Theatre
Let's play master and servant
Published 02 October 2006
Eve Ensler turns to dialogue to tackle torture and Iraq in a patchy two-hander
The Treatment
Culture Project, 45 Bleecker Street, New York City
Eve Ensler's new stage show, The Treatment, is a startling departure from her best-known work, the feminist oddity that is The Vagina Monologues. For a start, it's a play, not an anecdotal polemic. There's no one shouting out rude words. There's a man in it. Furthermore, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by serving in Iraq, and by the US system. The system is represented by Woman (Portia), a uniformed medic who purports to be helping Man (Dylan McDermott) get over his psychological hang-ups. We believe she is a shrink. The twist is that she is nothing of the sort.
The play, directed by Leigh Silverman, is receiving its world première as part of the Impact festival at the Culture Project in New York City, an off-Broadway venue devoted to theatre "at the flashpoint between politics and culture". It's the perfect venue, as its politically aware audience will bring along all the necessary illustrations for this piece.
Ensler gives us the character of a soldier who has been party to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at a US-run compound. We all know what this consists of: pointed hoods, pyramids of naked human beings, leashes and electrical flexes. The Treatment, however, is less about the treatment of prisoners than the effect of the treatment on the tormenters.
McDermott gives a reasonably convincing portrayal of someone who is going to pieces with guilt. His horror concerns one man in particular, Prisoner 93817, a young boy who was afraid of the dark. But his shrink isn't particularly interested in his psychological condition. She wants to talk to him for a different reason. A buttoned-down combination of Condi Rice and Colin Powell, Woman is ruthless but aware of the moral code of war. Armed with a hidden tape recorder, she wants to trick her patient into telling her who was at the top: who gave the command to torture Prisoner 93817 by blindfolding him and (because there always has to be a toe-curling image of a sexual nature in these things) ramming a metal rod up his rectum. During a series of one-on-one sessions, she tries to get him to give her the information she needs.
The set, a room with strip lighting, alarm bells and office furniture, is suitably brutal. We feel sorry for Man, particularly when he turns up for a (highly unlikely) midnight session in a pair of pyjamas. Yes, it must have been awful kicking Iraqi prisoners to death, and the effect on the human psyche must be catastrophic. Yet we don't witness the collapse of a personality, and even if we did, we probably wouldn't care too much, given that Ensler has forgotten to embody a man with anything other than a stereotypical story (uncaring wife, erectile dysfunction). Her rather dated writing style ("Man", "Woman" - so very 1970s) doesn't help much. His interrogator addresses him only as "soldier", which, after about an hour, becomes infuriating. There's a bit of sexual teasing in a wholly incredible cuddly section on the sofa, but this is no searing analysis of the dark underbelly of the US establishment, whether from the vantage point of the grunt or that of the woman wielding the whip.
It's not a complete turkey, however, because both McDermott and Portia pull off this 80-minute piece of untempered dialogue with clarity and energy. Also, once you have accepted that neither character nor plot really flies, the questions raised are still intriguing. Who did carry the can after the Iraqi prisoner fiasco? Who, apart from Lynndie England, was punished? And are the torturers now the tortured? As Woman says to Man: "The people at the top don't have nightmares."
At the end of the night, there was a standing ovation. I know US audiences are big on those, but let's hope in this case it was provoked more by sympathy to the issues than by the power of the drama.
www.cultureproject.org
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