Early in Betrayed, we learn that a young Iraqi working as a translator for the U.S. military after the ousting of Saddam Hussein literally is afraid of his own shadow -- and for good reason.
He tells a U.S. soldier that when he walks home from the base at the end of the day the floodlight meant to help secure the military casts his shadow far down the street, giving any insurgent who considers him a traitor for helping the Americans silent notice that he's within striking distance. Not to worry, says the soldier, a U.S. sniper has your back every step of the way and ensures your safety. So the translator, Laith, thanks the sniper the next time he sees him, but the sniper has no idea what he's talking about. It's an eye-opener for Laith. "I believed the Americans wouldn't lie to us," he tells his friend, Adnan, in journalist George Packer's debut play. "That was my first shock. Nobody's looking out for you."
Based on Packer's reporting for the New Yorker (his March 26, 2007, story on the subject also is titled "Betrayed") the play focuses on three Iraqis working for the U.S. who are caught in a cross-fire not only of violence but of mistrust and indifference. It gets a handsome and moving Southeastern debut at GableStage in Coral Gables, where producing artistic director Joseph Adler hustled to schedule it into the season-ending slot. The play opened Off-Broadway only in February, but nothing about Adler's end-of -summer production seems unfinished or hurried.
The story: Among the hundreds of Iraqis who applied for jobs with the occupying Americans, Laith (played by Antonio Amadeo), who learned English by listening to Metallica, Adnan (John Manzelli), a bookseller who learned English with the help of pornography, and a woman, Intisar (Ceci Fernandez), who quotes "Wuthering Heights," eventually end up together working as translators in the embassy.
But their yellow badges require them to line up for an hour or more each day outside the administrative center called the Green Zone to clear security so they can get to work inside. That gives various insurgents and militia members seeking traitors time to hone in on them. Receiving death threats, they request badges that would give them automatic clearance; it's denied. Nevertheless, as they gain the trust of one supervisor, another official becomes suspicious. After all, they live in the same neighborhoods as terrorists.
Actors Amadeo and Manzelli especially are top-rank as Laith and Adnan, and their Iraqi accents are consistent and convincing throughout (as were their Irish accents early this year in The Lonesome West at Amadeo's Naked Stage theater company).
Ricky Waugh does well by Prescott, an officious embassy functionary who becomes increasingly frustrated at government indifference toward the people he was sent to help. And Todd Allen Durkin, as a polygraph-administering interrogator, turns in a performance that is gut-wrenching in depicting of the impossibility of black-or-white responses in an evolving society of grays. Tech work is a dream. Matt Corey's sound disturbingly delivers a nearby explosion and more distant small-arms pops, and his original music variously has tones of the Middle East, of heavy metal guitar and of martial snare drum. Lyle Baskin's sets include simple desks and chairs for the offices at the embassy, woven rug and patterned walls for a red-hued neighborhood restaurant, and a palette seemingly based on desert-sand brown for fenced-off and guarded military bases.
Lighting by Jeff Quinn does it all: the offices' pale glare; the restaurant's intimate, subdued lighting that becomes just plain dark when Baghdad loses electricity then sputters to life when the power comes back on; and the muted glow of a fortified military base from an in-the-wings sunset.
