InterAct's "Love Lessons From Abu Ghraib'

One-person shows generally fall into three categories: an actor enacting multiple roles in a plot-driven narrative; a monologue exploration of a famous figure or historical event; or a first-person account of the playwright's life.

Each can yield a potent evening of theater. Robert LePage's The Andersen Project captivated its audiences with both its story and its visual design. Biopics like William Gibson's Golda's Balcony, and to a much lesser extent Peter Parnell's QED, lend insight and humanity to the lives of Golda Meir and Richard Feynman, respectively.

The third category causes the most trouble. At its best— for instance Jake Ehrenreich's immigrant/coming-of-age hybrid, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn— the material and performance transcend the narrow contours of one person's life to convey the experience of a larger group, if not all humanity.

Jennifer Schelter's Love Lessons from Abu Ghraib represents the genre at its worst. Every third sentence seems to begin with "I," "me" or some variant of the first-person indulgent.

Journey to Istanbul

Love Lessons begins with a promising premise. Schelter, a teacher of Vinyasa yoga, has a student who works as an international human rights lawyer assigned to record testimony from former detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The lawyer has crumbled under the strain and begs Schelter to accompany her to Istanbul for the next round of questioning. The lawyer presumes that yoga could help restore these shattered Iraqi souls to a better state of repair.

Unfortunately, the synopsis is more fascinating than the material. The first line sets the intellectual tone: "Do I even believe all this spiritual shit?" The operative word here is "I."

Had Schelter emphasized "believe," we might have witnessed an illuminating examination of yoga's power to relieve real trauma. The Iraqi detainees suffered a nearly incomprehensible abuse. I, for one, would love to know to what degree yoga and meditation could mend these wounds.

Looking for dates

But aside from a few brief statements on the principles of yoga ("do no harm"), Schelter quickly veers away from therapeutic questions to tackle her own needs as a 40-something woman with no husband or children and only middling prospects for romance.

You see, she informs us, she hasn't had many successful dates lately. And who better to pester for love advice than a group of foreigners who suffered physical and psychological torture?

Yes, I'm serious.

My field is philosophy, not medicine, but here's my free advice for Schelter: You didn't need to leave America to learn that the reason you're not getting many second dates isn't because you scare men with your concern for human suffering. It's because you're the type of person who would use such misery as the backdrop to complain about your own life.

Man on a dog leash

To be sure, Schelter— an Equity actress— effectively portrays the pain of the torture victims, especially Abdulwahab, who was dragged across a concrete floor by a dog leash. His story—why he was detained, and what became of him after— would lend compelling subject matter to any drama, first person or otherwise.

But it doesn't add enough to redeem this play. Nor would a serious chat about the merits of yoga. Schelter has admitted in interviews, though not in the script, that she didn't do any yoga with former detainees. Apparently the yoga was just another excuse to talk about herself.