'Lady From Rwanda' brings story of survival to American stage

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- British playwright Sonja Linden has spent her career bringing horrific subjects to the stage. She dramatized a prison bathing strike and set another play in a concentration camp. Now, the 1994 massacre in Rwanda is the subject of her latest work.\nEleven years after Hutu rebels began a 100-day slaughter of Tutsi in Central Africa, killing nearly a million people, Linden's small production with a big title will have its American premiere April 6 at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre.\n"I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda" will spend five weeks in Kansas City before theaters in Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and Chapel Hill, N.C., produce it next season.\n"Lady From Rwanda" follows the Academy Award-nominated "Hotel Rwanda" and HBO's "Sometimes in April" in bringing the massacre to American audiences. Like the films, the play was inspired by real people, in this case Linden's experience with a Rwandan refugee at a center for torture victims.\n"Art such as this can play a huge role in communicating unpleasant and important truths," Linden said in an interview from her home in London. "People are not always going to sit down and read articles or a history book."\nThe play focuses on a Tutsi survivor, Juliette. She's compelled to write a book about the genocide that killed her family and a struggling British writing teacher, Simon, encourages her. Simon works at a refugee center and his job is to chaperone his first client through a healing process of writing.\nPaul DeBoy portrays Simon. He said that he shared his character's naivete about the 1994 atrocity that many have called an underreported holocaust.\n"I knew nothing compared to what I know now," DeBoy said. "I was like Simon. The British didn't get involved, Rwanda was a Belgian colony. The Brits were left in the dark and stayed away from reporting it just like the Western media."\n"Lady From Rwanda" has played at small theaters in London since 2003. An abridged radio drama was also produced by BBC and the play is now being optioned as a movie by BBC Films.\nWhile on the surface "Lady From Rwanda" is a story about the aftermath of genocide, it doesn't shy from the deplorable scenes of the event. In the play, Juliette, played by Kenya Brome, talks openly during an initial meeting with her mentor.\n"There were dead bodies everywhere and the dogs were eating them," Juliette says. "Even the U.N. soldiers started to shoot them in the end. One shot and, 'Pow!'"\nThe play avoids being overtly political, however, and moments of tragedy are balanced by uplifting comedy. Simon's intellect is undermined by his untidy wardrobe, and cultural nuances among the Rwandan and British co-stars are jokingly lost in translation.\n"I knew it would be important to tie humor into the writing and not to beat the audience about the head with the subject matter," Linden said.\nRelief from the somber theme also plays out in awkwardly romantic moments between the middle-aged writer and the young Juliette.\nThe play is cinematic, with 19 scenes in all, but the stage is nearly bare -- only a bed, a desk, a chair and a stack of books. It's fitting for the intimate theater of about 200 seats. Gun shots and screams -- sounds that echoed as a soundtrack in "Hotel Rwanda" and during the real massacre -- are absent, leaving room for imagination and powerful acting.\nDirector Michael Bloom said recent movies have created interest in the slaughter and context for the play that might not have existed otherwise.\n"This is an important play and it's a perfect confluence of events to have the play come to the U.S.," Bloom said.\n"Lady From Rwanda" was the first major theater project to be done about the massacre, Bloom said, although an American play about a nun who lured the execution of thousands in the Rwanda genocide, Erik Ehn's "Maria Kizito," premiered last year in Atlanta.\nAnd Linden calls the play her most important project. The 59-year-old daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany has had a quiet career that has spanned decades but this is her first play to be shipped overseas.\nThe show was the inspiration for her production company, Ice and Fire, which is creating other works based on true stories of people removed from conflict zones. Her current play, "Crocodile Seeking Refuge," includes characters from war-torn Sudan and Iraq.\nPeter Altman, artistic director of the Kansas City Rep, said the Rwanda play could eventually appear in a dozen other U.S. cities.\nAltman stumbled upon "Lady From Rwanda" in a tiny pub theater while scouting shows in London for Kansas City's resident theater. Linden said she chose the lengthy title to challenge people's short attention span concerning Rwanda.\nAltman was intrigued by the play's long title, which appears in the opening lines of the show, and he was moved by the story.\n"It's important for American theaters to tell stories about different parts of the world," Altman said. "There are so many subjects and issues, but in the American conscious our field of vision is sometimes limited"