On the same day U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft left Washington on a monthlong national tour to try to shore up rapidly crumbling national support for his beloved USA PATRIOT Act, Tariq Ahmed and Mody Naresh were arrested as they sat quietly aboard a Charlotte, North Carolina-bound train in Newark, NJ.

Ashcroft and his PATRIOT Act are, to a growing number of chagrined and concerned Americans, all too real. Ahmed and Naresh are a pair of fictional characters in Mike and Kris Kolker's "Civil Liberties", which tonight closed its Fringe run at Cooper Union's Wollman Auditorium.

Ahmed and Naresh are representative of the untold thousands of mostly Middle Eastern men residing in the United States who have been interrogated, harassed, arrested, detained, incarcerated and "disappeared" all courtesy of Ashcroft & Co.'s end-run around the U.S. Constitution, aka the USA PATRIOT Act.

Overwhelmingly passed by a cowed Congress in the anthrax-dusted days following the attacks of September 11, 2001 the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (don't you just love those bureaucratic acronyms) is one scary piece of legislation that would have had the likes of Joe ("no sense of decency") McCarthy, J. Edgar ("nice dress, fellah") Hoover and Tricky Dick ("I am not a crook") Nixon popping boners at the mere thought of its wide-ranging, Constitution-trampling potential.

The Act's "Appropriate Tools" allow the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government unprecedented powers within vague and undefined guidelines that have already resulted in, as the Center for Constitutional Rights has summarized, "a wholesale suspension of civil liberties that will reach far beyond those who are involved in terrorist activities." Probable cause, search warrants, and other pesky nuisances that make up the Fourth Amendment are easily swept aside by the Act's wide-ranging provisions aimed at rooting out terrorists, and the vague language makes it easy to define "terrorist" as just about anyone its proponents care to.

To the police and military authorities in "Civil Liberties", the Muslim Ahmed and the Hindu Naresh have "terrorist" all but stamped on their foreheads. Apprehended during a "routine" search of passengers on a Newark-to-Charlotte train, Ahmed and Naresh are incarcerated without due process in some Guantanamo-like hellhole for eight months before being allowed to return home, where they are promptly busted by the INS and taken away again.

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As effective drama, "Civil Liberties" is pretty tough going. The characters aren't people as much as types -- Ahmed (Gagan Deep Singh) and Naresh (Kenneth Maharaj) are unfailingly polite and deferential no matter what; as various asshole figures of authority, Tiffany Lea Williams and Michelle Ramoni aren't given the opportunity to do much more than swagger about twirling their billy clubs, smirking and shouting questions.

That the questions shouted are basically the same ones repeated over and over may help to underscore the nature of the two mens' plight, but it doesn't make for particularly compelling drama. And subtitling the show "An Avant-Garde Musical" is a stretch that borders upon false advertising.

There are no songs sung from a chain-link holding pen, no immigrant's lament for the dream of a better life turned nightmare (although that one's pretty much covered in a speech). The "musical" here is a haphazard collection of drum samples mixed with a MIDI player programmed to sound like an old Fender-Rhodes and allowed to run amok under the dialogue, noodling incessantly in the background.

The result is a weird juxtaposition of innocent immigrants' terror and trauma scored with a soundtrack that sounds like Return to Forever at its most languidly introspective. Fortunately, after a while I was able to push this intrusion into the background soundtrack of the city that surrounds Wollman Auditorium, back into the continuous subliminal aural haze of sirens, horns and car alarms.

What is more difficult to ignore and really annoying is the choice to mic the actors and process their voices through a vocorder, a vocal synthesizer that manipulates pitch. This ill-advised peripheral only contributed to making the dialogue a continuous struggle to understand. Plus, at the show I saw, the actors became unplugged three times, causing men in black to scurry about during the performance, plugging cords back in.

Uhhh...why...?

As good, old-time agit-prop theater, however, "Civil Liberties" is a roaring success. Relieved of the subtleties of well-crafted drama, its timing as a political tract -- snapping at the heels of the Ashcroft "Victory Act" dog & pony show -- could not be better. Like a clumsy film adaptation of a fine novel, where enduring the movie inspires you to discover the book, if seeing "Civil Liberties" has inspired people to educate themselves in the insidious, serpentine evil that is the USA PATRIOT Act, then this will have been a most worthy show indeed.

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For More Information On The USA PATRIOT Act,
Visit The Center For Constitutional Rights.

To Sign The STOP ASHCROFT Petition,
Visit Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard Dean.

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Walking around Washington Square, especially at night, always makes me feel slightly like that old snot-faced panty-sniffer from Jethro Tull's Aqualung. Remember him? Don't know why, exactly; maybe it's the Square's storied tradition of furtive drug-dealing and exchange of bodily fluids that always makes me feel like -- if I'm not powering through this place, bowling panhandlers over like tenpins -- I'm sure to be accosted. Or busted. Or both.

Did some world-class loitering the other night, trying to find the Brooklyn Pageant Project and FringeALFRESCO. Made a new friend, a probable Square regular who stumbled up, slopped part of her Budweiser tall boy on my shoes, thudded down next to me and announced, "I feel goooood!"

Sort of like James Brown, though I doubt the Godfather of Soul ever smelled as sweet as this little darlin'.

Yeah, baby.

Anyway, turns out even though I was a little late, I got there before the Project did, because when they did show up, you could hear them coming a block or two away.

Marching up along W. 4th with tambourines, drums and assorted other noisemakers, they reminded me of back in the day when I had an office in Laguna Beach, CA overlooking Pacific Coast Highway, and every day at noon the local Hare Krishna sect would parade past, banging and thumping and jingling.

The Brooklyn Pageant Project didn't have shaved heads and white robes, but they did have a beat-to-shit white mini-pickup pulling an old-time traveling snakeoil salesman caravan.

Egged on by a straw-hat-and-cane-equipped "step right up folks" MC/barker, the Project crew quickly unfolded their trailer into a tres-nifty footlight-equipped stage with an Andromache Chalfant-style, Chinese-box efficiency.

What unfolds from the compact stage is "Dust", a peppy, music-laced tale of a young man's journey West from the desolation of his Depression-era dust bowl home.

"Dust" is an ingenious, inventive, and thoroughly enjoyable show highlighted by the young cast's considerable musical talent. This bunch lays down some serious old-time country -- not that pop crap cluttering the airwaves today, but the pure and simple vintage hillbilly harmonies I suspect a good portion of the young New Yorkers in attendance the night I was had never before heard.

"Dust" has a couple more performances this weekend, both in the daytime. Catch it if you can.

It will make you feel goooood.

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