Why Torture is Wrong,
and the People Who Love Them
by Christopher Durang
Blurb:
Christopher Durang turns political humor upside down with this hilarious and provocative satire about America's “War on Terror." Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them tells the story of a young woman suddenly in crisis: Is her new husband, whom she married when drunk, a terrorist? Or just crazy? Or both? Is her father's hobby of butterfly collecting really a cover for his involvement in a shadow government? Don’t feel guilty about laughing hard at this new black comedy for an era of yellow, orange and red alerts.
Cast:
Felicity - Brooke Edwards
Zamir - Adam Flores
Luella - Kari Ely*
Leonard - Whit Reichert*
Rev. Mike - G.P. Hunsaker
Hildagarde - Jenn Bock
Voice/Narrator/Looney Tunes - Jordan Reinwald
Mentions/Awards/Kudos:
Critics' Reviews
Richard Greene - Talkin' Broadway
Aside from being a hilarious comedy, Christopher Durang's romantic misadventure also raises a startling question about America's uneasy relationship with the Middle East. Namely (as they used to say in the ladies' magazines) "can this marriage be saved?"
Brooke Edwards plays the modern American young woman (Felicity) who wakes up, shocked to find she's in bed with a stranger, possibly a terrorist—and, in fact, married to same. She and Adam Flores (Zamir) are funny in that well-worn "ethnic mismatch" sort of way, made new by Flores' rough-and-ready comedic approach. He's volatile and voluble, and she's the classic screwball dame nicely updated, standing on principle, and slipping on her own banana peels. It's magic.
The rest of the cast is full of surprises: Whit Reichert does an outstanding job as the ex-military dad, thoroughly subverting his many years on stage as a cuddly, sweet old teddy bear. As Leonard, he starts out like a typical Reichert plush toy, but develops startling new dimensions as his suspicions grow, regarding his new son-in-law. All those years I spent watching him play Santa Claus have finally paid off.
As the mom, the great Kari Eli is the forest and the stars and the ocean, merely in a supporting role. Dressed like Donna Reed, she bubbles with all the latest chatter about the Broadway stage, playing verbal tennis with a racket made by Ionesco. And then there's her horrifying, momentary break-down, as sudden as a summer storm, and stunning in its realization. Marty Stanberry directs, I should mention, and though I'll never really know how he did it, you can credit him for putting this cast together, and for the good time.
G.P. Hunsaker is excellent as the porn producer who may or may not be able to help Felicity and Zamir out of their troubles, and Jenn Bock is sweetly odd as an unlikely femme fatale, a former Texas debutante who can't keep her code names straight, or her lacey underwear from falling to her ankles. She manages to be endearing, nonetheless, but some of Mr. Durang's comedy, as those red panties prove, is a smidgen too broad.
Mostly, though, his script is a dazzling bit of nonsense mixed with startling social commentary, taking steady aim at the mind-set of the frantic, confabulating Fox News audience, and blowing it out of the water again and again. There's even a nod to screwball director Preston Sturges, with a reference to his great old movie The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, which ought to be good for an award of some kind.
And then there's that little matter of radical Islam. Zamir, himself, isn't a terrorist but (as they say) he'll do until a real one comes along: the diminutive Mr. Flores makes him smooth and reasonable at one moment, then choking on rage and astonishment the next, threatening all kinds of violence, though the average American woman would probably take him in one round (the average American woman, I am reliably told, is a size 14, though Ms. Edwards couldn't possibly be more than a four, and Mr. Flores is barely bantam-weight). Sure, Zamir may be an emotional terrorist, but is that really a crime?
Mr. Durang comes up with a good, unsettling way of approaching the issue of smoldering international grievances: early on, he lays the seeds of a narrator's voice in the comedy (Jordan Reinwald), and now and then Felicity can actually hear him speak. And, in these "in-and-out" moments from the narrative, a second rhythm develops, and she's finally able to master it—stopping the action and changing the course of the play herself. But each time she steers the narrative back to moderation, things veer right back to mayhem. But who knows? Maybe it's nothing a trip to a glittering little nightclub known as "Hooters" can't cure.
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Reviewed by Bob Wilcox - KDHX Radio
The title of Christopher Durang's play Why Torture Is Wrong and the People Who Love Them might lead one to suspect that the playwright wishes to comment about some current issues of ethics, morality, and politics. And one would not be wrong in suspecting that. In fact, a young man of indeterminate Middle Eastern appearance and speech is tortured, quite viciously, in the course of the play. When he answers the torturer truthfully, but not with the answer the torturer wants to hear, he is tortured even more viciously until he lies and gives the torturer the answer he wants. It now appears that something similar led our country into spilling considerable blood and money in Iraq, so the play does seem to comment on current events. And it concludes that we have no realistic way of escaping from the horrible mess we have made. But wouldn't it be lovely if we could.
The satire of governmental cruelty and stupidity clearly springs from Durang's strong feelings about these matters. But the satire is also a little obvious. The bad guys go through the motions without much reality, straw men and women we've seen before.
To me, the burning core of Durang's anger is focused, as it so often is in his plays, on the family, and in particular, the American family. Brooke Edwards, who seems to be making a speciality of playing women stuck in unfortunate marriages – and doing it very well – here plays Felicity, who discovers that she has, one drunk and drugged night, married Zamir, the young man of indeterminate Middle Eastern appearance and speech. Zamir can be sweet, but he also has a short fuse that explodes dangerously, and Adam Flores, who plays Zamir, gracefully combines innocence and menace with comic confusion.
Felicity wants out of this marriage, and she turns to her family for help. Being a Durang family, they provide none. Her father is a broad caricature of a far-right-wing anti-abortion, xenophobic gun nut, a member of a paranoid conspiracy somewhere to the right of the Tea Party. How Whit Reichert manages to give credible life to this simplistic caricature I don't know, but Reichert does, and he makes him both funny and terrifying.
Felicity's mother is another caricature, a ditzy 1950s housewife who gives costume designer Bonnie Kruger scope for some full-skirted fun. All the mother wants to do is talk about theatre, and Kari Ely, playing her, provides a hilarious history of the American musical, complete with dance. Like Reichert, Ely manages to make this caricature a credible character.
Jenn Bock gathers continuing laughs as a conspiratorial colleague of the father who is shortchanged in everything from intelligence to the elastic in her underwear. G.P. Hunsaker makes completely sincere and convincing the minister who married Felicity and Zamir and who makes porno movies on the side. Jordan Reinwald fills in where needed with several of the broadest comic sketches in the show.
Otis Sweezey ingeniously materializes the play's multiple locations with a few handsomely upholstered cubes and benches, with smart lighting by Sean Savoie. Director Marty Stanberry keeps playwright Durang's centrifugal forces reasonably well under control.
As always with Durang, Why Torture Is Wrong and the People Who Love Them takes us on a wild and funny ride. But I wish the half that is political satire were as sharp as the family satire half.
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Judy Newmark - St. Louis Post Dispatch
The story opens as a young couple (Brooke Edwards and Adam Flores) wake up in the morning. The seriously hung-over woman, Felicity, is horrified to learn that the night before, she married the total stranger next to her, Zamir. ("It's Irish," he tells her. "From my country. Ireland.") Secretive and hot-tempered, Zamir so frightens Felicity that she rushes home to her air-headed mom (Kari Ely) and gun-nut dad (Whit Reichart). Oddly enough, they're no help.
The show has a lot to recommend it — notably Ely's recap-in-dance of modern musical theater and Reichart's nasty little smile over whatever weapon happens to be in his hand. Director Marty Stanberry also draws smart performances from G.P. Hunsaker as a minister who makes porn movies, Jenn Bock as an inept spy and Jordan Reinwald as the emcee from "Cabaret," now employed at Hooters. Otis Sweezey's set — featuring a ... distinctive ... twist on "American Gothic" — adds to the loony atmosphere.
But Durang, who is one of the sloppiest writers around as well as one of the funniest, can't stay on track. (Curiously, this is exactly Felicity's complaint about her mother's conversation.) He has packed the comedy with his own tics (the quotes from other plays, the theatrical self-consciousness, the absurdist shtick). We kind of expect that. But "Torture," which had a brief run last year in New York, also comes off as a screed against the Bush administration. It's not as if the world is a shiny new place, but it feels a little dated now — or maybe just not as urgent as it needs to.