‘Lidless’ becomes a victim of its own convoluted plot
How people, and families, survive in the aftermath of war?
This is the question at the heart of the Horse Head Theatre Co.’s production of “Lidless.”
The play, which runs through June 18 at the Fresh Arts Gallery in the Winter Street Studios, addresses these vital and topical moral questions. But the play, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, often takes on these ethical conundrums with a messy brew of cheap metaphors and increasingly convoluted plot developments.
One of the chief problems, who’s at the center of the drama that is “Lidless”?
One answer is Alice, the former military interrogator who pill-popped and repressed her way through the stress of what she perpetrated at Guantanamo Bay. Consequently, she leaves the Army with no memory of her actions and now faces internal struggle while starting a new life in Minnesota with her husband, Lucas, and daughter, Rhiannon.
Another answer as to the story’s focal point would be Bashir, the detainee on whom Alice practices a relatively new interrogation tactic: “invasion of space by a female.” The haunting and haunted Bashir shows up in Minnesota 15 years later for his reckoning with Alice.
The question of whose story this is has real significance.
Alice’s narrative arc leaves the audience with an awkward question: As sympathetic as we are to returning soldiers struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, is it not too much to ask us to sympathize with a torturer in worrying about how well she’s adjusting to civilian family life?
Bashir’s story is that of a victim struggling to face the perpetrator who raped him, which also makes the dramas of Alice’s household —Alice’s 40th birthday party, Rhiannon’s resentment of her mother — seem rather trivial.
All of this is more than enough to take in, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem quite enough for “Lidless,” which piles on the drama.
Bashir also needs a liver transplant, and he happens to remember that Alice shares his rare blood type — a fact she reveals in one of their sessions.
After some tense encounters at her florist shop, during which Alice protests she can’t remember Bashir or what she did to him, Alice reveals she can’t donate her liver because she has hepatitis. Meanwhile, Rhiannon is trying to discover her mother’s past. She meets Bashir, develops a crush on him and later reveals, by noting genetic traits, that he must be her biological father — and that she is the product of a rape.
That, though, isn’t quite enough complication for “Lidless.” Plot twists can’t address the nearly insoluble dilemmas that arise in the aftermath of hideous violence. Nor can the cheap metaphors.
And yet Herman Gambhir, as Bashir, manages remarkably with an awkward script. The most persuasive scenes are the ones in which he appears, whether in lyrical remembrances of his daughter or thoughtful meditations on his own broken life.
Deeba Ashraf, as family friend Riva, (a doctor at Guantanamo) is equally persuasive, especially as she recollects her Iraqi childhood and the seizure and torture of her father. She reads to Bashir, at his request, in Arabic, as a way of comforting him and reconciling herself with her own broken past.
As Alice, Mischa Hutchings is a gruff, gross, thrillseeking and jingoistic interrogator with a slight Texas drawl. As Alice, the wife and mother, she’s less remarkable, though that may be more a problem of the script. And whenever she and Bashir interact, Hutchings abandons her placid persona for the domineering torturer and excels.
Rick Evans, too, does what he can with the cheerful, nursery owner Lucas. But his past life as a drug addict, which is made out to be some strange parallel to Alice’s past as an interrogator, convinces no more than his sudden demand for a divorce. Tanith Albright struggles the most to convey the troubled teen Rhiannon, who does a little too much shouting and pouting.
“Lidless” tackles weighty issues, but it plays like a casualty of its own good intentions.