September 7 – 25, 2016
Welcome to Club Abu, the darkest party in Baghdad. An incendiary rock musical that pulls back the curtain of one of the greatest moral challenges we have faced as a nation and sets it to a wicked irreverent back beat.
Bad Apples is a rock musical inspired by the real-life prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Bad Apples seeks to answer the simple question: How in God’s name did this happen? Two soldiers ended up pregnant by fellow soldier Charles Graner; both women wanted to marry him, competed with each other to win his love, and enthusiastically tortured prisoners together, documenting most of it in pictures that later leaked and shocked the world.
Who were the victims? Who were the villains? Is sadism part of being human? Normal for war? Normal for love? Was Abu really an aberration brought on by a few “bad apples” or does it speak to something deeper in our national psyche? Bad Apples is not a history play. It digs deeper than the facts, exploring a twisted theatrical world inspired by a fictionalized Abu Ghraib.
“Nothing I can tell you about this play does it justice, except come ready to be rocked. Leave your judgments, and your kids, at home.” —Huffington Post