CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Testifying at the January trial of a U.S. soldier accused of prisoner abuse at the American prison in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi detainee, Hussein Mutar, said “the Americans were torturing us like it was theater to them.”

Tonight at Harvard, Abu Ghraib will become theater, as students re-enact the prisoner abuse in a 90-minute university-funded performance that, according to the show’s Web site, is designed “to inflame.”

“It was important to spice up the theater scene at Harvard,” said Currun Singh, the 19-year-old Kuwaiti-born sophomore from Honolulu, Hawaii, who wrote and is directing the play.

“Abu Ghraib” opens with a handcuffed male actor – clothed only in a black hood – holding his genitals while standing atop a three-foot box placed center stage. Later in the show, the character of Army Specialist Charles Graner, portrayed by freshman Rob Salas, 18, urinates on a detainee who has been tied to a door, although Mr. Salas said he only “stage” urinates with his back to the audience.

“We haven’t censored ourselves,” Mr. Singh said, while noting that the play does avoid full-frontal nudity. “The prisoners get roughed up a bit,” he said, but the play for the most part relies on “stylized violence.”

Mr. Singh said he composed the show’s profanity-laden script largely based on trial testimony from the trial of Specialist Graner, who in January was found guilty by a military court-martial on nine counts, including maltreatment of detainees, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Mr. Singh said the show aims “to approximate the truth as much as possible.”

But Mr. Singh also takes artistic license with the character of Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the Army Reserve general formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib. One scene depicts General Karpinski taping electric nodes to the body of a female prisoner – despite an Army investigation that concluded this month “that no action or lack of action on [Karpinski’s] part contributed specifically to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

Xin Wei Ngiam, the 20-year-old Singapore native who is the play’s producer, describes the play as “a call to action for human rights,” and she said, “We’ve tried very hard to make it nonpartisan.”

Tickets at the show’s venue, the 80-person Loeb Experimental Theater, are free, so Ms. Ngiam raised $3,450 to defray production expenses, collecting several hundred dollars from university administrators.

“We thought it was a worthwhile project that challenges students to expand themselves creatively and stretch their artistic muscles, so to speak,” said Jack Megan, director of the Harvard Office for the Arts, which contributed $400 to the show.

Harvard’s Institute of Politics awarded a $500 grant to the show with the hope “that this will raise discussion on campus,” the institute’s executive director, Catherine McLaughlin, said.

“The show is meant to provoke,” Mr. Singh said. “Controversy? There’s been tons.”

The student-run campus magazine Fifteen Minutes asked in a February article on the show: “Isn’t that a little – what’s the word? – tasteless?”

Mr. Singh said the show’s flyers have been repeatedly defaced in one freshman dorm.

“We’re excited to have people tear our posters down because it means that people care enough one way or another, that this is important enough to talk about, important enough to act upon.”

Mr. Singh said his cast and crew will consider taking their show on the road to other college campuses after its three-day run ends Saturday night.