CONTRACTED OPTION 1: I saw it happen before it did...

June 26, 2009

Response to Heads by EM Lewis, directed by Jessica Hutchinson (Part of the Alcyone Festival 2009 at the Halcyon Theatre, June 26, 2009) and “Iran Escalates Its Fight With Britain; New Clashes Erupt” by Michael Slackman (Published New York Times, 28 June 2009)

The headline in the New York Times said that British Embassy Workers in Iran had been detained. I read it and suddenly, my mind was filled with vivid images—the chafed wrists and bloodshot eyes of the people who hours before had thought themselves invincible, the damp mold expanding across a prison wall, the stained mattress on the floor. I had seen the one of the detained embassy workers in her cramped cell, shared with an American engineer who had been missing for months. I really had, only two nights before.

My window into their prison cell was a small stage in a dark church basement on Leavitt Street. The combination of incredible acting and a room so small I was practically sitting on the stage transported me into the midst of their incarceration. I left the play haunted, with the grim realization that I had probably seen something very close to what was actually occurring a world away.

But as I read the Time’s article this morning, the similarities between what I had seen on stage and what was being reported made my stomach twist. The article mentioned two journalists, one who worked for the BBC, another of British-Greek heritage, who had been expelled from Iran. Creepily, they had been in the play, too—only in the stage version, they had been detained, not expelled. The two characters in the cell next to the embassy worker were a free-lance journalist with an accent, who could have easily been Greek-British, and a young man working for a network—in the play’s case, NBC.

Since I left the theater, I have had flashes of scenes play through my head—the way the embassy worker compulsively tugged at her clothing and the way her hands shook; the way the freelance journalist bloodied his hands trying to sharpen a piece of wire; the regime the engineer had constructed for himself where he allowed himself to think of his wife only once a day. It has been uncomfortable, haunting, to think of events like that happening. But to think of them happening in real life is a million times worse.