Christopher Durang's loopy new satire, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, is a bright and colorful examination of your average American family's relationship with torture. When Felicity—played by Laura Benanti, fresh off her Tony award-winning turn in Gypsy—wakes up in bed next to the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking Zamir (Amir Arison, who you may remember from Queens Boulevard), she discovers that her long night of partying has had some undesirable consequences. And her only hope of shaking her louche new spouse is to take him home to meet her eccentric, neo-con father (Richard Poe), who takes a very special interest in this mysterious newcomer.

To say more would spoil the production's absurdist twists, not the least of which is David Krons's marvelous set design, which packs myriad hyper-naturalistic interiors into the cozy Newman Theater at the Public. We conducted a somewhat spoiler-free interview with Durang last week about his latest opus, American politics, and aliens.

You grew up in Berkeley Heights New Jersey. You know there was an alien captured there recently on Google Street View. A being as opposed to a flying thing? Did you look at it?

Yeah, it's sort of blurry but I can see how it could be interpreted as that. Ever have any encounters there? No, I didn't think it was a place that had that, but then I was less open to that sort of thing. I am more so now. I'll have to search for it, although I don't yet have a functioning laptop so I'm not online much. But I did grow up in Berkeley Heights, and it was a somewhat countrified area. It's now strictly suburban, but it had a pleasant small town feel to it then. My relatives lived in Summit, New Jersey which was a somewhat wealthier town, two towns away.

I noticed in the Playbill that the production has a Hooters consultant. Yes, we do! [Brooks Ashmanskas] was actually brought in to work on the staging of that scene, since it has a lot of music underneath it. He's actually an actor and sometimes a director, so we thought it was fun to call him a Hooters consultant, but he's not literally from Hooters.

Too bad, I was hoping that was actually a career option. Yeah, I'm always interested in new career options, too.

There's an ongoing discussion about theater in the play and one of the characters is said to have to committed suicide during three long Tom Stoppard plays, which got a huge laugh. Is that based on any experience you had, perhaps during Coast of Utopia? Ohhh... I'd rather not say. Or rather, let me say it wasn't based on any suicide!

Okay, but does the play reflect any of your feelings about contemporary theater? Because there are those long monologues about Broadway in the play. I lived in New York from '75 to '96, and then I moved to Pennsylvania, but for different periods I've had sublets in the city, and so I've just seen so much theater. And sometimes, and this is an awful thing to admit, but it's harder to engage me because I feel that I've seen so much. And sometimes something will be revived and I'll go, "Oh, didn't we just see this?" So I think it's a little bit my age. But I do still get excited by some things I see, including revivals. The Gypsy revival with Patti LuPone and my leading lady in this play [Laura Benanti] was very exciting to me. I hadn't met Laura at that time. But yes, I think it's how much theater I've seen, and so I think a lot of Laura's disinterest in theater comes from that part of me.

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Joan Marcus

There's a shadow government that is dramatized in the play. Does that come from your own interest in conspiracy theories? Someone on the production just asked me that question! I'm not a huge conspiracy person, but I'm probably just a few steps away from it. [Laughs] But I mean, from what we know openly about the Cheney Vice-Presidency, his maneuvering of foreign policy certainly felt like a shadow government, or a parallel government, if not shadow. I especially remember during the buildup to the Iraq war, he was unhappy about the foreign intelligence, so he was doing it on his own, and getting other people do to it out of his office. So I thought, who are these other people? Because the ones who were involved in working in that area certainly gave the impression that he was looking for people to find the intelligence he wanted, as opposed to the intelligence that was out there.

And there was the Office of Special Plans. Right, right. So I was thinking about that, and then I was thinking about two of my favorite movies:The Manchurian Candidate, and another not-funny movie called Seven Days in May. In that one, the military is not happy with the president and they're planning a coup. Kirk Douglas, who is also in the military, finds out about it, and he's the good guy. When I was writing the father as this right-wing character, I realized that I also wanted him to have enough power to cause something bad to happen. And the main thing I thought about was Seven Days in May, where people in the military were ready to do other things. And then, of course, Dr. Strangelove.

You always hear this argument justifying torture, the scenario that a bomb's about to detonate and information has to be extracted from a suspect. How do you feel about that point of view? I feel it's a false question that we should not be debating. I feel that if someone knew for sure that that was happening, and made a strong choice, then that's one thing, but I don't think we need to make it a policy. You hear about these renditions, in which people have been picked up and there's been a mistake and they've been in prison for three or four years and they won't even apologize to them. Because, I guess if you apologize it acknowledges what happened.

Look at the way the intelligence on Iraq was so wrong. I feel that Hussein was a bad person, but look how we supported him when he was busy killing the Kurds, which George Bush brought up every ten minutes. But Washington helped him use the chemical weapons he used to kill people. Because we were using him as balance against Iran. I think the main thing to point out—and in talking about this I sound like a typical liberal, which perhaps I am—is that a lot of people who work in intelligence say torturing does not get good results, because people will say anything. I guess that's really my take.

Of course, I agree with what you said, but that's part of living in New York. I know, I know; it's the bubble.

And then you go out of town and suddenly you're sitting next to someone at a dinner and you realize that they feel quite differently about the issues New York liberals have spent the entire Bush administration ranting about to each other. Do you ever have that experience? Certainly. I've even had it a bit in Bucks County, where I live. It used to be a very Republican place. Gore and Kerry did win by small margins, but they did win. And now it's become more Democratic, due to the offenses of the Bush administration. I understand the Republicans like Andrew Sullivan or David Frum or Peggy Noonan, who basically say, 'Wow, the Bush administration really screwed us and wrecked Republicanism and now we have to figure out what that is again." I understand them, but the ones who are still ranting for more tax cuts and more invasions... I just don't understand them.

Special thanks to Jessica Madison for her assistance.