The new show by critically acclaimed Dumbshow is based on the ideas in Naomi Klein's book, “Shock and Awe.” As Dumbshow explains in a program note, the book “challenges the myth that over the past 70 years, free-market capitalism triumphed across the globe democratically and posits that often, its advancements have been forced on populations unwittingly when they were too shocked or distracted to realize what was happening.”
Electric Dreams dramatizes that theme in a complex, original and compelling way. It opens with four librarians facing up to the imminent closure of their library by a cost-conscious Tory city council. While packing up, they discover a box of documents and photographs belonging to a mysterious old woman who once did research at the library.
That woman, Rose, is based on Gail Kastner, who figured prominently in “Shock and Awe.” Back in the 1950s, Kastner was experimented on by a Canadian psychiatrist at McGill University, Dr. Ewan Cameron. He believed that “rather than try to discover the cause of his patients' anxieties and mental illnesses, he could simply wipe their brains clean and then reprogram them with healthier messages. He believed that he could create a blank slate for his patients to start again. In order to break his patients down, he used a cocktail of treatments: enforced insulin comas, excessive electro-convulsive therapy, hallucinogenic drugs, sensory deprivation and sensory overload.”
The CIA became interested in Cameron's ideas and used them, forty years later, as the basis for the interrogation (read torture) of U.S. prisoners in Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib. We first meet Rose when she is a young woman contemplating suicide. Not only is she depressive but she has no memory her mind having been wiped “clean” by Doctor Demento himself, Ewan Cameron. Rose's life is saved by a young man, a Chilean leftist named Sebastian. They fall in love and for a time know happiness, until the trauma of their early years (he, too, was tortured, not by Cameron but by the fascist Pinochet regime) catches up with them, destroys them.
When all this is revealed to the librarians, they do further research of their own which leads them to Naomi Klein's book—and to further applications of the shock and awe theory, especially the war in Iraq. There, after defeating the Iraqi army on the battlefield, the U.S. proceeded to destroy Iraq's entire infra-structure: its electricity, water and gas plants, its schools, libraries, museums and police barracks. By pounding the country and its institutions to bits, it was thought that a new, gloriously free and democratic society would rise up out of its ashes. We all know how that worked out. The librarians then come to the realization that they are also victims of shock an awe, namely the current campaign by the U.K's Tories to destroy the welfare state (which includes the public library system). “Are we experiencing a period of 'suspended animation’ while we watch the destruction taking place?” they wonder. Then answer is all too clear. Instead of just feeling helpless they decide to take action, fight back, reclaim their humanity and ideals.
Electric Dreams manages to tell this dense, multi-layered story in a clear and effective way. Yes, the play is political and polemical, but it is dramatized, acted and directed skillfully by this youthful, courageous theater company.
