Spandan Docu Theatre

Spandan takes the stage, 9/11 myth bust afresh

Suchetana Haldar

THE US conspiracy theory of 9/11 has swept the globe and has been done- brilliantly on screen. But in what is probably a first, Leftist playwright and director Sangram Guha and his team collaborated with international researchers and technicians to bring the show onstage. For Guha's Spandan IPTA, a CPM backed theatre group, it took two year of intensive research to put together the pieces of the complex jigsaw puzzle of the alleged US conspiracy in their latest production Anticlock The show found a high profile admiring audience in Left Front Chairman Biman Bose and State Commerce Minister Nirupam Sen. Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who watched the show earlier, was all praise for the play.

The message was loud and clear; With the fall of Communist Russia, the U.S. is left without an enemy, leaving the U.S. weapon industry with a very bleak prospect.
The WTC and the subsequent American war against terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran was necessary to breathe life into the $100 bn US arms industry.
In the war against terrorism, as one of the characters say, there is an enemy you can identify but you can't locate them. The plot begins with the mysterious death of Neil Fletcher, a French born American software engineer in New York. A journalist of the New York imes, Phillip Parker, approaches lawyer Peter Garrison to take up Fletcher's case.

Parker also tells the lawyer about Fletcher's association with the organisation OPEN, a computer server connecting individuals dedicated to expose the unholy nexus of the US administration, arms traders and terrorist outfits like Al Qaeda.

Garrison's hunt for the truth leads him to the dark alleys of New York where he meets a prostitute, Lola Cardue. Gradually, the plot unfolds to reveal the sinister designs of the US investigative agencies — the CIA and FBI.

The power packed performance of the entire cast including Sangram Guha, as lawyer Garrison and Samudra Guha as CIA agent Charles Allen deserves applause. Sampa Sen as Bennett Dawson is brilliant in the scenes where she reconstructs the sequences which leads her to identify the dead prostitute.

In a departure from conventional theatre, Anticlock incorporates screening of video clippings and stills of the 9/11 incidents, questioning the deliberate security lapses. These also included photographic documents to establish Osama Bin Laden's close links with the White house and his CIA training.

"The entire play is based on facts and even Benett Dawson's character is based on the life of Rave MacGuerra, a woman still languishing in American prison," claimed Sangram Guha. The script was the result of research from documents sourced from OPEN members. "The OPEN server's database was destroyed, though,' said Guha.