On March 20, 2003, U.S. troops marched into Iraq to free the country from the iron rule of Saddam Hussein. People cheered as the statue of the Iraqi dictator was pulled down. As we now know, displacing Saddam was the easy part. Rebuilding the country and making it safe is now proving to be more difficult than U.S. officials thought.

What has it been like for Iraqis who lived through the American invasion and its aftermath? Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank, the husband-wife team whose Off Broadway play, The Exonerated, focused on wrongly convicted Death Row inmates, traveled to Jordan to find out. They interviewed 37 Iraqis for their personal stories about life before and after Saddam. The result is Aftermath now being performed at the New York Theatre Workshop.

Nine actors, all of Middle Eastern descent, represent a cross-section of these Iraqi civilians. (While The Exonerated had a rotating cast, Aftermath will not). We hear from a translator, a doctor, two couples, and an Iman. The translator, a self-assured Fajer Al-Kaisi, reminds the audience that there are four million Iraqi refugees worldwide. “These are six of these stories,” he says. (Two of the stories are from couples).

Blank and Jensen had their work cut out for them culling what one expects were hours of interviews into 90 minutes of compelling theatre. The characters rarely interact (exceptions are the couples and the translator who frequently comments), instead telling their stories to the audience with a range of emotions. Outstanding are Amir Atison, as a doctor, and Laith Nakli as the Iman, but all the actors are persuasive. The common thread running through all these impassioned accounts is the hope felt when the Americans first arrived and disappointment, even anger for the result. “There was chaos everywhere,” one person remarks. Even the translator, an Iraqi, comes in for criticism, being seen as an opportunist, telling the Americans what they wanted to hear rather than what was being said.

While Saddam was in power, a story was told about the television repair person who, failing to fix the set, glues a photo of Saddam Hussein to the screen. When his customer is confused, he says that’s the only image he will see on the TV anyway. Why worry if it doesn’t work?

The fact that the story is told with nostalgia for another time, seems to say it all. As bad as conditions were under Saddam, there was predictability. There are no diatribes, however, against the U.S. president, past or present. Blank and Jensen are wise enough to let these Iraqis speak for themselves. No embellishment needed.

Aftermath
New York Theatre Workshop
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