A smash in London, Guantanamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” arrived at 45 Bleecker Theater just in time for the Republican Convention. It’s about those detained in the “‘so-called’ war on terror” (as Canada’s CBC likes to call it), and its program is dense with helpful background information: Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, we’re told, “exists as a result of what one might call the first phase of outward U.S. imperialism, as opposed to inward imperialism, the so-called manifest destiny under which the United States conquered much of North America.”

Let’s hold it there for a moment. The Guantanamo detentions have certainly disquieted large numbers of people, not all of them on the left. In Britain, the first pictures of the prisoners arriving in Cuba marked the point at which many nominally conservative commentators began abandoning the war on terror, even though most of their concerns—malaria, mosquitoes—were bogus and stemmed more from their aversion to basic research than anything Rumsfeld had done. But the orange jump-suits for the detainees proved a durable hit, to the point where they’re now an instantly recognizable shorthand for any director in need of “relevance.” Simon McBurney’s recent production of Measure for Measure, at the Royal National Theatre, dressed the Viennese prisoners in orange Guantanamo chic, and needless to say everyone got the joke.

But, if what’s going on at Guantanamo is supposed to be a moral outrage obvious to all, why expand the brief? If you’re seriously interested in converting the open-minded