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Daily Telegraph By Dominic Cavendish March 18, 2011
Lessons Still To Be Learnt
When it was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, Lidless – by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, directed by Steven Atkinson – placed the audience inside a white box, hard up against the action. At Trafalgar Studio 2, with its in-built basement effect, no such container is required.
This is an artful, at times overly self-involved, examination of the way U.S. mistreatment of Guantanamo detainees – specifically involving female operatives and sexual polys – can rebound down the years. In such a pressure-cooker setting, though, and with five fully committed performances, there's no question that for its short, sharp, 75-minute duration, the piece grips.
Sunday Times London
Lidless, Trafalgar Studios
Alice has filed away her stint as a U.S. army interrogator in Guantanamo Bay at the back of her mind, with help from bottles of pills. Now, she's a florist with a hippie husband and a teenage daughter who has a habit of killing small animals. But you can't delete the past: Bashir, a former Fitmo detainee, tracks down Alice to ask for restitution. With its explicit linkage of eroticism and torture, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's play is intermittenly overblown and perhaps not as viscerally uncomfortable as it thinks. Some scene-chewing in Steven Atkinson's production doesn't help. Still, it's potent and seething with justified indignation.
The Times by Dominic Maxwell March 11, 2011
This Intense Guantanamo Drama Doesn't Quite Convince
This prize-winning play by American writer Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig is intelligent, impassioned and hard to swallow. Oh, not that she doesn't make some grabbing political and psychological points in this story of a Guantanamo Bay interrogator and her prisoner, reunited after 15 years. But there are also moments in Steven Atkinson's determinedly intense production when psychodrama slips into melodrama.
Mind you, full marks for making something exciting from this cramped, difficult space. It's staged in the round, on a white floor surrounded by neon strips. Characters wear white shoes and trousers, sometimes picked out in solo spotlights. It's not out for naturalism.
Even so, you need to buy into a heightened style that's poetic yet gets to the point fast in order to fit a lot into its 75 minutes. "People should not be allowed to haunt other people," says Bashir, seconds after walking into Alice's minnesota flower shop. His life was ruined by his spell in "Gitmo": it was Alice, now an ordinary mom with a recovering-drug-addict husband – OK, a semi-ordinary mom – who tortured him. And was mandated by the American Government to do so, using what they called Invasion of Space by a Female, and what Bashir calls rape.
Alice can't remember much of this, thanks to the memory suppressant pills she took, aka a handly plot device that Cowhig, wisely, doesn't linger on. But now Alice's inquisitive 14-year-old, Rhiannon, wants to know about mom's spell in the army. It's a subdued but powerful performance by Greer Dale-foulkes, who roots every scene she's in.
There are intriguing ideas in here about power play, about the acts of will called upon to live in the present. Some concise yet colloquial dialogue, some tight plotting. "You couldn't read Lidless without wanting to read her next play," said David Hare, who chaired the Yale Drama Series panel that gave this play its award.
But, in this production anyway, an important topic sometimes becomes a self-important play. Anthony Bunsee gives Bashir the driven charisma of a stage hypnotist as, ridden by the hepatitis he picked up in Guantanamo he orders Alice to give him her liver. Paul Blair's controlled Southern manner as Lucas, Alice's husband, verges on the creepy under the tight focus of this bare set. Yet Penny Layden is more fluent in the tough central role of Alice and Nathalie Armin is a steady presence as her Iraqi-Assyrian friend Riva. There are things to admire here. But it's hard to take Lidless quite as seriously as it wants you to.
High Tide August 28, 2010
Lidless Wins Fringe First Award
We are delighted to announce that Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's Lidless has won a Fringe First award. The awards are a celebration of new drama at the Edinburgh Fringe and are awarded to new writing which has premiered at the Festival. The award ceremony will take place today (August 27th) at Assembly @ Princes Street Gardens.
THE INDEPENDENT By Alice Jones August 25, 2010
Lidless, Underbelly
An uncomfortable watch in more ways than one, for Lidless the audience is lined up on tiny camping stools around the walls of a brightly-lit white box. Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's punchy play won the Yale Drama Series Award in 2009 and plaudits from David Hare and it's easy to see why. The meeting between a Guantanamo Bay interrogator, Alice, who can't remember what she did there and one of her inmates, Bashir, who can't forget it, is fraught with tension and indignation.
Fifteen years after leaving the US Army, Alice, her memory fogged by pills, has rebuilt her life as a florist with a loving, ex-junkie husband and a teenage daughter in tow. When Bashir erupts into their cosy set-up, clutching an orange jumpsuit and demanding Alice's liver as payback, she and her family are forced to confront her transgressions.
Given a stylish production by High Tide, it's a little heavy-handed in places, but this is vital new writing from a talented new voice – just what you'd hope to find at the Fringe.
The Scotsman By Mark Fisher August 18, 2010
Five Stars, Lidless
If Henrik Ibsen had been alive in the era of Guantanamo, he'd surely have written a play every bit as scintillating as Lidless.
Like the Norwegian playwright, who explored the way events from the past have a nasty habit of catching up on the present, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, in a tremendously accomplished debut, considers the moral legacy of American foreign policy in the most emotionally devastating way. And, from Steven Atkinson's hot-house production, a superb play is given a stunningly good production.
Lidless is not the first play about 21st-century interrogation to appear on the Fringe. A couple of years ago, they were all the rage. But it goes one step further than, say, Judith Thompson's My Pyramids, which was about Private Lynndie England's escapades in Abu Ghraib, by bringing the trauma back home.
Penny Layden plays Alice, a former Guantanamo interrogator who, after taking the policy of "invasion of space by a female" to its ultimate conclusion, has opted for a quiet life as a florist in her native Texas. She and her husband, a former heroin user, have agreed never to talk about their old selves if, indeed, Alice can remember any of it.
Her memory blackouts are symbolic of society's collective amnesia, an amnesia no longer possible once Anthony Bunsee's Bashir, a Guantanamo inmate, shows up seeking not so much revenge as resolution.
In Greer Dale-Foulkes' 14-year-old Rhiannon, whose casual cruelty to orange-coloured goldfish recalls her mother's abuse of orange-clad prisoners, the playwright shows how even repressed violence is passed on to the next generation. The more the family try to keep the lid on their past, the more dysfunctional they become.
That Bashir appears to be in search of spiritual salvation, rather than a continuation of the conflict, makes their behaviour look only more neurotic.
Performed in a white box, as if we too are an interrogation cell, the production by High Tide is fluent, gripping and immediate. The acting is uniformly excellent, notable especially because of Cowhig's portrayal of women, not men, as the ferocious ones. Reframing global politics on a domestic scale, she turns headline news into a modern-day tragedy.
DAILY TELEGRAPH By Daisy Bowie-Sell August 10, 2010
Four Stars for Lidless
Lined up and handed small folding chairs, the audience are pointed to a large, brighly lit white box in the middle of the stage. We climb into it and arrange ourselves around the edges. This already feels a little uncomfortable - the box is a prison of sorts, and the doors close behind us as we sit down.
The feeling of imprisonment is intended to physically represent the experience of detainees at Guantanamo Bay but Lidless, an excellent new play brought to Edinburgh by High Tide, also focuses on the lives of the interrogators.
Alice is a female soldier, who takes pills to make her forget her actions in Guantanamo. She is cushioned by the drugs and in the last week of her work the government gives the word to allow women interrogators to use their sexuality as a form of torture. Alice’s actions as a 26-year-old, soon-to-be married Guantanamo interrogator are horrific, but she is never presented as an odd-one-out.
Flash forward 15 years and Alice has no memories of 'Gitmo’ and lives with her daughter and husband, a reformed heroin user. There is a pact to not ask each other questions about their past, so the family glide by, never facing up to their actions. Rhiannon, their daughter, feels instinctively something is missing from her life, however, and when a man turns up asking Alice for help they are forced to confront the truth.
With bright light bulbs overhead and the actors mostly wearing white, the feeling of being exposed is tangible. The director, Steven Atkinson, plays on this theme throughout. His delicate direction is complemented by a very strong script by American playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. The story grips and the characters are well drawn, demonstrating the complexities of human nature and the ability people have to put morals to one side.
May 2010
Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig Has its European Premier At The High Tide Festival. Suffolk England.
Lidless had its European premier at the High Tide Festival in Suffolk England this month. Next stop the Edinburg Festival Fringe in August. Then it returns to the states for performances at the American Contemporary Theatre in Virginia and afterwards at the Interact Theatre in Phildadelphia.
"The High Tide Festival showcases emerging artists in the true spirit of discovery." We were proud of the opportunity it afforded the Yale Drama Series and the DCHorn foundation in producing Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, our 2009 winner of the Yale Drama series prize. "
The production was special. Staged in a prefab painted stark white the audience was witness to the devastating horror and tragedy of war and its life altering effects. It was a compelling presentation, brilliantly directed by Steve Atkinson, .
The High Tide Festival is in its fourth year. Bravo to Sam Hodges, the festivals young founder. The patrons are Bill Nighy, Sir David Hare, Sally Green and Sinead Cusak. We were proud to be a part of it all.
THE STAGE David Hare's podcast, May 14, 2009
WLIU 'IN THE MORNING' with Bonnie Grice podcast, March 19, 2009
AUSTINIST INTERVIEW By Mike Agresta February 11, 2009
LIDLESS Playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
This week, local playwright and James A. Michener fellow Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig will debut a new play, LIDLESS, at the LAB theatre at UT. The play runs Thursday through Saturday night and closes with a matinee on Sunday afternoon. It is a short run, but, thanks to funding from UTNT (UT New Theatre), the show is entirely free. We loved Cowhig's [410]GONE at UT last fall, with its joyful flights of imagination (monkey kings, giant fingernails, a "Dance Dance Revelation" arcade game) softening an emotionally raw core. This time, we sat down with her for an interview to learn why, if we're only going to see one play about a Guantanamo Bay detainee this Valentine's Day weekend, hers is the one not to be missed.
How did you come to write a play about torture and the "War on Terror" by setting a story fifteen years in the future? Was that your original intention, or did it take you a while to settle on that approach?
It was set in the future from day one, because I wanted Alice, the former U.S. Army interrogator to have entered a completely different phase of her life—to be a florist, and have a teenage daughter who would become the driving engine of the play. I am also interested in what Alfred Jarry calls 'pataphysics,' or the science of imaginary solutions, and I think that is what the play is, both a cautionary tale and an imaginary solution, but because it is set in the future, it is also hopeful, because it hasn't happened yet, and there is still time to change things. Also, by setting it in the near future, it allows me to enter into a sort of Magical Realism, where I change the surface of a few things to create a more solid set of circumstances for the characters to inhabit.
I'm assuming that you don't have a lot of firsthand experience of torture.... How did you prepare yourself as a playwright to evoke Guantanamo interrogations, both play-by-play and as they are experienced internally by the detainee character?
I did a lot of research. I read poems and memoirs written by detainees, watched films and read plays about reunions between torturers in their victims (i.e. The Night Porter, Death and The Maiden), I interviewed a former U.S. Army Medic who served in detention centers in Iraq. He gave me a red-orange jumpsuit from the prison, as well as his army clothes to use in the play, and sometimes I would wear the jumpsuit or army gear while writing, and let that inform how I moved and felt and wrote. Since sensory deprivation is such a big part of the experience of being detained, I tried writing hooded, with ear plugs, etc, to see what that did to my language and expression. I went to acupuncture every week to kind of reset my spirit, and make sure the anxiety and tension and terror that I sometimes had to inhabit in writing wasn't something I would carry over into other parts of my life.
I know you're a playwright who likes to give actors a role in developing the play. How has LIDLESS changed since you started working with this cast?
I tried to pay attention to where they were struggling to find meaning, motivation, intention, as that was usually a problem with my writing. Specificity was a huge problem up front, and seeing how much the actors were struggling with their characters put a lot of good pressure on me to make some big decisions about characters that really activated the play.
Word is that Obama is shutting down Gitmo but hasn't yet decided where to send the detainees. As a playwright, what do you think he should do with them?
I am currently in a class with Coleman Jennings about Theatre for Youth and Creative Dramatics. I was really struck by a reading we had recently by Winifred Ward, who wrote that one of the goals of Creative Drama for young people is to give them opportunities to grow in understanding people who have a different viewpoint from themselves. I think Obama should change Guantanamo into a Creative Dramatics Center and get the people involved in its creation and daily life, from politicians and military police to defense contractors and the press and detainees to re-enact what happened there from a different perspective. Maybe invite tourists to come and watch too, like a Renaissance Fair.
Any idea where LIDLESS is headed next after this run at the LAB?
In my ideal world I would get thoughtful, provocative responses from the audience and invited respondents, spend six months or so going deeper into character, scene, and research, and then share it with the world. Realistically, I don't know. I read an article in the New York Times recently about how hard it is to get audiences to come see war plays. I hope this isn't true. On the positive side, the play is one of thirteen finalists for the Yale Emerging Playwrights Prize (David Hare will read the thirteen plays and select the winner), and a semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neill National Playwright's Conference [but there are 150 semi-finalists]. Right now the only given is that I will work my ass off to give this play the energy and life it deserves, and then see what happens.
I know you have a few projects going up in town this year.... Anything else you'd like to plug for our audience?
Yes! Two years ago I invited some classmates from the Dell'Arte School of Physical Theatre to come live in Austin for three months during my final semester of my MFA work at the Michener Center and make a play with me. They are here now, living with me. I commissioned Kate Braidwood, another graduate of the Dell'Arte School who is based in Humboldt and an amazing mask maker, to create six larval masks (a pre-character, embryonic creature that is a proposal of Lecoq, adapted from carnival of Basel masks), and now we are going to make a one hour play for larval masks that explores their capacity for violence and whimsy and naivete and despair. All without words, I think. We will be collaborating with musical duo The Just Desserts (Michael Shay and Lisa Shawley) to create a piece that will play three times only in and around a house in East Austin (at dawn, 2 pm, and 8 pm) March 21 and 22.
Above Scrolling Images:
All photos by Charles Erickson.