Comments (0) Best New Play - 2009
George Packer's Betrayed at GableStage at the Biltmore
George Packer's Betrayed at GableStage at the Biltmore
1200 Anastasia Ave.
Coral Gables, FL
305-445-1119
OK, so Betrayed wasn't completely new when it opened at Joe Adler's GableStage. But it still had that new-play smell. George Packer is probably the best writer The New Yorker has had in a decade or more, and his 2007 article about the Iraqi translators who teamed up with American forces after the 2003 invasion ("Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America Most") was one of the most powerful pieces of journalism written lately. Packer is no 9-to-5er, and he felt its power too: The plight of the secular, liberty-loving, life-risking Democraphiles he'd met in Iraq haunted his dreams, and this play was the result. It gave the reactionary liberals who proliferated in George W. Bush's second term — the ones with the curiously partitioned minds, who deplored totalitarianism in theory but thought it tolerable in practice, at least when its only enemy was a corrupt Republican administration — one hell of a jolt and reminded our glibbest hawks what the real fight was about and what it was worth. A play can hope to do no more.
