"In A Daughter's Eyes,' by InterAct (1st review)

The ludicrous thing about politicized crimes is the certainty expressed by people who were nowhere near a given incident when it happened, and the alacrity with which they dehumanize those on the other side. The most striking example, of course, is the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia free-lance radio journalist convicted of murdering police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981.

To police supporters, Faulkner was a noble public servant in a dangerous job who lost his life at the hands of a homicidal black militant. To victims of police brutality and a skewed justice system, Abu-Jamal's conviction was (as one handout put it) "a political frame-up engineered by the Philly cops in collaboration with the District Attorney Ed Rendell, hanging Judge Sabo, and other local power brokers eager to silence Mumia."

Thousands of people around the world with symbolic axes to grind instinctively claim, based on their temperament and prior experience, to "know" what happened that night near 13th and Locust Streets. Yet only two people now living are known to have actually witnessed the killing.

Sphinx-like silence

One is Abu-Jamal himself, who was found wounded four feet from the dying policeman. The other is Wesley Cook, Abu-Jamal's apparently feeble-minded brother, who was stopped that night by Officer Faulkner for a traffic violation, thus setting the tragedy in motion. But Cook was never called to testify, presumably because he was mentally incompetent; and Abu-Jamal himself has maintained a Sphinx-like silence for 30 years as to what happened that night (a testament, according to his supporters, to his unselfish concern for larger issues of abstract justice rather than his own personal case), leaving his supporters and detractors alike free to paint their own scenarios.

Faulkner's mistreatment of Cook, according to one theory, prompted Abu-Jamal— then driving a cab and coincidentally parked nearby— to rush to his brother's aid. According to an opposing theory, Faulkner was a random officer in blue set up by angry black militants. And so it goes.

In the process, both Abu-Jamal and Faulkner have been lionized and demonized to levels that neither man deserves. And the critical distinctions between the three essential questions involved in the search for truth— Who shot Faulkner? If Abu-Jamal shot Faulkner, did he get a fair trial? And if he got a fair trial, does he deserve the death penalty?— have been hopelessly muddled.

Inconvenient questions

While each side reinforces its preconceptions in rallies, books and films, each pointedly overlooks questions inconvenient to its narrative. Such as: How come Mumia and his brother happened to converge at the same spot at 2 a.m.? If Mumia didn't kill Faulkner, who did? If someone else shot Faulkner, and Mumia was coming to Faulkner's assistance— as one defense scenario contends— why did Faulkner shoot Mumia, and why has Mumia steadfastly declined to shed any light on these questions?

Conversely, what was Officer Faulkner doing to Wesley Cook that could have caused Mumia— a man with no previous criminal record of any sort, even though, as an outspoken activist and former Black Panther, he'd been under police surveillance since his teens— to resort to violence?

When Sadat met Begin

Here's an even more intriguing question: What if, instead of lobbing endless rhetorical grenades at each other from distant camps, Faulkner's widow and Mumia's wife had to hang out together in a setting that required them to acknowledge their common humanity?

Such things do happen, you know. At International House in New York, where my father worked for nearly 50 years, Palestinians and Israelis, Pakistanis and Indians, Russians and Poles routinely learn to respect and even love each other once they perceive each other's individuality. According to the memoirs of the Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Anwar Sadat's 1977 trip to his enemy's capital, Jerusalem— anticipated with great apprehension— turned into a mini-love fest when members of the two government teams discovered that, under the skin, they were all worldly diplomats with common interests in culture, good food and fine wines.

Two women

This notion is the basis of a new play by A. Zell Williams, based on the Abu-Jamal case. In a Daughter's Eyes concerns the relationship of two women— Kathryn, the daughter of a slain policeman (Krista Apple), and Rehema, the daughter of his convicted murderer (Lynnette R. Freeman)— who've reluctantly joined forces, we are told, because doing so will advance their particular legal and polemical agendas.

It's an intriguing premise, but one that unfortunately fails in its execution. In Williams's script, we meet the two women five months after their first encounter, only to find them still spending most of the time shouting and interrupting each other, stomping out angrily (only to come back again) and otherwise engaging in heavy-handed histrionics (e.g., "You are the free market in all its trickle-down glory!") that ultimately degenerate into more violence.

Perhaps in the hands of more skilled actresses, Kathryn and Rehema would come across more as people rather than rhetorical symbols. Not only do the two characters fail to grasp each other's humanity; so does the playwright. But beyond that failure, Williams's script suffers from an essential flaw.

The real dramatic question here is how these women got together in the first place— not what's happening between them many months later. If Williams could let us envision that— well, then perhaps we could perceive how other intractable enemies might begin bridging their ostensibly unbridgeable differences. For that kind of insight, you'll have to look elsewhere. Boutros-Ghali's memoirs would be a better place to start.♦


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