stockthewarehouse.org

Jason Maghanoy, the writer of the 13th Annual Wildside Festival’s offering Dust, is one brave soul. When I sat down to interview Maghanoy, he told me that following a meeting with Centaur’s artistic director Roy Surette he submitted his application for Dust to be part of the festival. When Maghanoy did not hear from Surette for months, he sent him a one-line e-mail saying “Let’s do the play” and Maghanoy tells me he even included a smiley for optimum effect.  Apparenly Surette took some time to reply to the bold e-mail, but when he did his response was just as compact: “Let’s do it.”

This anecdote appropriately telegraphs the bravura with which Dust takes the stage. The play is a romance inspired by the prison abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib and focusing on the two US prison guards Lynndie England and Charles Graner who formed a romantic relationship at the prison. The play presents them as Jenny Reynolds and Jonathan Mazurek. Maghanoy told me he set out to explore whether love can exist in a place with no hope.

The performances in this piece are layered characterizations that could easily have slipped into caricature but did not. Jessica moss and Brandon Coffey carry this two-hander with brilliant physicality, a natural-sounding southern twang in their voices and complex emotions that allow us to see the different colours of their characters from scene to scene. Moss was absolutely charming as a power-hungry office clerk with aspirations to be a prison guard, who misses chicken McNuggets and her mother’s oatmeal cookies and tries desperately to create a home in the prison. Coffey is deliciously awkward and tightly wound. His opening monologue is arguably the most effective scene in the play.

So this is where Dust crumbles a little. Maghanoy told me he set out to juxtapose cruelty and love, to show how two people could be so caring towards one another and yet so heinous to another human being. I believe this contrast is not fully explored. I found myself wondering if the audience could be projecting the violence onto the play from knowledge of current events more than actually experiencing it in the play. This is simply a matter of expansion, building on some of the dark seeds already in the play and truly showing us both sides of the characters’ lives. Secondly, there is a very strong Eve-and-the-apple-like quality to the Jenny Reynold’s character. I am the first to understand that fact needs to be rendered dramatic for the stage and that there are many devices and structural techniques used to transform the mundane into the theatrical. However, in the real events at Abu Ghraib, Charles Graner was named the ring leader of the abuse and he received a sentence of ten years, while Lynndie England who claimed her actions were a result of her love for Graner, was only sentenced to three years. I wonder, from a female perspective, what it means in the play that Jenny gradually coaxes the conscience-searching Jonathan into thinking that the abuse is simply a way of life in the prison, a part of their temporary home.

Overall, Dust brought some very beautiful and evocative writing to the Centaur stage. The performances were spot-on and it really was enchanting to become so absorbed in a love story set in a jail in Iraq. The play needs to be expanded to give us more of what is working so well and then I’d suggest a stint in the US (just maybe not in the red states). {w}