This Spring at the Ex: Torture Onstage

Carousel..Antigone..The Abu Ghraib Show?

This spring, Harvard drama will truly run the gamut: Curran Singh ’07 is offering up a show based on the infamous American abuses of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Blending dance, dialogue, and something Singh calls “aerial dance,” the Abu Ghraib Show draws directly on actual accounts of Abu Ghraib prisoners and guards.

Isn’t that a little—what’s the word?—tasteless? Not according to Singh.

“Before the event fades from our collective memory, I feel we should seize the opportunity to provoke genuine reflection on the issue,” he writes on his website, abughraibshow.com. “It’s not going to be sexual,

it’s not going to be voyeuristic.”

Instead, he hopes the Abu Ghraib Show will “send a message about the universality of humanness.”

The Adams House Social Studies concentrator has “always been interested in politics and theatre.” The Abu Ghraib Show, the first “distinctly political” show performed at the Loeb Experimental Theater in decades, is the perfect mix.

“All I really want to do is bring more to the world than I take from it,” he says.