COURTESY OF NICOLE TESSIER Nina Buck plays a patient in "The Captive" and Robert Wyllie, left, Ryan Burbank and Thomas Smith play her guards.

Mistreated prisoners
carries tale of ‘Captive’

Can a play written 200 years ago address the issues raised by the discovery that Americans, in this current war, torture political prisoners, too? University of Hawaii student director Frank Episale intends to do that with his staging of "The Captive."

'The Captive' Where: Ernst Lab Theatre, University of Hawaii-Manoa When: 11 p.m. Saturday, March 11 and 12, and 8 p.m. Sunday Tickets: $8 general; $7 non-UHM students, seniors, military, and UH faculty/staff; $3 UHM students with validated Spring 2005 UHM student ID Call: 956-7655

The raw material for Episale's project is a play written by M.G. Lewis back in 1803 about a woman who claims she has been unjustly imprisoned in a dungeon-like mental hospital. Episale found it in an anthology of gothic plays while researching plays set in prisons.

He notes that although there were no "meds" being allocated during Lewis' time, the play's stage directions never conclusively establish that the female captive has been wrongfully imprisoned.

"She calls the guards 'jailers' (and) it feels very much like a dungeon, but it does seem to be a mental institution. She's claiming that she shouldn't be there, she's not mad, her husband put her there, and she'll never see her son again. As written at face value, she's been wrongfully imprisoned, (but) if I were staging this (as Lewis wrote it), there's this possibility that she's crazy and deserves to be there."

Episale has reworked the play as a starker and more direct indictment of the mistreatment of those imprisoned, be they women in a dungeon or Muslim men of undetermined status in the new American gulag.