Posted: Mon., Aug. 18, 2008, 3:22pm PT

Pedro and the Captain

(Dairy Center for the Arts, East TheaterBoulder, Colo.; 99 seats; $14 top) A Maya Prods. presentation of a play in one act by Mario Benedetti, translated by Mark Read. Adapted and directed by Ami Dayan.

Captain - Mark Read

Pedro - Aaron Jennejahn

By BOB BOWS

Amidst continuing U.S. debate over the use of torture and lingering allegations of war crimes directed toward the White House, multi-hyphenate Ami Dayan brings a new English translation of Latin poet,

novelist and playwright Mario Benedetti's "Pedro and the Captain" to the fourth annual Boulder International Fringe Festival. Based on the scribe's experiences and interviews with police, army officials and insurgents recalling the Uruguayan junta (1968-85), the story brings home the realities of torture while serving as an inspiration to those who would resist.

The struggle in Uruguay -- between the Tupamaros, former university graduates who became an urban guerrilla force, and the military -- is represented by prisoner protagonist Pedro (Aaron Jennejahn), and his interrogator antagonist,

the Captain (Mark Read). Benedetti concentrates on torture's physical manifestations and psychological dynamics in six tightly written, feverish scenes, while taking a page from the Greeks by leaving the acts of savagery offstage.

Head covered by a sack and hands tied in front of him, Pedro is thrown into a room where the Captain (a graduate of the School of the Americas torture academy in Fort Benning, Ga.) explains the rules to him: Silence is OK for the first session, but sooner or later everyone talks, depending how much abuse they're willing to take; I can give you back your life, your wife, your child, your house; we know you know a lot of things; if you resist, we will rape your wife in front of you; if you cooperate, we will make it look like you did not cooperate to protect you from your comrades.

The commonality of torture throughout the world coupled with the intimacy of Benedetti's language and the characters' interrelationship make it impossible for the audience to avoid the drama's personal implications as we consider how well we would hold up to beatings, finger nail removal and electrical burns.

Dayan's bare-bones staging and make-up artist Chloe Cook's impressive array of gory effects keep the focus on the threat and experience of pain. We suffer with Jennejahn's stoic Pedro while marveling at his emotional resiliency. But the startling conclusion is somewhat dampened by the absence of a convincing psychological shift in Read's cold and calculating Captain.

However, Democracy has returned to Uruguay and those who survived the "dirty war" and "disappearances" are now in power. One hopes such an outcome is possible elsewhere as well, where torture, suicides, plane crashes, automobile

accidents and heart attacks are all too common for those who hold damning information or key votes.

Set, Dayan; costumes, makeup, Chloe Cook; lighting, Bryon Arnold King-Hall; production stage manager, Courtney Thomas. Opened, reviewed, Aug. 15, 2008. Running time: 55 MIN.

At the Boulder International Fringe Festival,

Pedro and the Captain explores the futility of evil

By Juliet Wittman

published: August 21, 2008

●

Aaron Jennejahn defies his torturer in Pedro and the Captain.

At the Boulder International Fringe

Aaron Jennejahn defies his torturer in

Pedro and the Captain .

International Fringe Festival

Two men in a room together: the torturer and the tortured. This

is Uruguay in the early 1970s, and the victim is Pedro, a member

of the revolutionary Tupamaros. The man who controls the

torture — though he doesn't administer it personally — is a

colonel in the fascist country's military, who admits only to being

a captain.

The script is straightforward, almost simple; there is no subtext.

The Captain needs Pedro to betray his friends because that's the

only way he can justify the work he does. He has many weapons

at his disposal in the battle of wills: sleep deprivation, hunger and

thirst, and the infliction of all kinds of physical agony, including

electroshock and waterboarding. He can even order the arrest

and rape of Pedro's wife and the brutalization of his child. Pedro's

task is to hold on to his integrity and sense of self, and the only

weapons he possesses are his own heart and mind. The play is

divided into relatively short interrogation scenes. Each time

Pedro enters, hooded and staggering, he's in worse shape than

the time before. His fingers drip blood because his nails have

been torn out. He shakes and vomits. And yet he is not entirely

powerless in the relationship. By the play's end, the Captain will

be on his knees, begging for any scrap of information.

The script of Pedro and the Captain may be simple, but it is

anything but simplistic. Author Mario Benedetti is interested in

all the complexities and ramifications of his topic. He shows us

the odd intimacy between the torturer and the tortured, and the

longings for a normal, loving family life that unite the two. "Why

am I confiding in you?" the Captain asks at one point. Pedro

smiles. "Who else can you confide in?"

As I watched, I remembered an article by an Englishman, Eric

Lomax, who had been horribly tortured by the Japanese during World War II.

Like all torture victims, he never fully recovered from the experience. But eventually he learned that his interrogator, Nagase Takashi, was still alive, and had devoted himself to works of reconciliation; Takashi, too, had never recovered from the things he had done. Lomax and Takashi met in 1998, now old men, and although Lomax was intensely skeptical at first, eventually the two became friends. "Some time the hating has to stop," Lomax wrote of the experience.

But Benedetti is not suggesting any kind of moral equivalence between his two characters. He makes it clear that one is engaged in an act of absolute evil, while the other is guilty of nothing but resistance. Though his work often breaks the torturer even as it does the tortured, the torturer's suffering is not redemptive.

Confrontations like this are occurring today in various manifestations all over the world, including America's own prisons — those we know about at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and those that remain hidden, black holes into which human beings have fallen and from which many will never emerge. But though the techniques used on Pedro are common in Guantanamo, there's one highly significant difference. Pedro is indeed a revolutionary; he must have known when he joined the Tupamaros that torture, mutilation and death were likely. We now know that most of those held by American forces are not combatants of any kind, but farmers, cab drivers, doctors, people betrayed by neighbors, sold for the fee the military offered

for militants, or swept up in the random madness of war. They have nothing to tell. They do not possess the one thing Pedro uses to maintain his sanity: volition.

This harrowing production is part of the Boulder International Fringe Festival, a celebration of artistic expression in all its forms — subversive, sexual, beautiful or ugly. Most of the shows continue through this weekend, but it's hard to imagine anything more important than Pedro and the Captain.

Ami Dayan directs with a strong, sure hand, and his actors — Aaron Jennejahn as Pedro and Mark Read, who plays the Captain and also translated the text — turn in performances of unflinching honesty. You'll be mesmerized; you'll understand some things about how human beings behave in extremis that you may not have understood before; you'll find yourself asking questions that desperately need to be asked. And the play's images will remain in your mind for a long time.

Details:

Presented by Maya Productions through August 20; the Boulder International Fringe Festival runs through August 25. Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, 720-563-9950,              www.boulderfringe.com.

Subject(s):

Pedro and the Captain, Mario Benedetti, Maya Productions, Boulder

http://www.westword.com/content/printVersion/867472 (2 of 2) [8/25/2008 7:09:13 AM]