After the dust from the 2001 bombardment of Afghanistan cleared, a young British man, Ruhel Ahmed, went into Kandahar, Afghanistan's chief commercial city, to assist the wounded with medical supplies he had bought himself. Almost a year later, fellow British citizen Bisher al-Rawi flew to The Gambia to start a business that would give many impoverished Gambians jobs.

If neither of them had been taught that no good deed goes unpunished, now they know.

Ahmed was captured by Afghani warlords and eventually rescued by United States soldiers, only to be detained at the U.S. naval base in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay. Al-Rawi joined him there in early 2003 after being arrested at the Gambian airport.

The men are two of a group of four British citizens detained at the Guantanamo naval base without charge, whose stories are told by actors in Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, a theatrical documentary written entirely from letters, interviews and government statements, running through Dec. 11 at Studio Theatre in Washington.

Unlike the format of most plays, actors playing the detainees do not directly recreate their experiences. One detainee and family members of the other three sit and tell the audience their stories, as their characters did when interviewed by the play's writers. Detainees stand in cells and read letters their characters wrote home, lawyers repeat statements their characters made in court, and actors playing the likes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw recreate press conferences.

"We're playing characters, but what we're playing more than anything else is information," actor Ramiz Monsef, who plays al-Rawi, says.

Monsef picked Guantanamo over another show he had planned to act in, and Nafees Hamid, the actor playing Ahmed, pulled out of shows he was cast in to do Guantanamo because he feels so strongly about the issue, he says.

"Muslims are just 'the other,'" he says, echoing a line from the play. "It's very easy to persecute 'the other' and put them in these types of conditions" - conditions like those of his character, who had a dislocated eye that required special contact lenses continuously sent by his family. Although the Red Cross reported dropping his contacts off several times, Ahmed never received them, and eventually was blinded in that eye when it shattered.

"We've heard stuff about how he's basically an insomniac, he can't sleep at night, he has night terrors," Hamid says.

Or like the conditions of al-Rawi, who remains at the facility and has joined the hunger strike that began on the base in August, his lawyer says.

Monsef and Hamid are both reprising the roles they played in the San Francisco production of Guantanamo. The other two detainees, Moazzam Begg and Jamal al-Harith, are played by Kaveh Haerian and Andrew Stewart-Jones, respectively. Stewart-Jones, who played Jules in "Jules & Mimi," the fake soap opera in Sex and the City, played Jamal al-Harith in Guantanamo's U.S. premiere in New York.

The detainees' stories were researched and crafted into play form by English writers Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo. Slovo, the daughter of leading anti-apartheid activists, is the author of an internationally bestselling autobiography, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, about her childhood in South Africa. Brittain, now a researcher at the London School of Economics, reported for The Guardian, a major English daily newspaper, for 20 years, eventually serving as a foreign editor.

Seeing the events at Guantanamo unfold in play form resonates with the audience more than a newspaper article does, Brittain says.

"They had to take it in in a way that most people prefer not to when they are reading the paper - it's just a story and you let it pass, you don't let it affect you," she says. "I think theater has this transformative quality so that people are affected in their hearts."

If some complain the script is liberally biased, that's because it is, but at no fault of the authors, Hamid says.

"The authors made many attempts to talk to members of the British government and the United States government, and they never responded," he says, a statement in agreement with a disclaimer in the play's program.

Biased or not, Hamid and Monsef say the beauty of Guantanamo is in the reaction it sparks from the audience.

"They walk out of it thinking, and they leave and they talk to each other," Monsef says.

Contact reporter Alia Malik at malikdbk@gmail.com.