Spokespeople.('Palace of the End')(Theater review)

One hesitates to call the Canadian playwright Judith Thompson's "Palace of the End" (an Epic Theatre Ensemble production, at Playwrights Horizons) a lyrical work, given its subject. Political pundits might be alienated by the idea of a hard-news story like the devastation in Iraq being treated in a poetic, "feminine" manner. But such is the power of Thompson's real, if uneven, talent that even the chest-thumping newshounds who see the show may find themselves recalling that the earliest reports of man's inhumanity to man took the form of poems, recited beside a crashing sea.

Still, it's the sound of desert sand scraping against the throat--and the mind--that one hears in Thompson's three monologues about lives laid waste by the wars in Iraq. The three actors are seated near one another on a small, sparse stage, each with his or her own distinct props and lighting. Lynndie (Teri Lamm)--who is based on the American soldier Lynndie England--is the first character we hear from. Dressed in fatigues, and speaking directly to the audience, she is a young, poorly educated, pregnant ex-Army officer who served in Iraq in 2003 and participated in the atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison, which were recorded in a series of photographs that still haunt most Americans. Thompson's Lynndie, however, has no real moral compunctions about what she has done to people who share neither her ethnicity nor her values. To her, the only remedy for "otherness" is to stamp it out. Lamm doesn't play Lynndie as a hysteric with no mind of her own. Rather, she is as reasonable as any moderately personable young woman you might strike up a conversation with on a long-distance bus trip and forget about as soon as the journey is over. And that's what makes her the worst kind of scary: her brand of evil is insidious, almost unrecognizable, and before you know it she has slimed your soul with her ideology of hate.

Indeed, you could say that "Palace of the End" is a play about ideologies gone awry--or about using ideology as a shield against the horror of truth. As the lights go down on Lynndie, they come up on Dr. David Kelly (the incredible Rocco Sisto), a character based on the microbiologist and former United Nations weapons inspector who blew the whistle on Britain's trumped-up dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, before dying mysteriously--most likely by his own hand. Thompson's Kelly feels as if he had betrayed a kind of cosmic Hippocratic oath. Nothing he does can reverse the torture, mayhem, and grief in Iraq, and the disaster there digs into his heart like barbed wire. Unlike Lynndie, he has never had the clinical detachment necessary to tolerate the pain of others.

"Palace of the End" is nicely directed by Daniella Topol, who works in an unobtrusive style that is as eerily flat as the light that shines on the play's characters. Topol leaves the poetic touches to Thompson, whose rhythmic language reaches its full flowering in the beautiful closing monologue, delivered by Nehrjas Al Saffarh (the immensely gifted Heather Raffo), a middle-class Iraqi woman who was tortured, along with her sons, under Saddam Hussein, and then died when her house was bombed by the United States, in the Gulf War. In Thompson's version of her life, Al Saffarh's belief in the power and wisdom of God is what sees her through the awful events that change her family forever. Dressed in a wraparound dress, occasionally flirting with the audience, Raffo plays Al Saffarh as a woman who has been defined by her economic and social class. What makes her a romantic--an ideologue--is her firm conviction that things will get better, somehow, somewhere.

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