A Tortured Affair

You know that scene in Matilda where Miss Trunchbull forces the poor fat boy to ingest an entire chocolate cake in front of his aghast peers? It's the most awful thing to watch, but for some reason, you can't seem to rip your eyes away, investing yourself in the horror of the scene until you seem to feel the goop greasing the sides of your own esophagus.

FlyBy thinks that might be how it would feel if it watched the play WATERBOARD, an Institute for Intermediate Studies production. Club Oberon in Harvard Square will open the play on Sunday at 8 PM.

The play "aims to create awareness and discussion about waterboarding as a form of torture." How, you may ask? Well, performers Nadeem Mazen and Stephanie M. Skier '05 will be waterboarding each other for approximately three minutes of the show. Find out more after the jump.

"Waterboarding seemed to be the term in circulation, and I think it's something that many people do not understand in terms of what it physically looks like," says Skier, the play's director and writer who sought training from someone who had gone through Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), a U.S. program that trains troops to withstand torture.

"Part of the project of creating a visual image of waterboarding in the space of the theater, which is very much a visual space, is to highlight the present absence of documentary visual evidence of waterboarding," Skier adds in an interview with FlyBy.

The show, which seeks to explore the history of drowning torture, will encourage interaction with the audience and employ animation to demonstrate more dangerous forms of waterboarding ("We're not going to do those on stage because we don't want to die," Skier notes). To explore "the eerily whimsical linguistic connotations" of the term "waterboarding," Mazen and Skier will also "play on slip’n’slides and toss beach balls while singing about 'enhanced interrogation techniques,'" according to the event's Facebook page.

"What does it mean to bear witness to something that we had not seen ourselves and don't have access to evidence of? " Skier says. "We are functioning as witnesses but at the same time acknowledging that we are incapable of doing that in any real way."

Photo courtesy of Zahra Syed.