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Out of the darkness, Capt. Rachel Radcliff (Jan Zvaifler) steps, in fatigues with a Big Red One patch on her shoulder, briefcase in tow, wearily reeling off the dizzy details, in operations jargon and military time, of a journey to yet another Middle Eas tern backwater under fire. 

“Hours waiting on tarmac ... transport snafu ... Is THAT a McDonald’s? ... so this’s what an invasion looks like ... 24 coffins to be shipped home.” The opening of Central Works’ Enemy Combatant at the City Club is ominous, a dream of the recent past, or is it a nightmarish continuation, the future bringing more of the same? 

“Welcome to the Ice House!” A greeting yelled in hoarse voice by Col. Lester Kaye (Keith Cox), an old colleague of her father. Capt. Radcliff was invited to look out from this old Turkish fortress on the heights in Yemen over the baked sands of the Saudi desert from 8,500 feet. “That’s why it’s called the Ice House.”  

Asked by Rachel why she’s been summoned to such a place (“I don’t know what my mission is.”), Col. Kaye reveals there’s something on ice in the Ice House. “There’s a ghost here, do you read me?” he says, an “enemy combatant” charged with killing a CIA interrogator--an American citizen to be tried in situ by a military commission for treason. 

Capt. Radcliff is a Judge Advocate General, brought to defend the Enemy Combatant, a Mr. Morehouse, Marvin Samuel (played by David Alan Moss). She finds him in a cell on the tile floor, a black American in orange prison jumpsuit, reading a dog-earred po cketbook Qu’ran, prostrating himself, praying, but otherwise silent, refusing help, not responding to his name. He tells her she’s not wanted, he’s at peace—and she’s CIA, she’s a Jew. 

Explaining military law (“They can convict on a 2/3 majority, even on sentence of death; hearsay is admissible”) she asks, “Does any of this make sense to you?” He giggles. “Shall I file for an alternative?” He responds, “Do what you will.” And he asks Allah to wash away his sins “with ice water and frost.” 

So begins the triangle of dialogues and monologues that define the action of Enemy Combatant. Rachel reports to Col. Kaye what Marvin/Farid’s said—and that her mother’s a Jew. “Really!”—”Do you have a problem with that?”—”What was it like?” Her father a military man, m other a liberal—there were arguments. And Rachel wonders about the new protocols. Farid asks her if he can write a letter to his mother; he can’t have a pen since it could be a weapon. “The pen’s mightier than the sword?”—“How did you get here?” 

Farid op ens up in a tour-de-force series of monologues on his translation from gospel church in Oakland to Nation of Islam to Malcolm X’s autobiography to true Islam and a one-way ticket to Yemen, where he avows he got caught in the middle of the anti-terrorist invasion, and was tortured into a confession. 

Intercut with Farid’s one-man theater of moods, gestures of ecstasy and terrors, Col. Kaye addresses the audience with material from the CIA KUBARK document on coercive interrogation: “I can’t teach anyone to be an interrogator ... only teach guidelines ... conducted under duress, it will probably involve legality ... Remember this—time is on your side.” 

Gary Graves’ play obviously takes off from the John Lindh treason case, and reels in concerns from what’s happened since, including Abu Ghraib and the background to the confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzalez. Graves’ script is ambitious, endeavoring to embody the upshot of a densely tangled controversy into an innovative chamber play. 

His stage direction takes the text out onto the floor of this chamber by the City Club patio and uses every square inch with an economy that highlights David Alan Moss’s ecstatsies and terrors, his wounded dignity dissolving in a pantomime of being stripped of all human dig nity. 

Central Works is a company founded on collaboration in order to make a performance, and it shows: all three performers are at the top of their game, especially working together, with Graves’ direction. 

But more than the ancient mountain fortress i s haunted. Something in the text rings hollow. Marvin/Farid’s character is presented too much as an innocent victim. The ambiguities attendant on the Lindh case and the arguments over measures to fight the “War on Terror” are passed over or only hinted a t too late. 

A maze of questions opens out into a melodrama, where Moss’ remarkable monologues become histrionics. Jan Zvaifler’s Capt. Rachel Radcliff (who covers her own ambivalence with adherence to duty) is sometimes displaced into ingenuousness and p assivity. And Keith Cox’s Col. Kaye is too much the bad guy—almost omniscient, like Iago replying “You know what you know.”  

This gap in a script that essays into difficult territory undercuts the production’s effectiveness, but—seen as a work-in-progres s—Enemy Combatant is effective nonetheless, and a platform for the excellence of the cast and the director.  

The last image especially sticks: Farid in raw cotton mufti and knit cap, sitting on the tile floor in a patch of light, barred with shadow—remot e, silent, peaceful. Such memories it recounts and triggers, the very image of what another American citizen charged with treason may have been evoking when—freed from 13 years custody, a journalist remarked he must be enjoying the peace and quiet of free dom—poet Ezra Pound replied, “Peace and quiet are two completely different things,” then returned to his own haunted silence.