STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Ansar’: Look at Political Imprisonment

The program states that “Ansar 3,” which had its only performance Saturday in the Robert Frost Auditorium of Culver City High School, is dedicated to the Intifada “detainees behind the barbed wire of Kitziot Military Detention Center, Ansar 3.” The event marked the first time that a Palestinian theater company has performed in Los Angeles, though, judging from the smallish turnout, few people knew it.

The two-character piece, which focuses on survival in a military desert camp, stops short of identifying the jailers. Presented by the Al-Masrah theater company from Jerusalem, it was written by the four men who take part in it: Nidal Khatib, Ismail Dabbagh, Abed Jubeh and Fateh Azzam. Dabbagh and Khatib play the prisoners, Azzam directed and Jubeh supplied the percussion (a hand drum) that is the pulse of the production.

The men claim that “Ansar 3” is based on true experience and there is no reason to doubt it. Like “The Island,” which depicts life in a South African prison, or “Bent,” which focuses on the survival of homosexual men in a Nazi prison camp, “Ansar 3” gives us the day-to-day existence of Palestinians detained on vague political charges with all of the attendant ills of such a situation: the beatings, the bad food, loneliness, anger, terrors, small joys and the quest for grace under pressure.

Nothing new here. What distinguishes this political imprisonment play is its provenance. The presentation is primitive, relying on a few abstract set pieces, a projection or two and some elementary lighting. As political theater, “Ansar 3” could be deeper. Except for some fine moments at the beginning that suggest arrest and mistreatment, nicely coordinated with the urgency of Jubeh’s drumming, later scenes settle into diurnal depictions of incident that repeat without much build. Most are tender and personal but well short of probing.

In that sense, “Ansar 3,” is surprisingly benign, showing life in this camp as no better or worse than in any other circumstance in which people are shorn of their civil rights, be it in the desert, Siberia, China or among the hostage-takers of Lebanon.

The nearly generic approach lives up to the goals proclaimed in the program: to “attempt to find the universality in our Palestinian humanity . . . the truth that ties us to our fellow human beings.” But the message and the messengers deserved a broader audience. Al-Masrah belonged in the streets, perhaps out there on the Santa Monica Pier, as part of the weekend’s Santa Monica Festival, alongside that oldest and boldest of activist companies, the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Who knows? Those San Francisco hands might even have shared a theatrical trick or two.