The house looks like a mess - we've begun to pack in earnest. Moving is an incubus. Twenty six years of stuff to go through. Decide what comes with us. What gets discarded. The boxes are beginning to get filled. We're piling them in various rooms. Or moving them toward the front of the house and stacking them there. Pumpkin is very upset. She knows something is happening and she's not happy about it. Come to think of it, I'm not happy either. Moving sucks. I don't know how some people move every few years. Impossible. Pumpkin is my cat, in case you're wondering.
Boxes, boxes - everywhere you look, boxes!
You're probably wondering why this post is called Guantanamo. Sometimes I just write these posts backwards.
The other night we saw a play: "Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." It came here from a run in the UK where it received raves. It's a documentary play. That is, like its predecessor, Exonerated, at the same theater -45 Bleecker - the dialog is the actual spoken or written words of either persons incarcerated at the infamous prison camp in Cuba or the words of their anguished family members.
Nightmarish are the terrible descriptions of being caught up in the throes of war, arrested and taken thousands of miles from family and home. Held in cages in the tropical heat of the Guantanamo without charges. Presumed guilty without trial or evidence. No explanations given. Years pass without a glimmer of hope. Suicide is the answer for dozens as hope gives out. The arrogant Rumsfeld is presented and questions are asked him about the Geneva accords and democracy and human rights which he rudely brushes aside.
If you have questions about the direction our country is headed, this play will only confirm them. I hope you get a chance to see this play before it closes in several weeks.
Here's part of the Times review by Ben Brantley:
On an anxious night, you have probably had a dream that goes something like this. You are arrested by uniformed officers for a crime that is never specified but that you know you did not commit. And there is no way for you to prove your innocence. Such a scenario was immortalized by Franz Kafka in "The Trial." It is also the real-life situation of Jamal al-Harith, Bisher al-Rawi, Mozzam Begg and Ruel Ahmed. Their stories are told with a bafflement that shades into gut-level despair in this deeply moving documentary play by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo. First produced in London by the Tricycle Theater, this calmly condemning drama considers the plights of some of the British detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no question that it is a partisan work. But it exerts an icy visceral charge that is never achieved by flashier agitprop satire, like Tim Robbins's Bush-bashing "Embedded." - Ben Brantley.
Tickets can be had at 212-307-4100.
Go see it!
Guantanamo at the 45 Bleecker Street theater.
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