim testimonies of four British detainees at the infamous island base, their family members and attorneys, and key public officials (including the egregious Donald Rumsfeld), all in a steadily absorbing face-to-face with the audience.

Journalism and art may have fundamentally little in common, but in opposing power both seek to expose the lies that shield it; on this score they come together fairly compellingly in Guantanamo. The play's deliberately measured unfolding (in interwoven monologues delivered by an expert San Francisco-New York cast, joined on opening night by actor and activist Danny Glover) contrasts starkly with the sensationalist tone of most corporate media. And yet, framed by the eight-by-eight cages and notorious orange jumpsuits of Bush's "detainees" (the preferred extralegal obfuscation for the more than 500 prisoners held without charges at the military's Cuban base), the stories patiently convey in simple human terms the devastating personal and social consequences of unchecked power. Indeed, since its London premiere more than a year ago, the ongoing revelations of pervasive torture, kidnapping, and other human rights abuses condoned at the highest levels of government – as well as the emerging picture of a worldwide network of secret U.S. detention centers – have only increased the significance of the precedent set at Guantanamo Bay.

Guantanamo's material is slightly uneven and not as well-rounded as it could be, and the play shares some of the weaknesses of the docudrama form, a subspecies of the "issue play." Nevertheless, its implicit strength and justification are straightforward: what the administration and media would obscure, Guantanamo puts starkly onstage; what the former demonizes, the latter restores to human dimensions. "We read, we watch, we hear about atrocities – we know what man's inhumanity to man consists of," says attorney Gareth Peirce (Julia Brothers), as if explaining the impetus of the play, "but we don't sufficiently register it.... How do ordinary words tell it?" It begins unassumingly but affectingly with the familial backstories provided by the brother of one detainee and the father of another (played, respectively, by the equally excellent Ramsey Faragallah and Harsh Nayyar). Ironically, as enjoyable as Rumsfeld's rabid, evasive, and muddled remarks to the press are here (especially as delivered, with a touch of Strangelovian black humor, by the fine Robert Langdon Lloyd), the sober, life-size context makes him almost seem like agitprop's representative villain, a cipher, rather than the deeply culpable, dangerous man he is.

Perhaps the most striking message to emerge from Guantanamo is about language, not just as a metaphoric battlefield but also as a central component of the organized crime that goes on under the rubrics of foreign policy and national security. When a rash of attempted suicides among Guantanamo detainees made for bad publicity, legal advocate Clive Smith (Joris Stuyck) notes, the military merely classified them under a new term, and they miraculously appeared to cease. Elsewhere, detainee Jamal al-Harith (Dion Graham) recounts the harmless-sounding euphemisms that masked the military's brutal interrogation sessions: "They use words, but there's evil behind it, man. There's malice." There's also an unprecedented expansion of state power, according to attorney Greg Powell (Steven Crossley), who dwells ominously on the totalitarian implications of the legal precedents set by the extralegal actions of the United States and United Kingdom under the cover of a war on terror. Such precedents "slightly reinvent the world," Powell warns, so that "effectively you have this fantastic level of social control by some individuals inside the community."

An almost incidental but telling expression of that level of social control is the enormous security cordon extending for miles around George W. wherever he travels, bringing normal life and activity to a halt in all directions, clearing from his sight anything but the preapproved images and supporters, making temporary ghost towns of large swaths of bustling modern cities, and so on. It must make Bush (already styled God's right-hand man) feel a bit like a god himself.

Call it a gray area, one explored by another play with truth-telling and the problem of power at its core. One Big Lie, a word-dazzled, politically savvy new musical by Liz Duffy Adams and composer David Rhodes, couldn't be further from docudrama – its characters include a set of extravagant, dangerously bored gods and three mortal but perennially reincarnated siblings menaced across millennia by their heartless supernatural superiors. Nonetheless many of Guantanamo's themes (including, obliquely, Guantanamo Bay itself) resonate here in a new, expansive key. A cleverly satirical if occasionally sluggish take on the idealization and reverence for power in the minds of its victims, One Big Lie is a deadly serious frolic with a wary eye on the immediate future.

Adroitly helmed by Rebecca Novick, artistic director of Crowded Fire (the play's coproducer with Playwrights Foundation), One Big Lie comes off as the respectable Guantanamo's offbeat anarchist cousin. Set on a mostly bare, tiered stage under a mock proscenium arch, the story traverses three time periods, opening on a mythical pastoral age where two sisters and their brother toil in their field and romp in the nearby woods, making ideal game for sporting gods.

The gods take various forms over time, but their actions remain the same: they take, invade, destroy. As the succinctly named Pow (Paul Lancour) pulls his human quarry around on a leash, a brutal image of rape and conquest shatters the whimsy of the surrounding scenes. In the language and metaphor of a patriarchal culture, this would seem the operative gendered image of totalitarian control. Indeed, as a theatrical transposition, it is as literal and symbolic as the image it replaces: Pfc. Lynndie England's leashing of a naked Iraqi man in the dungeons of Abu Ghraib, a now iconic photo that starkly if inadvertently revealed the true meaning of Bush's war.

In fact, the fight over the late Terri Schiavo's body did mean something, for all the political cover it offered as mere distraction. Like Adams's rapacious gods, enjoying and demanding absolute control over human beings, those forces now simultaneously waging war and "valuing" life are more consistent than one might first admit.

The precedent set by Guantanamo and indefinite detentions – which places the U.S. executive branch above the law, and the liberty of every person at the president's pleasure – hasn't gone unchallenged. The producers of Guantanamo have been copromoting their efforts with the civil rights organizations – notably the Center for Constitutional Rights (the first to stand up to the Bush power grab) – that have litigated back a few steps the Bush administration's bold autocratic leap forward. Not that anyone thinks the fight is anywhere near over. 'Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' runs through April 24. Wed.-Sun., 8 p.m. (also Sun., 3 p.m.), Brava Theater Center, 2789 24th St., S.F. $20-$65. (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org. 'One Big Lie' runs through April 16. Thurs.-Sat. and Sun/10, 8 p.m., Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, S.F. $15-$25. (415) 675-5995, www.crowdedfire.org.