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Lynndie England is dressed in an orange jump suit -- Prisoner Number 9J7327 -- with her stringy hair pulled back. She stares at the audience in the Culture Project’s theater on New York’s Bleecker Street. Several feet away, a British journalist attaches Post-its to a board. They are separated from each other by the length of the stage -- as well as by nationality, education, and class. Yet, as the audience learns during Peter Morris’s award-winning play, Guardians, which opens at the Culture Project on April 11, their lives are intertwined because of Abu Ghraib.
Guardians, which presents an insightful study of the intersection between the political and human dimensions of the torture scandal, allows us to see the issue from the perspective not of legal experts or of administration critics and apologists but of two individuals who have been swept up in its wake. The play presents two competing monologues: one in the voice of American Girl, or Lynndie England, played by Katherine Moenning; the other that of English Boy, played by Lee Pace, an Oxford-educated, tabloid journalist who has longed for a career in pornography but “settled” for the more respectable journalism, and who, living his life in service to the gods of ambition, has fabricated pictures of torture to advance his career.
These two people, personally implicated in U.S. torture policy, for better or worse, don’t quite get it -- not completely, at least -- and aren’t able to see much beyond their own lives. They are bit players in a larger drama that has revealed the cruel perversions and intentional deceit of a world that exists as much inside the corridors of power as within S&M parlors and the abusive lives of some American families in the rural south.
Interspersed in English Boy’s disdain for the war and his eye for the opportunism of the conflict are his confessions about his life as a gay man who enjoys belting his boyfriend and watching him physically abused by other gay men. The boyfriend, who’s known as Timmy, first appeals to English Boy because he has been through army training and has reveled in its practices: “You don’t think. Don’t think about work, paying the rent, anything. You just do what you’re told.” It dawns on English Boy: “He’s a submissive. It’s a match.” -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2759 bytes Desc: not available URL: <../attachments/20060412/592583e3/attachment.bin>