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  • Guantanamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”
  • Ryan Claycomb
Guantanamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”. By Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo from spoken evidence. Directed by Serge Seiden. Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C. 02122005.

Documentary performance can be a powerful form of political theatre, creating dialogue out of monologue. When addressed to a specifically exigent audience, it can even more effectively build a dialogue on stage to provoke further discussion with those in attendance. Imagine The Laramie Projectplaying at the University of Wyoming, or Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992at the Mark Taper Forum. While consensus on such performance events is hardly imaginable, debate and dialogue in these cases are ripe for the theatrical catalyst. Such was the promise of Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's documentary drama, Guantanamo: "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom"when it appeared at Washington, DC's Studio Theatre in the fall of 2005, after runs in London as well as in New York and San Francisco. A mere month after the US Senate (only blocks away from Studio Theatre's space) overwhelmingly passed Senator John McCain's Defense Spending Initiative Amendment to limit US interrogation techniques, Guantanamo's Washington opening seemed a felicitous convergence of play, audience, and history—a unique opportunity for the dialogue and political activation that theatre at its most utopian can offer.

The play revolves around the case of four British Muslims, all detained at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Using testimony from family members and attorneys, public statements from officials, and letters and testimony from the detainees, the play deploys the story of these men to interrogate US detention practices in Cuba. From the opening moments of Studio's production of the British script, however, accusation and interrogation seemed likely to be the production's approach rather than dialogue and exchange. Director Serge Seiden staged the opening monologue of Lord Justice Johan van Zyl Steyn (Leo Erickson), of the UK Supreme Court of Appeal, front and center (a staging choice made for all lines taken from appearances by public officials). Steyn's opening salvo roundly condemns US detention tactics at Guantanamo as "ill-conceived," ultimately to be "judged at the bar of informed international opinion," rather than opening up tough ideological questions about the competing concerns of security and human rights. From these very first moments—with a British character in a British play leveling charges directly at an American audience (and a potentially activist audience at that) that the atrocities would be "judged" outside of the purview of that audience— Guantanamoproduced diatribe rather than dialogue.

The remainder of the first act, though less confrontational than the opening statement, saw much of the same one-sided discourse, with family members, attorneys, and detainees themselves rotating through exposition that led to the indefinite detention of these men. The monologues, delivered warmly and passionately, painted the detainees as innocents: one doing social work, another on tableeg(Islam's equivalent to missions), another bringing a business venture to impoverished Gambia. Never addressed directly are the cases of actual "combatants," who remain silent throughout the production, staged (and caged) in the background, sleeping, praying, marking time.

Although the production presented the audience with another perspective at the outset of the second act, this encouraged dialogue no more than earlier perspectives. Erickson, this time performing a spot-on impression of US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, returned to center stage, rehearsing one of the secretary's grandstanding press conferences. That his portrayal drew laughter testifies at once to the presence of an audience already skeptical of the secretary's politics, and simultaneously to the paucity of other available responses. The portrayal foreclosed more thoughtful response by reproducing the easy target of Rumsfeld's spin.

In contrast to the official doctrinaire, the detainees themselves created both the strongest pathos and the greatest cause for action. As the mentally deteriorating Moazzam Begg, Kaveh Haerian offered a harrowing portrait of the human elided by human rights abuses. And as the jittery, colloquial Ruhal Ahmed, Nafees Hamid presented a vivid image of youthful energy and naive optimism crushed by detention. Other detainees narrated their letters home, while still more figures lurked...

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