Rendition

Two years ago, Ryan Kelly was a National Guardsman flying Black Hawk helicopters in combat in Iraq. Today, he’s engaged in a battle of a different sort: using his skill as a playwright to address some of the most disturbing issues of war.

The result of his labor is Rendition, a wrenching, sometimes funny, often brutal, two-act play that offers no easy answer to the question of how far a soldier should go to protect a comrade-in-arms. Named for the process of "rendering" or transferring prisoners of war from U.S. custody to that of another party with fewer restrictions on using torture to elicit information, Rendition uses the easily imagined scenario of a kidnapped soldier to envelop the audience in the harsh reality of Iraq’s front line.