Brilliant and humane playwright Karen Malpede has produced another play that grabs this country by the lapels, shakes it, caresses its cheek, and kicks its ass.  The play is called “Another Life” and the life it leaves me thinking about is the life of our dreams.

The play is not so much a national nightmare or a national fantasy as a surreal reproduction of the mixture of horrors and hopes that most dreaming is: the most gruesome and graphic and taboo of our collective fears without exactly the fear itself, the deepest of longings and desires in immediate and mundane form but recognizable as revelations upon awakened reflection.

I’ve read “Another Life” as military commissions have just been officially reinstated and the Pentagon has just defended forcing a lawlessly imprisoned young man to stand naked for review each day.  The broken poetic dialogue of the half dozen characters of “Another Life” draw me in as they present  what a decade ago would have been sick ravings and are today the understandable concerns lurking in the shadows of all of our minds: torture, terrorism, sadism, racism and religious bigotry, the sufferings of the victims and of the victimizers, mistaken identities, exposure, surveillance, humiliation.  Scene 1 ends with these words, which make perfect sense when arrived at:

“And, now, he’s going to talk.  No more of this.  Mr. Nice guy.  Picked her up.  We know who you are.  We know what you did.  You want to see your wife, again, your kids.  You want your wife raped, just like that, blood on the floor, you want to watch.  You want your daughter deflowered.  You want your virgins in the sky.  We’ll have your eyeballs in highballs.  We’ll have your cock in plastic wrap.  A stick up your arse.  The gloves are coming off.  I’ll crush your balls in the palm of my hands.  Eat them like olives.  You’ll give me what I need.  Believe me.  You’ll tell us what we want to know.”

This is a scene in a home, where foreign relations and family relations have merged, and things Dick Cheney or John Yoo once said have seeped into the air.  An old man has become the Global War of Terrorism and Erik Prince and Grandpa, while a young man is all things decent in public life going bad and possibly recovering and bearing a strong resemblance to Ali Soufan, and a young woman is the U.S. public becoming an accomplice and a whistleblower as well as a widow and a lover.  Her tragic loss, the loss of 9-11, is depicted in scenes in which she speaks with her dead fiancé.

And as one reads this it begins to sink in that every single person complicit in and resisting the horrors of our age has personal pleasures and goals and losses and deep fears.  Meanwhile a man in the coffee shop where I’m reading is ignoring a table full of toddlers, one of whom is screaming in fury, so that he can persuade a waitress who probably doesn’t care that the United States needs to send the Marines into Libya.

A torture victim in “Another Life” mutates into an “illegal” in the Homeland and from there into a slave, traveling back through the history it seems of our national criminal record.  Then real, named torture victims enter the drama: al Libi, perfectly named for the alibi he provides warmakers; Zubaydah; and Emad Khudayir Shahuth Al-Janabi.  The dead fiance remains in the September 10th mentality, the straightman to our national mental health crisis.  And the play looks both backward and forward, like a dream, as the men in this coffee shop talk a little too loudly about the failure of Alcoholics Anonymous to help them find jobs, and I wander outside.

And there’s Thomas Jefferson staring at me from a statue, a guy who sent war ships to Tripoli when not enslaving human beings at his house on that hill, promoting the genocide of the native people of North America, or fighting wars for democracy.  And there’s not a single thing a president could do today that anyone would punish him for, the accountability groups of the Bad Illiterate President Era are down to about 8 active members nationwide, and Chris Hedges says we’re all Easter Island on a course for catastrophe.  But that’s only if we fail to change course.  And if feeling in our bones the course we are on will help us change it, we can be grateful that Karen Malpede keeps writing.

By David Swanson

I wrote a review of Karen Malpede’s new play "Prophecy" when I had only read but not yet seen it. Karen read the review and invited me to lead the first in a series of talk-back discussions following performances in New York, and I did so on Wednesday. For that incredible privilege I’m glad I wrote that early review, but I’m sorry it was so insufficient as an attempt to convey the intensity of the phenomenon that is "Prophecy."

"Prophecy" should certainly be read (and the book, available in the UK, will soon be published in the US), but it must be seen. This play has, in fact, received the highest praise everywhere it’s been presented in this country and the UK, and has nonetheless been refused by the theaters that have praised it. The UK run, and success there, was necessary before any theater in New York would permit a performance, and now a run of three weeks has been selling out — yet extending the run is forbidden. Why? I heard nothing but passionate praise and gratitude from members of the audience on Wednesday. When a bunch of us went out afterwards, the conversation centered on how we could get the play more widely seen and how that could change our world.

But we were a self-selected group of people who had chosen to attend a performance that we knew was anti-war. We were not just representatives of that majority of Americans who tell pollsters they want the current wars ended. We were people who feel compelled to work for that end. Others who have seen the play and praised it have not been peace activists, and they have not stood up for an artistic masterpiece in the face of what they’ve claimed have been angry Emails. You see, the play, while it focuses on the lives of eight people, inevitably leaves you with the understanding that there is something horribly and outrageously evil about U.S. foreign policy, and even worse: Israeli foreign policy.

The play is set in the early fall of 2006 in New York City, but includes flashbacks to earlier decades, and also includes a scene in which one character is speaking by telephone from Beirut. The eight characters are played by five actors, with one young woman masterfully playing three very different roles. The play reveals itself slowly, in the sense that later scenes give earlier scenes new meaning. While I found the performance overwhelmingly powerful despite (or even because of) having read the script, I don’t think I should impose any knowledge on you that could interfere with your seeing the play fresh.

So let me just say this: Multiple wars explode into the characters lives from the past, present, and future. The lives and relationships are not otherwise untroubled (knowing the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar enriches the play), but it is impossible to separate the characters’ personal troubles from the wars that have impacted them. Among the characters are victims, participants, opponents, and avoiders of war, and they come from a variety of backgrounds. You are likely to relate to at least some of them in the sense of having met people and known people they resemble. But a prominent theme in the play is the need to look at things from the other people’s points of view. And this is contrasted subtly with the dehumanization of enemies that takes place in war.

It’s easy to ask how we would approach the occupation of Afghanistan or Iraq if we were the ones occupied. Would we want the occupation ended slowly and "responsibly" if we were the occupied instead of the occupiers? It’s easy to question the New York Times story printed on Wednesday’s front page that explained how humanitarian aid workers are something "Israel sees as a serious and growing threat." It is not easy to feel the soul-crushing pain our short-sightedness inflicts on people we feel we know and care for.

Tragedy often involves prophecy and the playing out of events understood to be inevitable, but of course war — even if it seems to repeat itself each generation — is something we could very easily put an end to. That fact makes it all the more horrifying to realize that we can with great certainty prophesy the creation of hundreds of thousands of unnecessarily traumatized lives if we do not act. "Prophecy" is a play that shows us and pulls us into what we need to know, and yet leaves us with a crystal clear understanding that we are not expected to merely feel worse about what we are allowing to occur. Our responsibility is to render false the prophecy that foresees ongoing war forever and always.

One tool we have at our disposal is "Prophecy." We need to find a way to have this play performed, including in Washington, D.C., with congress members invited to attend. There are no sound bytes or caricatures here for them to work with, only people struggling to survive the policies so routinely enacted and re-enacted by our representatives.