WHY TORTURE IS WRONG AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM

BY CHRISTOPHER DURANG

3 – 28 JUNE 2014

AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE

 “Enough with men needing to kill and blow things up all the time!”

Felicity wakes up after a drunken blackout to find she’s married to a sexist, violent loser who calls himself Zamir, claims to be Irish, and makes Osama bin Laden look like a moderate. Is her new husband a terrorist? Is her father’s seemingly innocuous butterfly collecting actually a front for his involvement in a shadow government?

Is her mother insane or just a harmless, if obsessive, theatre buff?  And what’s with the minister who directs porno and the government operative with malfunctioning underwear?  Felicity’s world is plunging into crisis and Homeland Security never looked so insecure.

This provocative and riotous examination of the ‘War on Terror’ era in the United States, with its twisted logic and the resulting cults of violence and paranoia, zeroes in on private terrors and preoccupations with biting black humour.  Christopher Durang is a social satirist in the great tradition of Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift and Dario Fo and this is one of his funniest plays.

“Comedic napalm … unnervingly true and cathartic” Variety