Theater Review - I Have Before Me ...: Murder, she wrote

One of the most arresting titles of modern times comes from Philip Gourevitch’s account of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. The line comes from a letter written by seven pastors providing sanctuary for 2,000 Tutsis and seeking rescue from the murderous Hutu extremists. The words’ matter-of-fact tone only emphasizes the horror that the prediction came true.

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Playwright and human-rights activist Sonja Linden credits Gourevitch’s work with inspiring the similarly lengthy title of her drama I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda. With such a conspicuous word count, the title makes itself hard to ignore, perhaps in contrast to the ease with which the United States and the United Nations were able to ignore the murders of at least 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.

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The unexpected part of Linden’s play, directed by Alan Kilpatrick for Theatre in the Square’s Alley Stage, is that the “Young Lady From Rwanda” part of the title is not the whole story. The “I” has no small significance as well, and the drama, impassioned but at times unsteady, explores not just the Rwandan genocide but such themes as literary inspiration and the developed world’s relationship to Third World nations such as Rwanda.

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Linden based the play partially on her experiences as writer-in-residence with the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Here, the playwright-surrogate is Simon (Randy Maggiore), a poet and blocked novelist who takes a job at a refugee center’s writing program. His first client is Juliette (Farida Kalala), a young Rwandan refugee writing a book about the darkest pages in her country’s history. “I have before me a remarkable document given to me by a young lady from Rwanda” is how Juliette first imagines the writing teacher — and in a way, the West itself, will respond to her book.

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Things don’t turn out to be that straightforward. Simon finds Juliette’s early chapters to be a dry, impersonal text and pushes her to focus on the deaths of her family and other firsthand experiences, despite the horrors of the events that leave her virtually unable to eat or sleep five years later.

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Kalala, who appeared in Theatre in the Square’s The Story last year, conveys the refugee experience with striking acuity. With no money or resources, Juliette lives like a prisoner in a hostel, and in one of the play’s most affecting sequences, describes the room and her surroundings as nothing but shades of gray. The only exception to the grayness is her own reflection in a mirror, and looking into her face, she can see traces of her deceased parents and relatives looking back at her. The play features similarly touching moments when Juliette lights candles for her family members, voicing memories of each one, as well as the wrenching speech that describes their violent deaths (and brought tears to the eyes of several audience members).

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It’s almost impossible for outsiders to grasp tragedies of such scope and cruelty as the Rwandan genocide, and Remarkable Document doesn’t shy away from the bleakness of the content. However, Linden also finds humor in the couple’s mismatched relationship. After they first meet, he wonders if she was intimidated by him; she reveals to have been utterly unimpressed. The plot even recalls the comedy Educating Rita, in which a poet/teacher finds renewed interest in life from a young student.

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More than just cultural differences complicate their relationship. When Juliette fails to bring in a writing assignment, Simon makes a “my dog ate my homework” joke, which leads to her anecdote that, after the massacre, dogs were killed in Rwanda because they started eating the dead bodies. As much as Simon sympathizes with her plight, he feels a kind of guilt and resentment toward it, as if he can never be her equal due to her past suffering: “What’s my little hurt against yours?”

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He feels similarly self-conscious about his abandoned novel, a work of post-modern literary gimmickry that seems especially pointless given that his student writes about her firsthand experiences that have true global importance. He’s also physically attracted to her, giving the character a host of mixed emotions, from literary jealousy to lust driven by a midlife crisis. Yet Maggiore only skims the surface of the role, frequently playing Simon in broad comedic colors that oversimplify the character’s complexity. It’s a superficial performance that makes the role seem more superficial than it needs to be.

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Although Juliette emerges with clarity not quite matched in the portrayal of Simon, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda still finds in their relationship an intriguing metaphor for the dynamic between the African and developed worlds. Simon seeks to help Juliette through the therapeutic process of writing, but the possibility of exploitation hangs in the air, and not necessarily sexually. Her beauty inspires his verse while her predicament gives his middle-class life a purpose, until helping her seems interchangeable with using her. It’s as if, for victims of tribulations in places such as Rwanda, suffering is a national resource.