Spoiler Paragraph for Guards at the Taj at Steppenwolf Theatre Company

The guards are tasked with a very hard task of cutting off 20,000 pairs of hands to make sure that nothing as beautiful as the Taj Mahal will ever be built again. This really messes them both up, but especially Babur. There is one scene where he is wearing bloody clothes and Humayun bathes him and helps him get dressed while Babur is just staring off into the distance, just blank. It is so moving to see these two guards who are supposed to be stoic and menacing acting so vulnerable with each other and them being completely wrecked. It shows there is damage to everyone involved. And that is what makes it so hard to figure out if they are actually bad because they did what they were ordered to do. You already love them which means you want to basically let them off the hook, and in scene two, that is basically possible because you don't see the actual action, you just see the aftermath. That is still pretty distressing, but not as bad as seeing someone's hands cut off. There is no screaming or pleading or any actual people you have to see. But then in scene four you actually see Humayun cut off Babur's hands and Babur is pleading to him and telling him that he has an escape plan. In the middle of Babur's sentence Humayun chops of his hands, and sears them, and Babur is rolling on the floor in agony and it is so horrible to watch. But you realize that there were 20,000 people who had just had that done to them a few days earlier. It shows that watching one person get their hands cut off feels more horrible than hearing about 20,000. It's like that thought experiment that asks if you would push one person in front of a train to save 20 people down the track. Mathematically in makes sense to save 20 people by killing one, but emotionally it is harder to push the person to save the 20. I think this play wants us to think about why it is so different seeing one person get their hands cut off compared to seeing a basket full of bloody hands and how we can ignore large-scale tragedies but not smaller personal ones. Return to review.