Theatre in Review: Lidless (Page 73 Productions/Walkerspace)

	Laith Nakli and Maha Chehlaoui. Photo: Richard Termine.

There's nothing more dismaying than watching a playwright get her hands on incendiary material, only to write the life right out of it. That's the case with Lidless; the author, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, sets out to probe the devastating moral fallout from the practice of torture at Guantanamo Bay; sadly, she puts considerable distance between us and the horror such a tale should inspire.

The specific aspect of this country's shameful 9/11 engagement with torture that gets Cowhig's attention is the use of female interrogators to sexually arouse and humiliate devout Muslim prisoners. (The official term, apparently, is "invasion of space by a female.") Alice, the protagonist, performs her assignment with gusto, appearing in front of an unseen subject - we hear his gasps on the sound system - striking sexual poses, masturbating herself, and revealing a bit of menstrual blood with her finger. (Taunting him, she says, "What's the matter, Mo? Is the great Islamic sword too weary to rise today?") In a sign of trouble to come, a sequence that should be deeply disturbing comes off as a playwright's desperate attempt to shock us -- partly, I think, because of a certain awkwardness in Danielle Skraastad's performance, and partly because, by introducing us to Alice at her worst, the playwright makes her repellent, thus damaging our interest in what happens next.

After this scene, set in 2004, the action flash forwards 15 years, when Alice is living in Minnesota. The hellion of the first scene is gone, replaced by a gentle florist with a hippie-ish husband and an adolescent daughter. In another awkward development, we're told that Alice took pills, which erased her wartime memories. (The author is extremely vague on this point.) This is why she doesn't recognize the man who enters her shop and begins speaking to her in such a familiar manner. He is Bashir, the victim from the first scene; having finally been released - he was, of course, innocent of terrorism - and been relocated to Canada, he has tracked Alice down. The reason: He will die without a liver transplant, and, since they share the same blood type, he figures she owes him one.

It's an understatement to say that Alice isn't on the same page as Bashir, and, as the action gets louder and more melodramatic, Cowhig keeps harping on the toxic effects of repressed memories. "We both know there was a time when you were a soldier and I was a junkie," says Lucas, Alice's husband, who has hidden his track marks under a series of elaborate tattoos. (Yes, the dialogue is that bald.) "You got out of prison, but you never found a new self," says Alice-- who really ought to talk-- to Bashir. "I know that when something excites you, your pupils dilate," he tells her - and there it is: Having been raped by Alice, he can't forget her. In fact, he's ready to get back down on all fours, screaming in terror, just to relive the bad old days.

It would take a masterful writer to probe this complicated psychosexual situation, and in Cowhig's inexpert handling, it comes off as crude and melodramatic. Anyway, there's more to come. To get Alice's attention, Bashir sends her, as a memento, his orange prison outfit, which ends up in the hands of Rhiannon, Alice's and Lucas' daughter. Rhiannon has terrible asthma when around her parents - the playwright is seriously insisting that Alice's repressions are making her daughter physically ill --but she can breathe freely when with Bashir-and a good thing, too, because Cowhig has a lulu of a twist up her sleeve about their relationship.

The trouble with Lidless is the author has a million symbolic ways of addressing her theme, but she can't make it come alive. She has carefully plotted her narrative road map, but failed to populate it with believable people. The before and after aspects of Alice never cohere, and Bashir's obsession with her is never made credible. Weirdly, Lucas thinks Alice should bare her bizarre history to Rhiannon, on the theory that a troubled 14-year-old girl ought to know about her mother's past as a torturer. Cowhig's crude attempts at humanizing her characters are of little help. Rhiannon, reading a document from Alice's past, asks, "Hey Dad, what's 'invasion of space by a female?'" "That's what happens when you get married," he cracks.

Tea Alagic's direction tends to underline the play's most portentous moments while doing little to add a sense of reality. The cast mostly seems ill at ease, although Laith Nakli has a couple of interestingly unsettling moments as Bashir, and Maha Chehlaoui has some good moments as Riva, Alice's best friend, who was born in Iraq, raised in Texas, and claims to have forgotten everything she ever knew about being a Muslim.

The stark production design places the action on Scott Bradley's largely white set with the stage bisected by a white wall, behind which one can see plenty of bloodstains. Tyler Micoleau's lighting emphasizes side angles and big shadows. Jessica Pabst's costumes are helpful in delineating the changes in the characters' lives. The sound design, by Daniel Kluger, who also composed the original score, is a barrage of creepy effects, including gasps, cries, and strange melodies.

Cowhig comes laden with grants and prizes and she may very well be a talented writer. But this material needs very special handling, with a sense of its inherent power. You can't fiddle with it, fancy it up, or borrow tricks from the Procter and Gamble playbook - if you do, you run the risk of coming off as exploitative. It's a test the author fails on all counts.--David Barbour