Saturday October 3rd - Show Number Two

We return to the theatre for our last show in Butare.  We start late, but have a good audience, more people than the afternoon and quietly attentive.  The audience is mostly male - where are the women? 

The talkback gives me both hope & doubt - more questions from the audience, one from a local police commissioner who seems too young for his position.  He wants to see more work about the larger forces behind a genocide.  It seems to me that this play deals with the individual's responsibility to common humanity. 

Ross handles this question well, explaining that plays can only be so long, so creators are limited as to what they can focus on in any given story, and seems to deeply take in the feedback from this man and again my respect for Ross grows. 

I cannot even begin to imagine how I would answer in Ross's position - I am seized with a moment of despair, wondering if there is some deep misunderstanding of the play happening for our audience, wondering if they are all wondering why we do not deal with the machinery behind Genocide - and if so, does that mean that there is no interest in individual responsibility?  How can that be?  Rwanda's reconciliation programs & Gacaca courts focus on the individual responsibility for one's actions. 

I feel confused in this moment.

The actors are asked by a young man in the audience how we can feel so deeply for this story, these characters.  As my colleagues answer articulately as to how they come to feel/believe/become their characters, I wonder if there is a fascination in the audience as to how people who have not experienced Genocide can portray it.  I hope that this question means that we are believable, that we do justice to their personal history, private as it may be. 

When we go to a memorial, I will hope that I have a chance to ask a survivor how they feel when Westerners visit these sites and break down.  Is it upsetting, or insulting, or confusing...?

Lili Francks has not participated in this talkback, but afterwards, in the dark beside the massive NUR bus, this same young man who asked the question, finds her and hugs her and begins to tell her his story.  This has already happened to Lili after the opening night show - people come to her, they tell her things.  They feel she understands.

 We have been asked many times if Lili is Rwandese.  She hears their words with grace and humility, and allows them the time they need to connect with her, to tell her anything they need to tell.  She is a remarkable woman - as strong and as flexible as a lightning rod. 

John & Tyler have worked a very long day again - the 2nd show started late and after the talkback it is very late indeed.  John is driven to be in the thick of the action, and seems tireless. I wonder when it will hit him, the exhaustion.  I wonder when it will hit the rest of us - we are all running from one event to another, from one task to another, squeezing in personal errands for Halls or cigarettes at the local supermarket,  and the only respite seems to come when we are sitting, waiting for a meal to come to the table.

On Sunday our film crew will follow Jack, Layne & Rick Banville on their early morning walk about town as the local people make their way to work. They will go to church, hear the choir sing, and see what they can find in Butare.

Footnote: Later this week, I will meet a young female police officer who is only 18.  She has 2 children, 4 & 3 years old.  Many people in these positions are younger than their Canadian counterparts.  I haven't yet seen many elderly people on the streets in Butare.  I've seen only two of them, and one is screaming nonsense at a crowd of young men, who are teasing him, trying to box with him.  One man tells me in French that he is mentally ill - "fou".



Post by Tara