Sex, Lies, & Abu Ghraib: Guardians @ ToJ

The relationship between Standley's character and Schutz's becomes more obvious as the play progresses. Schutz's character becomes an object lesson in the other character's unfolding theory of porn, an unwitting pawn dragged, courtesy of a porn-obsessed lover, through one porno and into a bigger one.

We don't want to give the wrong impression, though—Morris's play doesn't represent the rather vapid theory, floated by social conservative commentators after Abu Ghraib, that the abuses there were the product of a pornified culture. In the play, porn isn't so much the cause as a metaphor. Like porn, the news is an exercise in power by the creators of the fantasy, and an exercise in willing submission to the fantasy on the part of the consumer. The pictures soldiers took of themselves abusing prisoners is a form of pornography, the play suggests, but not personal, sexual pornography. This is the porn of an empire flexing its muscles, released and disseminated through the media to the public for consumption. And like porn, it's a sort of dirty secret, something to be publicly decried and privately enjoyed. Ultimately, the play tears down the veneer of uncensored reality ascribed to the horrifying images: Captioned, written about, placed in a media narrative, what's the truth about these pictures?

As such, the play treats Schutz's character sympathetically, though at the character's expense, since she's written off as a rather slow-witted pawn in a bigger story she's only beginning to grasp at. Possibly true, we suppose, but we don't know that it's fair to write off England as just stupid.

In fact, the play's script itself is the weakest part of the show. Morris's themes don't feel all that well fleshed out, since the play starts out exploring the classic dynamic of who it is who's supposed to "guard the guardians" and ends up meditating on the world of spin and evasion created by the 24-hour newscycle. Morris's monologues for Schutz's character also strike the American viewer as somewhat off, since Southerners don't share the English affinity for similes. But worse is the script's unwillingness to countenance doubt. It's got a point to make it and it makes it, turning the characters into cyphers for the author and largely quashing counter-interpretations that would propose that what these two admittedly perverted people say is just as likely self-justification as a cynic's realistic view of the world.

The reason this production is so good, then, isn't the script (a mixed affair) but rather the actors. We saw Adam Standley as the syphilitic son in Ibsen's Ghosts last month, and found it overwrought. But in Guardians he delivers a knock-out performance. While the English could no doubt find some fault with his accent, as far as we were concerned he nailed it, down to the swallowed "w" in "power." He charms, he flatters, he disgusts and seduces all at once. Definitely a Seattle actor to follow.

Gabrielle Schutz does a fine job as well, though we were less blown away by the character. Her Southern accent is subtle and believable, and she evinces the vulnerability the playwright gives the character. Like we said earlier, the character's written as somewhat gullible and slow to understand the big picture, which we thought was a cop-out of sorts, but Schutz does well with it, particularly at the emotional climax, which Schutz handles deftly, not over-doing it but still moving the audience to near (or actual) tears.

So faults aside, we have to hand it to Morris—normally we find the monologue approach to theatre story-telling as insufferable as "memory" plays, but here it's a deliberate form of anti-theatre that works well. By refusing to actually dramatize the back-story to Abu Ghraib, Morris denies the audience its voyeuristic joy. He denies us entry into the story and instead forces us to step back and think about that very process. As such, Guardians makes for an interesting counterpoint to the phenomenal visiting performance of Jerk last fall at OtB. Whereas Jerk ultimately implicated the audience in allowing a serial killer to find onanistic pleasure in recounting his murders, and thus slap us in the face at the end, Guardians pushes us away at the beginning and leaves us feeling like we dodged a bullet by the end. We don't entirely buy Morris's arguments, and it wasn't as thrilling as Jerk, but this a damn fine piece of theatre, one we can't recommend highly enough.