NIRJAY Mahindru will not let Americans or Britons claim they live in a completely civilized society where torture is considered both immoral and illegal. His latest play ‘The Hot Zone’ explores the brutal practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ with a raw, searing wit. The convoluted term means the extraditing of terror suspects to countries where Americans can use torture without tainting the American conscience. Unsure about the play’s disturbing content, the Lyric Theater gave the play a week’s run. But the production sold out almost immediately, a testament to the urgent need for gritty, no-frills narrative in British theater.
The premise seems simple. Three British Asians, Iqbal, Waris Islam and Sonny, are among the countless innocent men captured in the hunt for terror suspects. They find themselves in an international detention center, where American and British agents toy with their sanity as they attempt to extract information the inmates cannot possibly have.
We’ve all seen the harrowing images from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison. And rendition, and all the atrocities that go with it, is an ongoing phenomena, but the issue has been dropped from the global media’s radar. Producers coordinating international news coverage say more pressing issues, like the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the earthquake in Pakistan pushed it off the news agenda. More cynical media experts believe channels are afraid of losing audiences to compassion fatigue.
Those channels need to consult Mahindru on how to hold viewers rapt. He appears to have perfected the art of jolting the audience out of their complacency to engage in his artistic exploration of the issue. The production’s treatment of Asian and Muslim identity in today’s paranoid, politicized climate is unflinching in its honesty. The audience feels more than understands the frustration, anger, despair, and confusion that grips the prisoners are they struggle to make sense of their situation. As the psychological torture seeps in, they wrestle with the realization that nothing they say can help them. The British agent wants confessions. She doesn’t care how tenuous their links are to actual terrorists. They were in Afghanistan at the time and are therefore guilty by association. It appears to be a logical conclusion to come to, despite the lack of evidence confirming the theory.
The American soldier, played to perfection by Robert Slade, is no better. At one point during an interrogation he holds a blade to Iqbal’s neck and asks for the third time, “Where would I get a surface-to-air missile in Wolverhampton?”
Iqbal, petrified by this point, makes up a place. He will say anything the agents want to hear if it helps get him out of detention.
Another exchange during the play addresses an issue westerns find particularly difficult to understand: A universal anger among Muslims over the unresolved Palestinian situation.
The American soldier challenges Waris’ support for the people of Palestine, telling him, “You’re not even from Palestine.”
Waris shouts back: “They’re my brothers. It’s the one word you can say to fellow Muslims and the anger is understood. Palestine. Look, the British ended up talking to the IRA sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to talk to us.”
While the dialogue keeps the debate surrounding identity politics simmering, the superb set design reinforces a sense of the sinister, and the inmates deliver a cohesive, moving performance.
In another meaningful exchange, Waris tells the American, “The West has a superiority complex that needs to be challenged.”
Mahindru is doing just that with this play.
“There is a patronizing notion that Asian theater still needs development,” he said. “The British establishment is happy as long as we Asians stick to the ‘sarees, samosas and smiles’ formula.
Bollywood is fine, where the Asian is funny and non-threatening, but they don’t want us to explore real issues. Those bigger issues are still for the righteous white people to deal with. We shouldn’t try to come out of our box.”
But Mahindru clambered out of that box and into the forefront of the fight to highlight real issues with “The Hot Zone.” His handling of practice of moving detainees from pillar to post has garnered the playwright instant accolades from the media, with Time Out declaring its critics’ number one choice of the week. The magazine rated Shakespearean production Richard II a distant number eight, in its top ten. Mahindru stared at the review in disbelief.
“I didn’t expect it,” he says, feeling the same elation he felt when his publicist Emma Schad called to say the play was sold out.
At a café in Hammersmith, we go over his reasons for writing “The Hot Zone,” which was inspired by a detailed dossier of interviews of inmates in Guantanamo Bay, given to Mahindru by a journalist at the Guardian newspaper.
From its inception he knew this was not a play aimed at ethnic audiences.
“It is somewhat redundant to preach to the converted,” he said, “I wanted to flag this paranoia in society that has made being Muslim a threat (in the West), and the gross injustice of rendition that continues unchallenged today.”
When asked about the dark humor underlying the dialogue, he says, “Humor is a powerful tool to contrast the horror, I wanted to show how ridiculous is it to perceive the average Muslim man as a terrorist. When we look at the Ku Klux Klan we don’t consider their beliefs or activities as representative of white society. So why the double standard?”
In the production, Mahindru also explores another dimension to the politics of prejudice.
“We are all a threat now. This is not a war against terrorists. It’s a war against Muslims and on a broader scale it’s a war against darkies.”
Another, rather serious, concern for Mahindru is the difficulty he had in getting theater houses to look at his work.
“British venues have been historically hostile to Asian work, and because Bollywood was the first commercially successful venture, that’s what they want. But then we are being filtered through the lens of exoticism, and we must move away from that,” he said. “British theater loves portraying Asian and Muslim men as deviant, or as wife-beaters, so we have never been given a nobility. We have not been allowed to have heroes.”
As a direct result, Asians don’t see the theater industry as a viable place to invest time, money, effort or education. But people like Mahindru, who have been in the game for some twenty years, are fighting to change that. And with productions like “The Hot Zone” selling out at a major venue like the Lyric Theater in London, it’s only a matter of time.
As for rendition, it continues to subject innocent people to atrocities we shudder at even imagining. Members of civilized society shake their heads in disbelief that such a barbaric practice could continue unchallenged. No one can understand America’s disregard for the UN Convention Against Torture’s ban on “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of terrorist suspects.
John Radsan, the former CIA lawyer, attempted to explain the practice in an interview with the New Yorker magazine.
“As a society, we haven’t figured out what the rough rules are yet,” he said. “There are hardly any rules for illegal enemy combatants. It’s the law of the jungle. And right now we happen to be the strongest animal.”
So much for civilized society.