CIVIC: Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict

WEDDED TO DOCUDRAMA, AND EACH OTHER

By Kate Taylor

THE 2002 play “The Exonerated,” based on interviews with people who were released from death row, won praise for depicting lives derailed by wrongful convictions.

In a very different way, the play’s success — it ran for 18 months in New York with a rotating cast of celebrities, then toured the country and became a Court TV movie featuring Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover — also changed the lives of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, the two actors who wrote it. It turned the pair, seemingly overnight, into playwrights of national stature as well as experts on the death penalty, wrongful convictions and documentary theater. They wrote a book about the process (in the course of which they also fell in love and married) called “Living Justice: Love, Freedom, and the Making of ‘The Exonerated.’ ”

For their next play they wanted something that wouldn’t be too close to “The Exonerated” but also, as Mr. Jensen said recently, “something where the stakes were really high.”

No problem there. Their new play, “Aftermath,” which starts previews on Tuesday at New York Theater Workshop, is based on interviews with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan. Through the voices of eight people (and a translator, who is the only composite character and is based on several translators with whom the couple worked), “Aftermath” portrays the experiences of ordinary Iraqis in the six and a half years since the United States invasion. The characters range from an imam who was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib to the victim of a car bombing; they include a wealthy doctor, a couple who are both artists, and a Shiite couple who fled Iraq after being pressured to inform on their Sunni neighbors to the local militia.

The writers changed all of the names and some identifying details (like the cities where people were born) to protect those who spoke to them. Beyond that, Ms. Blank said, the text of the play is about 95 percent verbatim from the interviews.

“Aftermath” began with a conversation Ms. Blank had with James Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, during a 2007 summer residency at Dartmouth College, where Ms. Blank was developing another play. Over breakfast the two discussed that there had been virtually no plays about civilians’ experience in the Iraq war.

She and Mr. Jensen quickly saw in this talk the subject for their next play. They considered going to Iraq but decided it was too dangerous. But with the help of the nonprofit Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict and a Ford Foundation grant, they went to Jordan for two weeks in June 2008 and conducted about 40 interviews with Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Christians.

They were prepared, they said, for those they met to be hostile or to vent about Americans, but instead the people were extremely welcoming. “I never drank so much coffee, orange juice and tea in my entire life,” Mr. Jensen said. Most interviewees were cautious at first, he said, but once it was clear “that we were open to whatever opinions they had and that they didn’t need to please us,” they were very open.

Shortly after they returned, Ms. Blank was back at Dartmouth, working on the transcripts with a group of actors, several of whom are now in the cast. Mr. Jensen was acting in a science-fiction pilot that was filming in Vancouver, British Columbia, but he participated via Skype.

Over the course of that and subsequent workshops Ms. Blank and Mr. Jensen narrowed the number of characters and developed the idea of the translator, to bridge between the characters and the audience.

A recent interview suggested that Ms. Blank and Mr. Jensen bring different talents to the collaboration. Ms. Blank, who looked glamorous even at almost six months pregnant — the couple are expecting their first child, a daughter — is the more patient and poised of the two. Mr. Jensen, who sports a large tattoo of Buddha, has an actor’s extroversion and a gift for engaging strangers in conversation. No sooner did a photographer arrive than Mr. Jensen was drawing him out about his experience covering international conflicts. He is also somewhat irrepressible, and during the interview he interrupted Ms. Blank often, which she took calmly. In a rehearsal, although Ms. Blank is officially directing the show, Mr. Jensen jumped in often with blocking suggestions, sometimes contradicting her. (She, however, has the last word.)

The cast members are mostly of Middle Eastern descent, though only one — Fajer Al-Kaisi, who plays the translator and also serves as the dialect coach — is Iraqi. He emigrated to Canada when he was 8, but he still has family in Iraq and said the war has been “a daily reality” for him. Having listened to the tapes of some of Ms. Blank’s and Mr. Jensen’s interviews, he said that the material ultimately included in the play stops short of the most violent and horrific stories that were recorded.

Mr. Jensen said that while he always intended to keep his personal views out of the show, he went to Jordan believing that American soldiers should leave Iraq immediately. But he soon realized, he said, that the situation was “much, much more complex than that.”

Ms. Blank said many interviewees recalled having hope after the invasion, but as terrorist and militia groups filled the power vacuum, they became disillusioned.

“People who had just spent 45 minutes talking about how much they hated Saddam and how repressive and awful it was to live under Saddam said to us, ‘Now we look back on that as the good old days.’ ”

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/theater/30tayl.html?_r=1&emc=eta1