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Legacy of brutality
Saddam Hussein gets a taste of his own medicine
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Saddam Hussein is being tortured in a dank, musty-smelling, low-ceilinged room. The walls are bloodstained; rusty chains and piano wire dangle ominously. "Bomb U.S.A." is scrawled in one corner, bottles of poison line a shelf. With nearly a dozen witnesses looking on, Saddam’s shrieks and hollers ring out as Iraqi soldiers taunt him, spit in his face, whip him. He is electrocuted. He is castrated. His skin is peeled off like an orange rind. He is relieved of his fingernails, then of his fingers, then of his arms and legs, and finally (who knew?) of his pink lace panties.

The setting isn’t an undisclosed location in the Iraqi desert — in fact, the scene is being repeated three nights a week in Allston, where playwright and director Donato Colucci’s latest drama, It Only Hurts When I Laugh: The Torture and Execution of Saddam Hussein, is being performed in an intimate venue. The "theater," which seats exactly 11, is the basement of Colucci’s home. (And in case you hadn’t figured out by now, it’s not really Saddam, either. But thanks to a prosthetic nose and an unkempt tangle of a beard, local actor Jameel Maloof bears an uncanny resemblance to the disheveled dictator.) Colucci advertises his Underground Magic Theater as a "private club" to which bravehearted theatergoers must purchase a $25 "membership" guaranteeing one ticket to the show (as well as a detailed map to Chez Colucci).

This is not the first play Colucci has staged in his basement, or the most scrambled — there was The Great Gorgonzola & His New Assistant, an evening of magic tricks involving eggs — but it is certainly his ugliest. When Colucci founded the outdoor Publick Theatre in 1971 (still in operation, it bills itself as "Boston’s Oldest Resident Theater Company"), he modeled it after New York’s Central Park Shakespeare Theater Festival. But he was stirred to stage It Only Hurts through his fascination with the Théâtre du Grand Guignol, the 19th-century Parisian entity whose stage was a mecca of gore, murder, and other delicious monstrosities, with a few comedic interludes tossed in to lighten up the proceedings.

"Years ago, I read a book about the Grand Guignol Theatre, where all these blood-and-guts melodramas of murder and rape, chopping of limbs, all that kind of stuff, were performed," says Colucci. "Days after Saddam’s capture, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he got a taste of his own medicine?’ I flashed on Grand Guignol when I was thinking of Saddam. Here was an opportunity to do something ripped from today’s headline."

In It Only Hurts, Colucci exacts an imaginary revenge that has been out of reach in real life. The unrepentant dictator’s trial, after all, is not expected until next year; in the meantime, Colucci declares he’s going to give the public what it wants. Booming with evangelical fervor, he bellows, "No actor has suffered on stage like Saddam is gonna suffer!"

The ruthlessness of It Only Hurts is colored with swift kicks of black humor, and Colucci insists there’s more to the play than naked vigilantism. "Even though I’m doing this gory thing, I still felt I could have substance and character development. They’re not stereotypes." Still, the body of the play involves an audience watching (and flinching) as an Imam directs two Iraqi soldiers, assisted by a doctor, in the infliction of prolonged and calculated torture. The soldiers clearly relish his agony.

In particular, there’s the lusty smirk on a female soldier’s face as she whips Saddam. Although the allusion to the infamous Abu Ghraib photos of Private Lynndie England is unmistakable, Colucci says it was a happy accident: he conceived the role of the second soldier for a man, but when one of the actors had to drop out of the cast, and then his replacement did the same, Colucci reworked the script and hired a woman. The choice gives the evening an unsettling dimension of universal (in)humanity — it’s a play deserving of England’s horrific thumbs up.

It Only Hurts When I Laugh, presented by Underground Magic Theatre, opens officially on July 24 and runs Saturdays through Mondays at 8 p.m. at 51 Hano Street, rear, in Allston; call (617) 787-2991.


Issue Date: July 23 - 29, 2004
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