Bombs in the Ladies Room
Timothy McVeigh is currently the most publicly excoriated American terrorist, but he wasn’t the first. We just don’t hear as much about the others, whose crimes are often smaller–perhaps their bombs didn’t detonate, or they never even got to plant them. Maybe they left a bomb where news cameras had limited access, and the shattered glass of a multinational office or bank building didn’t become an emblem of betrayal overnight.
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The Lexington experiment, documented in Nora Rosenblum’s 1990 PBS film Through the Wire, isolated women convicted of terrorist crimes in brightly lit white-painted cells in the basement of Lexington Penitentiary. In a form of sensory deprivation, fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day, and the women were awakened every hour when they slept; they were mostly denied visitors, books, and natural light. Two of the four women in Rodgers’s play were imprisoned not in Lexington but in similar cells in Germany, but the common goal of the experiments was to secure information from the prisoners and persuade them to renounce the political convictions that led to their terrorist acts. According to the playwright, the experiment was shut down in 1989 after the ACLU won a suit against the Bureau of Prisons for first-amendment violations. But Rodgers claims that similar units are being built in many of the new prisons across the country.
The women who serve time in this landscape are filtered through Rodgers’s performance: she gives her script a mishmash of accents and attitudes that together provide a sense of the terrorists’ eccentricity. The historical characters are Ulrike Meinhof, a German children’s-rights activist and founding member of the Baader-Meinhof gang; Silvia Baraldini, an Italian citizen still serving a 43-year sentence for helping a member of the Black Liberation Army escape from prison; Irmgard Mšller, who bombed a U.S. military base in Heidelberg in 1972, killing three servicemen; and Alejandrina Torres, a Puerto Rican nationalist with the FALN, arrested in 1983 and charged with possession of weapons and explosives. Of the four, only Mšller was released (in 1994); Meinhof was found hanged in her cell, and Baraldini and Torres are serving time in minimum-security prisons, still suffering lasting physical and psychological problems from their months of sensory deprivation at Lexington. None was isolated for more than two years.
Feminists and left-leaning audiences will find it easier to sympathize with the play’s politics. I found myself wondering whether I would have been as easily convinced that this kind of punishment must be opposed if it were McVeigh or another neoconservative asking for my understanding. And if Rodgers is right about the experiment being reinstitutionalized in new prisons, we all have to face similar questions for real.
