Why torture is wrong, and the people who love them

I saw this play at the public theatre today and found it relevant and distressing at the same time.

Don’t feel guilty about laughing so hard at “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” Christopher Durang’s hilarious and disturbing new comedy about all-American violence. Though it tackles and practically tickles to death subjects that are sensitive to the point of rawness just now, the production, which opened on Monday night at the Public Theater, has a healthier heart and conscience than many a more pious play.


"Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them," with Laura Benanti and Amir Arison, opened on Monday at the Public Theater.
It’s just that Mr. Durang chooses to wear his morality not as a minister’s black robe but as a jester’s crazy motley. There are occasions when this is perfectly correct attire for playwrights of good faith, especially when they’re visiting matters that have started to seem too serious to be taken seriously. Like guns in the hands of angry and irrational people, and torture as a first-resort means of interrogation, and raging paranoia as an accepted worldview.

Scary is funny this season in the New York theater. Mr. Durang’s work (henceforth to be referred to as “Torture,” though watching it is not) is the latest offering in a trifecta of aggressively dark comedies that have opened in recent weeks, shows that draw gasping laughs from grim topics.

Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” considers the loneliness in the everyman-for-himself savagery that lurks beneath civilized relationships, while the Broadway revival of Eugène Ionesco’s “Exit the King” is about people’s refusal to face their own deaths.

“Torture,” though, moves beyond brooding abstractions to the specifics of its title activity — with graphic onstage demonstrations — and of the idea of trigger-happiness as a conditioned reflex in masculine culture. Given recent accounts of prisoners tortured in the C.I.A. detention program and the mass killing by a gunman at an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y., you might think no sensible theatergoer would want to attend a play in which a young man is tied to a chair to be beaten bloody and a leading character points a rifle at the audience, musing on spraying it with bullets.

Yet “Torture,” directed with just the right balance of crudeness and finesse by Nicholas Martin, turns such scenes into occasions for one of the most releasing forms of laughter: the kind that encourages the spewing of the anger, fear and helpless indignation that build up in anyone who still reads or watches serious world news.

Little spurts of such laughter are provided by mock-news shows and sketch satire on television. But Mr. Durang, bless his heart, believes that no other art form can offer the communal catharsis — and consolation — that theater does, a point he makes quite directly (between bouts of violence) in “Torture.”

This is the playwright, after all, who turned his own unhappy childhood into works (“Baby With the Bathwater,” “The Marriage of Bette and Boo”) that became templates for that increasingly fashionable genre, the comedy of domestic dysfunction. With the blissfully grisly “Betty’s Summer Vacation” (1999, also directed by Mr. Martin), he broadened his focus to explore (and condemn) the American appetite for entertainment at all costs.

Like “Betty’s” (which until now I regarded as Mr. Durang’s funniest play), “Torture” places at its center a sensible-seeming young woman to whom the sort of things happen that more typically befall virginal heroines of splatter movies. In the play’s first scene the hopefully named Felicity (Laura Benanti, in a lovely anchoring performance) wakes up in a cheap hotel room to learn that she has married a quick-tempered chap named Zamir (Amir Arison), who says he is Irish and is given to pronouncements like, “It’s a flaw in my character, but all the women in my family are dead.”

You’re no doubt familiar with this situation. (I mean, from movies and television, not from personal experience.) And for the play’s first few minutes, I feared it might turn into a morning-after sitcom. Then again, there are all those unsettling references to Zamir’s predilection for violence, date-rape drugs and mysterious midnight errands involving money hidden under rocks.

Imagine the relief when the action switches to the cozy New Jersey living room of Felicity’s mother, Luella (Kristine Nielsen), first seen raptly contemplating a flower arrangement. Of course that relief evaporates when Felicity’s dad, Leonard (Richard Poe, deliciously channeling George C. Scott in highest dudgeon), strides in to explain that that burning smell is not French toast, but some squirrels he incinerated with a napalm blaster. He then puts a gun to the head of Zamir, who responds by threatening to use his cellphone to make the whole house explode.

That takes us only to Scene 2, but I won’t describe the plot any further. Suffice it to say that things get really crazy from then on, with references to a shadow government and ominous Supreme Court rulings; a description of the incapacitated Terri Schiavo as the ideal wife; a prim woman in a Republican red suit walking with her panties around her ankles; and people using code names taken from Looney Toons characters. I can honestly say I know of no other show in which a man (played by a priceless David Aaron Baker) gleefully yells, “Bweak da fingah. Bweak da fingah,” in the voice of Elmer Fudd.

This is all carried out in the highest, giddiest style imaginable, what with David Korins’s marvelous revolving set functioning as a whirligig fun house for this fang-toothed farce. (Best set-inspired moment: when Felicity discovers her father’s secret sanctuary.)

And Mr. Martin has drawn precise, Marx Brothers-esque anarchy from his spot-on ensemble, which also includes John Pankow (as a pornography-making minister), Audrie Neenan (as the woman with the panty problem) and a multifarious Mr. Baker.

But within the theatrical fun and games is the subliminal, creepy buzz generated by an addiction to violence that transcends cultures but is apparently coded in the male chromosome. Mr. Durang lets neither American nor Arabic men off the hook for their bone-breaking problem-solving methods and their treatment of their women. No wonder that Luella — played by Ms. Nielsen, a longtime Durang muse, with the marvelously addled air of a thwarted actress in retreat from reality — goes to the theater in hopes of learning “what normal is.”

Felicity says she has no use for the theater, which after all has become so expensive and so darn Anglo-Irish. (There are jokes about people committing suicide during plays by Tom Stoppard and Brian Friel.) But Felicity is oh, so wrong. The theater is what lets a playwright like Mr. Durang heighten absurd, vicious human behavior into detoxifying Absurdity and — for a few silly, happy moments — create an artificial world in which all wrongs are righted, and mutually respectful couples go dancing in the dark without crashing.

WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM

By Christopher Durang; directed by Nicholas Martin; sets by David Korins; costumes by Gabriel Berry; lighting by Ben Stanton; music by Mark Bennett; sound by Drew Levy; production stage manager, Stephen M. Kaus; general manager, Andrea Nellis; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Jenny Gersten; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Andrew D. Hamingson, executive director. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555. Through April 26. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Amir Arison (Zamir), David Aaron Baker (Voice), Laura Benanti (Felicity), Audrie Neenan (Hildegarde), Kristine Nielsen (Luella), John Pankow (Reverend Mike) and Richard Poe (Leonard).

Here is another review.
During the last couple of weeks, the actress Kristine Nielsen has noticed a change in the audiences at Christopher Durang’s satirical new play, “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” especially in the second act, when blood appears on the T-shirt of a suspected terrorist and on the blouse of one of his comically daffy interrogators.

In a relatively rare confluence of theater and politics, the critically lauded production of “Torture” opened nine days before the Justice Department, on April 15, made public four memos that described brutal interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration. The furor over those methods, which included waterboarding, has only intensified during the run of the play (which ends on May 10), as President Obama, former Vice President Dick Cheney and others in Washington have debated whether it is necessary to hold public hearings and possibly prosecute those involved in the interrogations.

For Mr. Durang, who has been writing satires of American society for three decades — he took on religion in “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” in 1979 and suicide in “Miss Witherspoon” in 2005 — the unusually timely resonance of his latest work has come as a kind of relief. He has been so angry at the Bush administration for so long, he said, that he is thrilled to see the issue of torture in the spotlight, onstage and off.

“I myself feel that the play is a catharsis, a comic catharsis, for the last eight years,” Mr. Durang said in an interview this week. “What’s particularly strange and unusual, though, is the play running when all of a sudden all these torture memos are released and discussed. It feels like I wrote some of these scenes yesterday.”

Mr. Durang did not set out to write about torture. In 2007, as an exercise for a class he teaches at Juilliard, he wrote what would become the first scene of the play: a woman named Felicity (now played by Laura Benanti) wakes up in bed with a man named Zamir (Amir Arison), whom she doesn’t remember, yet whom she married the night before (and who, in addition, drops hints that he might be a terrorist). In the next scene Felicity introduces Zamir to her parents, Luella and Leonard (Richard Poe). Tensions soon flare between Zamir and Leonard, who is a deeply emotional political conservative.

“At first my thought was to get into the red state-blue state stuff between these two men, who are both so hot-headed and have strongly held feelings,” Mr. Durang said.

“But as I was writing — and I don’t write with an outline — I had this idea of Leonard offstage in a private room that supposedly contains his ‘butterfly collection,’ a room he doesn’t let anyone else see, and then I started thinking about secrets and deception, and my thoughts about the play started to shift,” he continued.

The interview with Mr. Durang was conducted in the so-called butterfly room on the stage of the Public — a room that, as the play reveals, is actually an attic torture chamber full of guns, swords and grenades, and where Leonard and his ally Hildegarde (Audrie Neenan) end up interrogating Zamir.

Before that scene, Leonard and Hildegarde huddle in the butterfly room to discuss how they will handle Zamir, an exchange that Mr. Durang says was inspired by a now-infamous interrogation memo written by John Yoo, an official in the Justice Department during the Bush presidency.

LEONARD: We’ll stick to John Yoo’s torture definition very closely.

HILDEGARDE: I’ve forgotten what that is.

LEONARD: How could you forget such a significant thing? John Yoo from the Justice Department wrote a torture memo saying that it isn’t torture unless it causes organ failure. And even if it does that, as long as the president says the words “war on terror,” it’s A-O.K.

HILDEGARDE: Oh that’s right. He’s such a brilliant lawyer, John Yoo, and how I love the Federalist Society.

The archness of this dialogue — and the absurdity of other scenes featuring Mr. Durang’s two torturers and their role in a “shadow government” — closely reflect the playwright’s real political sensibilities and suspicions. In an hourlong interview he railed against Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Yoo and others at great length, though none of his characters were based on them.

“Once I came upon the shadow government idea for the play, I really did think of Cheney, because he was fairly secretive,” Mr. Durang said. “But I also was choosing not to base the people on Bush and Cheney, because I thought that would tie me down too much.”

Striking a balance between the satire in Mr. Durang’s play and the gravity of its subject matter fell chiefly to the production’s director, Nicholas Martin. He said that he and his actors and designers had lengthy conversations about “treading a very careful line to maintain the play’s humor” while also using clothing, props, lighting and — in selected ways — fake blood.

“One particularly important point was about which clothing garments would be bloody, and how bloody they would be,” Mr. Martin said. “I initially thought there should be less blood on the clothes, but that really would have diluted the truth of what was happening to Zamir. And when the father produces a baggie containing three human fingers and an ear, well — we knew we couldn’t stint on the blood.”

The play’s unusual ending — in which Felicity stops the action onstage and suggests changing all that has come before, because the torture of Zamir pains her — was meant by Mr. Durang to comfort the audience. But Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, offered another interpretation.

“Someone said to me that the play’s ending captures our desire to undo the last eight years,” Mr. Eustis said. “I do think Chris was tapping into a longing in this country that is very deep to redo things, to say, ‘Torture is not who we are.’ ”