Theater Review - Blood ritual

Maria Kizito invokes Rwandan massacre

The facts of the 1994 Rwandan massacre defy rational understanding. Ten years ago, the African nation’s Hutu majority murdered 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days.

The tragedy includes a footnote that’s even more unthinkable, if possible. Two Benedictine nuns, Sister Gertrude Mukangango and Sister Julienne “Maria” Kizito, abetted the execution of thousands. Kizito even carried gasoline that the Hutu militia used to lethally burn scores of Tutsis, as revealed in the nuns’ Belgian trial for genocide in 2001.

In its world premiere production at 7 Stages, Erik Ehn’s Maria Kizito uses highly symbolic stagecraft to attempt to illuminate both a personal and a geopolitical heart of darkness. The challenging production alternates between being horrific and being impenetrable, but demands the audience bear witness to the worst atrocity of our time.

The audience enters from the upstairs rear of the playhouse, so we gradually discern white-garbed figures sprawled across the stage floor, behind rows of junk piled in low barricades. The chilling tableau looks like a failed siege, and serves as an overture to Maria Kizito’s monstrous images.

Ehn flashes back and forth between the actual events and the subsequent trial, with nuns and refugees played by a distraught chorus (Caroline Karoki, Chante M. Lewis, Bobbi Lynne Scott and Yvonne Singh). Simple actions stand for catastrophes, like the way the chorus holds fishbowls of burning paper huts to represent the initial wave of anti-Tutsi attacks.

At a village monastery and health center, the nuns at first deny the refugees shelter, then report their whereabouts to the Hutu militia. Kizito (Crystal Dickinson) and Sister Gertrude (Marvel Micheale) act out of nationalism, self-preservation and even, in Kizito’s case, possible attraction to Hutu strongman Rekeraho (Johnell Easter). “Christian mercy” proves to be an alien concept.

As the 29-year-old Kizito, Dickinson at first seems a portrait of sheltered naivete, especially with her big, dark-rimmed glasses and sensible white sweater. But she alternates with depths of rage and chilling indifference to the Tutsis’ suffering and eventual slaughter. She only comes across as a cartoon of insanity when she bursts with childish laughter, then clamps her hand over her mouth speak-no-evil style.

Ehn writes Maria Kizito in a poetry of terrible beauty. At times, the refugees quote ghastly lines of eyewitness testimony, such as “Babies were sucking the breasts of dead mothers.” His dialogue also takes on a lyrical surrealism: Describing what the Hutus do to Tutsis, Kizito tells one refugee, “They tendon you. ... They cello you to broken string.”

The shocking material and poetic language combine for indelible moments: At one point, a man embraces a woman while speaking in the voice of a flame, and she calmly describes being consumed alive. Easter leads the chorus in a choreographed demonstration of machetes while matter-of-factly explaining how to kill most efficiently.

Directed by Del Hamilton, Maria Kizito’s representational style provides a means to imagine the state of Kizito’s fractured psyche, if not truly understand it. And the symbols can attempt to do justice to events on a scale far beyond the resources of live theater to convey.

But Maria Kizito at times feels more dense and difficult than necessary. Americans tend to be so insulated from the Third World that a dramatization should educate more than Maria Kizito does, despite the play’s unquestionable passion. The Kizito case includes more background details that deserve to be on the stage, not in the program notes or recommended reading. The show’s diverse music such as hip-hop and vintage rock ‘n’ roll evokes the involvement of Hutu radio in the massacres, but also drowns out dialogue we very much want to hear.

Still, Maria Kizito wrestles with global issues of moral urgency and gazes unflinchingly at humankind at its worst. Perhaps the nuns’ actions, like genocide itself, cannot be explained by a play or any other means. But they must be faced, lest the world allow them to happen again.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com