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Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'
Weaving together personal stories, legal opinion and political debate, Honor Bound to Defend Freedom looks at the questions surrounding the detentions in Guantanamo Bay and asks how much damage is being done to Western democratic values during the “war on terror.” A critical success in London, it has now recently opened in New York.
- GenresPlays
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 26, 2012
This is really a tough play to read, and I imagine it would be absolutely devastating to see performed. As Americans/Westerners we are all implicated in the detention/torture camp at Guantanamo Bay because we allowed our government to open and run it.
This play is in the emerging documentary theatre tradition, which takes the words of actual participants (and in many cases, victims) of historical events and structures them in a kind of mesh of voices to provide an alternative (i.e., non-official) history of the event. I heard a conference presentation where this technique was referred to as the 'memoirist project' in African-American histories--histories constructed not from the position of the all-knowing-historian, but through a set of personal stories woven together. This play has the voices of government officials, both British and American, parents and family members of detainees, as well as detainees themselves, plus artifacts like letters to and from the prisoners, all of which combines to provide a picture of the Gitmo detentions from the poitn of view of those detained and directl affected by the detentions.
This play is in the emerging documentary theatre tradition, which takes the words of actual participants (and in many cases, victims) of historical events and structures them in a kind of mesh of voices to provide an alternative (i.e., non-official) history of the event. I heard a conference presentation where this technique was referred to as the 'memoirist project' in African-American histories--histories constructed not from the position of the all-knowing-historian, but through a set of personal stories woven together. This play has the voices of government officials, both British and American, parents and family members of detainees, as well as detainees themselves, plus artifacts like letters to and from the prisoners, all of which combines to provide a picture of the Gitmo detentions from the poitn of view of those detained and directl affected by the detentions.
December 11, 2018
The play is divided into three acts .The first Act explains how the detainees are kidnapped from several places and transported to .Their life in Guantànamo camp is delineated in the second Act.The severity of the life they lead in Guantànamo and the inability of their families or their lawyers to have access to any information about them show the suffering of those prisoners . In the third Act ,we are told that some of the detainees will be released .However , the act is not supposed to be a happy ending for the play as other detainees will have to continue in their incomprehensible entrapment wating for their Godot to end their misery
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews