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Review: 'Betrayed' at Culture Project

BY LINDA WINER | linda.winer@newsday.com

February 7, 2008

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Sweetness mingles with impotent rage in "Betrayed," George Packer's troubling look at Iraqi translators abandoned by America to be hunted as traitors in their own broken country.

The quasi-docudrama, which opened last night at the Culture Project, is based on Packer's 2007 New Yorker exposé about people who signed on to help our country and themselves after the invasion almost five years ago. The modest production, directed with an admirable lack of sensationalism by Pippin Parker, lays out the stories of three Iraqis and their Yank supervisor - all good people crushed by the colliding bulldozers of sectarian civil war and American military indifference.

The acting is personable in a way that makes details both humane and larger than life. Packer, whose early support of the invasion brings an extra layer of darkness to his theme of betrayal, has conflated his research into a handful of believable, fact-based fictional characters. We know their fate from the start, but their personalities rise above the predictable.

Waleed F. Zuaiter and Sevan Greene find a lovely mix of playfulness and desperation in Adnan and Laith. One Sunni, the other Shia, these are buddies who share fascination with things American. Adnan, our narrator and what he calls a lifelong "non-belonger," explains how he came to be holed up in Baghdad's now-deserted Palestine Hotel. Laith, who learned English from Metallica, arrives in a panic with al-Qaida on his trail.

For most of the next 100 minutes, their journey from hope-filled U.S. Embassy employees to despairing outcasts is told in flashback, with actors playing old Iraqis and double-edged American functionaries. Also at work is Intisar (hauntingly portrayed by Aadya Bedi), a sparky young woman who loves Emily Brontë and independence. Mike Doyle has just the right chiseled All-American quality as their crushingly naive boss.

Packer shares the Iraqi gallows humor (many jokes involve beheadings) and the poignancy of reluctant disillusionment. As Adnan tells us at the end, "I feel sorry for every face in Baghdad."

Packer has given a few faces to statistics, a useful theatrical function served well by the Culture Project. After all, the only people many of us felt we knew in South Africa during apartheid were characters seared into us by playwright Athol Fugard.

And, yet, there is something awful about watching an entertainment about catastrophes now happening in our name, day and night, while we distract ourselves with football parades and starlet meltdowns. We feel helpless about Adnan's helplessness and I guess that's the point. But bigger theater, of course, needs a bigger step.

BETRAYED. By George Packer, directed by Pippin Parker. Culture Project, 55 Mercer St., Manhattan. Tickets, $25-$60; 212-352-3101. Seen at Sunday afternoon preview.