IN DARFUR FULL PRESS PAGE
Washington Examiner
'In Darfur' focuses on what grows in scorched earth
By: Barbara Mackay
Special to The Examiner
April 6, 2010
Most of us probably can't quote the United Nations' detailed definition of genocide, but we all know what it is. And we know that "genocide" -- with its references to destruction, politics, race and religion -- is a huge concept to comprehend, let alone transform into a play.
Yet that is what Winter Miller has done with "In Darfur," at Theater J. The play begins in a refugee camp in Darfur, a large region in western Sudan, where a young American doctor, Carlos (Lucas Beck), encounters a young woman, Hawa (Erika Rose). She has been raped by a gang of Janjaweed, the government-backed militia of Arab nomads, that has also killed her husband and destroyed all the homes in her village.
The third main character, Maryka (Rahaleh Nassri), is a journalist who begs Carlos to introduce her to Darfuris she can interview in order to get a story on the front page of the New York Times. Her moral dilemma is that she knows if she identifies anyone by name, they almost certainly will die. Carlos' situation is complicated by the fact that, in addition to being passionately devoted to protecting his patients' anonymity, he knows that if he cooperates with Maryka he can be thrown out of the country.
Director Derek Goldman maximizes the terror that ruled the aid camps in the spring of 2004, when "In Darfur" takes place. When his two ensemble members, Brandon White and Carl James, appear as soldiers throughout the play, they are truly threatening.
As Carlos, Beck is appropriately defensive, protective of his patients. Nassri is pushy and obstinate as Maryka, determined to let the world know the truth. Hannah J. Crowell's effective set consists of tall, moveable, gray-beige flats that suggest the hospital, Carlos' tent, Maryka's hotel, the desert. Costume designer Ivania Stack creates two brilliant remedies to the bleak camp surroundings: Hawa's maroon and crimson headscarf and orange skirt; and Hamida's (Jessica Frances Dukes') turquoise and aquamarine headscarf and skirt.
There are many elements to admire in this production, especially Dukes' soulful singing. But it is Rose's performance as Hawa that makes "In Darfur" extraordinary. The daughter of a sheik, Hawa is well-educated, a teacher. Rose brings out all of Hawa's pride, strength, courage and fragility.
Sadly, Miller's play is based on the reality she found in Sudan when she visited with New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Miller interviewed adults and children who were willing to talk in order to get the story out, then wrote the play in 2006.
Miller did not write "In Darfur" simply to move people. She intended the play to be a reminder that the tragedy of Darfur is not a thing of the past. And indeed, the headlines from the last four years have emphasized her message. According to the Enough Project, an organization dedicated to providing information on Darfur, in 2004, when "In Darfur" ends, almost 1.2 million people had been driven from their homes, including 1 million internally displaced people and 150,000 refugees in neighboring Chad. In 2010, approximately 2.6 million Darfuris remain internally displaced.
Washington City Paper
Arts & Entertainment : Theater Review
In Darfur
By Winter Miller; Directed by Derek Goldman
At Theater J, a chilling take on rape
By Chris Klimek on April 9, 2010
Requiem Darfur a Dream: Miller’s play is a memorial—and a mystery. Winter Miller’s In Darfur is one of those plays that seems at least obliquely to chronicle its own creation, like Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations or Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. In seeking to compress an unfathomable tragedy into a tellable story, Miller transfers her own pedagogical burden onto one of her three major characters: New York Times reporter Maryka (Rahaleh Nassri) has only days to turn up evidence of a genocide campaign backed by the Sudanese government before her editor reassigns her to a story with more established news value. “Are these good rebels or bad rebels?” Maryka’s editor wants to know, inquiring after the Sudan Liberation Movement. “They’re not great,” Maryka says. The difficulty of untangling the warring factions for Westerners hardens the Times’ reluctance. But Maryka has lucked into the ideal ambassador in Hawa, a teacher whose command of English gives her the ability to personalize the story for readers Maryka hopes will pressure their governments to act if she can get Darfur onto page one. Carlos (Lucas Beck), a frayed American doctor working in a camp for the displaced—Maryka and her editor quibble over whether to call them “refugees,” the sort of plausibility-building detail that bespeaks Miller’s background as a fact-checker for Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whom she accompanied to Sudan in 2006—doesn’t buy that help will come, but he’s certain that the mounted Janjaweed will kill anyone they spot talking to a reporter. Only superhuman intervention could end the conflict, he says: “Bush appoints Oprah Special Envoy to Sudan, and she ends this in a heartbeat.” Here and there, Miller stumbles into having Maryka and Carlos verbalize the stakes (“I’m just trying to do my job! Which is to save lives!”), though Nassri and Beck are skilled enough to sell it. The conflict isn’t abstract—it’s a practical question whether tending to the raped and mutilated or exposing their attackers to the world is ultimately the more humane response. But as with her character, Erika Rose’s haunted-but-hopeful performance as Hawa is what makes Derek Goldman’s elegant, compelling production register as a story rather than a debate. Whether Rose is recalling reading Edith Wharton at university or mulling whether her unborn baby was sired by her husband or one of his murderers, she lets you straight into her heart. When Hawa allows Maryka to snap her photo, the house holds its breath as though the lens were a gun barrel. Minutes after the lights have gone down, she endures a beating at the hands of a policeman for the crime of adultery—a Kafkaesque fate, and a common one for rape victims in the region. Goldman makes you watch it for a lot longer than you’ll want to. Which seems, under the circumstances, appropriate.
Washington Jewish Week
4/7/2010 8:59:00 PM
'In Darfur,' a genocide story
by Lisa Traiger
Arts Correspondent
The "Save Darfur" banners that hang in front of many synagogues have faded and drooped. The insatiable news cycle has long since moved on to another crisis du jour: Afghanistan, Haiti, health care, a congressional sex scandal.
But catastrophe in Sudan rages on. Attacks by various mercenary and military forces on the ground may have ceased, but life there remains grueling with tens of thousands of displaced Sudanese living in refugee camps where surviving the arduous conditions ‹ lack of the most basic necessities like food, sanitation, basic health care ‹ amounts to daily living.
Theater J has long made a point of producing thought-provoking, politically engaged works, and In Darfur ‹ playwright and journalist Winter Miller's 100-minute flashback on the early revelations of genocide in the east African nation ‹ is no exception. Finely directed by Derek Goldman, the one-act play unravels in spring 2004 as a reporter tries to verify facts on the ground to confirm genocide in Sudan for her demanding editor.
Featuring two Americans out of their element in the midst of the unfolding military and humanitarian crisis, the play wrestles with essential moral quandaries: racial, tribal and ethnic infighting among the Sudanese; white Western colonialism and its still-present aftereffects; who gets saved and who sacrificed in the chaos of war and escape; and should one life be lost in the hopes of improving many others?
While the play focuses on the white interlopers ‹ Carlos, an American doctor (Lucas Beck), and Maryka, a New York Times reporter on deadline (Rahaleh Nassri) ‹ the most stunning performance comes from Erika Rose, who plays Hawa, a proud Sudanese English teacher who has been raped, tortured and lost her family in an attack on her village. Rose's rich, buttery voice and her staunch, fearless demeanor mark Hawa as an indelible character, one who loves and needs her country: She won't relent and leave her Sudanese life behind to begin anew in America.
Joining Rose, the ensemble features Jessica Frances Dukes as her new-found friend, Hamida, and two young men who play multiple roles as Sudanese army militia members, Janjaweed mercenaries and corrupt police officers. Carl James and Brandon White are both fearsome and astoundingly intimidating, and seemingly proficient in barking orders in Arabic as coached by dialect coach Kim James Bey.
While In Darfur features no Jewish characters, this riveting tale of truth-telling in the face of indescribable human tragedy resonates deeply with Jewish sensibilities. It's not a stretch to associate the starvation, senseless killing, rapes and terror with events of the Holocaust, especially when reporter Maryka accuses the American aide worker of a willful (but understandable) cover-up: "If this were 1943 in Germany, would you do the same thing?"
Miller's In Darfur tells its story artfully, but, at its essence the play is not art, but provocation, provocation for action and public service. Can theater change lives and even halt a genocide? That question remains unanswered.
DC THEATRE SCENE
April 6, 2010 by Debbie Jackson
Filed under Features, Our Reviews
No doubt about it. In Darfur is not an easy piece to watch. That’s to be expected. The “news” from that part of the world is not new. So brace for scenes and stories depicting the horrific violence perpetrated on masses of people in Sudan, the brutality, the degradation, the savagery that hit the mainstream press in bits and incomprehensible pieces over the years.
Brace yourself, yet dare to look at this theatrical account to experience the moments close up from the personal perspectives of its characters, brought to us here with unflinching performances, honoring a carefully crafted new script by Winter Miller and ferociously directed by Georgetown’s own, Derek Goldman.
The story is told from the points of view of several key characters—an aide worker, a New York Times reporter and Hawa, an African Dafuri woman, a fictional composite of several stories that Miller heard while serving as a researcher in the field. And that’s the crux of why the story’s tone works as well as it does– it is anchored in a journalist’s desperate need to tell the story. Maryka, played with dispassionate cool by Rahaleh Nassri, must grapple with the age old ethical dilemma of whether to reveal her source to get an article published. The script makes very clear that Maryka is not unscrupulous or ill-intended. Quite the contrary– she’s the only one who gives a care about the atrocities, and she’s on deadline to deliver the goods to assure international attention with coveted “front page/above-the-fold” coverage. She knows that once she leaves, the world can and will comfortably turn a blind eye to the carnage in the deserts. She also knows that she needs a sympathetic victim who the Western world will relate to and care about and finds what she needs in Hawa, who was brutalized while teaching English to school children. With Hawa’s story, Maryka has struck gold, but does she invoke retaliation on her source to save lives? Miller interweaves the various storylines into a gripping story.
Miller has a gift for dramatic tension and she has planted minefields everywhere in this play. The show opens with the main characters huddled in a beat-up Jeep, obviously running for their lives, terrified of each bump on the minefield encrusted roads and psychological detonators at the checkpoints. Cut between the scenes are feisty interchanges between the journalist and her no-nonsense editor, played with relish by Deidra LeWan Starnes. In these moments, Miller covers stateside cultural territory about why well-meaning Americans haven’t rallied to stop the suffering, with specters of the Rwanda genocide still hovering in their collective consciousness. Miller also questions the sometimes prickly question about the lack of cultural allegiance of black Americans with Africa and ponders their seeming nonchalance about the deplorable conditions on the continent. There are no easy answers, of course, and she doesn’t try to solve the complex issues of allegiance, identification, or racial bias . Instead, she strategically places the nuggets and possibilities and doubts out there for all to see and consider.
The triple-threat casting makes this a powerhouse production. Erika Rose fans, line up and see how she careens from devastating brutality, horrendous pain and suffering, to fateful resignation, to bright-eyed enthusiasm, all while somehow clinging to vestiges of hope and humanity. It’s an amazing performance. Lucas Beck as Carlos, the weary and well-meaning aide worker, gives his all as well, and Jessica Francis Dukes invokes the spirit of the desert with her hushed presence and powerful vocals of plaintive wailing African melodies.
The designers help this production crest and flow in its winding course of telling the story from fractured time perspectives. The sparse and minimalist set reflects life’s piercing and jagged edges along the periphery and even most creatively, in the basic Jeep that plays a pivotal role in the story. Lighting by Dan Covey sets the somber mood and includes a breathtaking starry night. The work of master fight choreographer, Paul Gallagher, was a pervasive presence, and kudos to ensemble players Carl James and Brandon White who took the physicality to excruciatingly difficult levels while commandeering the Arabic language of the rebel militia.
In Darfur is difficult to watch, especially for the squeamish. My threshold and tolerance for depictions of man’s inhumanity to man is unusually low– remember, I had a hard time when Stanley was “flattened” in the children’s story. But considering that this is a depiction of actual experiences, the least I can do is honor the lives and deaths of the victims by being a witness and strive to make a difference. If In Darfur doesn’t stir up a call for action, nothing will.
In Darfur
Written by Winter Miller
Directed by Derek Goldman
Produced by Theater J
Reviewed by Debbie Minter JacksonWE LOVE DC
We Love Arts: In Darfur
By Jenn Larsen, 1:07 pm April 6th, 2010
“Plays like this make me so grateful I was born at the time and place I was,” my friend says as we exit Theater J Saturday night. We’d just seen In Darfur by Winter Miller, and as a Western woman who’d spent the day shopping for frivolities, I felt the cold twist of shame in my stomach. But this isn’t a preachy production. Its simplicity provides the horror, and it’s truthful. These things happen. We ignore them. Then we see a simulation of a woman’s legs being cracked apart like a wishbone, and our silence feels culpable.
This is a hard sell, no denying it, but I urge you to go see In Darfur, playing now through April 18. The play is inspired by Miller’s own trip to refugee camps along the Chad-Sudan border, in the company of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Strangely, its flaws have to do with that prism of experience, as the two Westerners who serve as our entre to this world – an American journalist and an Argentinian aid worker – are simply not as compelling as the Africans they encounter. But I still urge you to see it, for Erika Rose’s central performance as Darfuri refugee Hawa is absolutely riveting.
The action unfolds in 2004, the aftermath of the initial atrocities committed during the conflict between the Darfur rebel groups, the Sudanese government, and the government-armed militias known as Janjaweed. Hawa, a Darfuri Muslim, has lost her entire family and been brutally raped – she is then further brutalized for being raped. Pregnant and wounded, she becomes the central pawn in hardened journalist Maryka’s (Rahaleh Nassri) quest to get Darfur on the front page, blocked by aid worker Carlos (Lucas Beck) in an ethical battle over whether endangering Hawa’s life to get the story out is worth the price she’ll pay.
Frankly, the philosophical arguments between these two characters, and Maryka’s bureau chief (a coldly practical Deidra LaWan Starnes), hinder the play’s movement. The performances are not at issue – rooted strongly in naturalism by the cast and framed by powerful images by director Derek Goldman. It’s just the play itself that can seem off course whenever it strays from its central character’s experience. Whether or not the atrocities in Darfur constitute genocide or not seemed immaterial to me. Such actions are wrong, plain and simple. But I understand – and the play does make clear – that labeling it genocide raises international awareness to the point of necessary action, and of course this responsibility is taken very seriously by Theater J and its mission (as the handout I received upon leaving states, “Change history, so that when we swear ‘Never Again,’ we mean it.”).
But, the play comes alive far more with Hawa’s monologues on her journey through hell, performed with such simplicity – the quiet dignity and anguish of a survivor. She’s well-matched by every heart-pounding entrance by ensemble members Brandon White and Carl James as various truly threatening militia or rebels, and framed by the ever-extraordinary Jessica Frances Dukes as chorus. Dukes is one of my favorite DC actors, and here her moment of realization as Hamida that she will be left behind to a horrific fate is one of the most chilling I’ve ever seen on stage, from denial to shock to panic in a few quick strokes of pain. That’s the story I want to hear, the play I want to see. Cut out the middlemen, and just get to the heart of the experience of these people in their land.
Production design is fittingly sparse, with scenic design by HannaH J. Crowell and Dan Covey’s lighting both evoking heat and sand, and natural costumes by Ivania Stack. Nothing detracts from the purity of the performances, and (at least to me) the dialects seem perfectly evocative.
It’s a fine production by a company that always does consistently good work. It’s also extremely thought-provoking – we were talking about it non-stop afterwards – and it’s haunted me for several days. That alone is reason to see it, debate about it, think about it. And get involved in humanitarian efforts to make sure that the systematic victimization, rape, torture and murder stops.WASHINGTON POST
Theater review
Peter Marks reviews 'In Dafur' at Theater J
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
For what feels like the longest time, you wait for a telltale tingling sensation during "In Darfur," Winter Miller's sober, rather prosaic drama about the Sudanese civil war. And then at last, the lights on Theater J's stage form a halo around Erika Rose, playing a Darfuri Muslim whose family has been systematically slaughtered, and your pulse begins to quicken.
It's Hawa's appalling testimony, the story of finding the broken bodies of her husband and son, that finally shoots some electricity into the solemn advance of the plot, an attempt to dramatize the journalistic complexities of telling the story of an African conflict in a way that would make the West stop and listen.
With her hauntingly expressive eyes, Rose cuts a warmly embraceable figure as Hawa, an educated woman who survives other atrocities at the hands of the government-backed militia. If only the production's richness extended beyond her presence. The other principal characters, an anguished refugee camp doctor (Lucas Beck) and an impatient New York Times correspondent (Rahaleh Nassri), adhere less affectingly to the formulaic strictures of this consciousness-raising genre.
Handled with an almost clinical sensitivity by director Derek Goldman, "In Darfur" is afflicted at times with an airlessness that comes from a tendency to finger-wag, over the West's inattention to the war, or daily journalism's situational morals. Miller, a onetime researcher for roving Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, establishes for Nassri's Maryka a prickly adversary in Deidra LaWan Starnes, as a Times editor back in New York. Their tense transatlantic exchanges feel authentic, but seem better suited to ethical case study reenactments than to full-bodied drama.
The playwright's desire to sound the alarm reduces some characters to mouthpieces. "I need a front-page story or Darfur is buried!" says Maryka, barging in on the doctor and jeopardizing his safety. ". . . There has to be a public outcry!" Moments such as this remind you of the kind of high-minded television movies written for well-known actors seeking to champion a cause. No fault can be found with the sentiment. It's just that you wonder if perhaps there isn't a way to express it without hitting an audience over the head.
"In Darfur" takes place in 2004, when the chaos of the region was in an early phase and its cruelties were just starting to come to light. Maryka, facing a deadline for coming up with a compelling human-interest story, plies Beck's frustrated Carlos with Scotch and eventually gets him to spill the beans about Hawa, whose plight is tailor-made for Maryka's readers: Hawa is a schoolteacher and, more importantly, speaks English. Even more significantly, from the reporter's point of view: Hawa was raped by the militia men and, as a consequence of a harshly repressive culture, is persecuted as an adulterer.
The sticking point is that though Hawa's story will be received sympathetically, and might even draw needed international attention, its publication will put her life at risk. What's a reporter to do?
Well, we know the answer. Oddly, however, after a thug visits a horrible revenge on Hawa for Maryka's article about her, the play fails to deal in a satisfying way with the emotional impact on Maryka. Does she feel culpability for using Hawa to forward her agenda, however beneficial the resulting publicity? "In Darfur" acknowledges the question but doesn't supply any useful explication. Nassri's Maryka blankly shrugs off Carlos's anger over Hawa's fresh wounds, and so we get no sense of the psychological toll the events might exact on the reporter.
Embroidered with the voices of Sudanese characters singing and speaking in Arabic (the dialogue is translated into English by other actors), "In Darfur" plays out on Hannah J. Crowell's rendering of a sere plain; folding panels are added to define, for example, Carlos's clinic. Ivania Stack's costumes meet the play's utilitarian wardrobe needs.
Only Rose's Hawa comes across as a character who is more than the sum of her professional duties, and this actress of open heart does manage to touch ours. If that's the main intention, then "In Darfur" does succeed at a crucial goal: giving texture to one life in an ongoing tragedy that only tends to crop up these days in the occasional news crawl at the bottom of the cable TV screen. You can admire the playwright's humanitarian impulses even if you wish she'd found a way to invest all the facets of this complex story with vitality.
In Darfur
Rich Massabny
“Arlington Weekly News TV”
THEATER J - - “In Darfur”
Theater J doesn’t do “Hello Dolly” type shows or other non-thinking productions. This has never been truer than today with its current show, “In Darfur,” by New York Times writer Winter Miller. She tells the gripping and horrible true story of conditions in Darfur where rape and the slaughter of men, women and children are ongoing against the non-Arab tribes. It’s a riveting depiction directed by Derek Goldman. You may feel a bit sqeamish to see just a slice of this true story about Miller’s experiences in Sudan and her efforts to get the word out to the rest of the world through the New York Times in mid-2000. Veteran actor/director Rahaleh Nassri plays Maryka, the Times reporter on the scene who is distressed by releasing the name of a raped Darfuri woman, Hawa (Erika Rose) in order to get the story published. Hawa is educated and speaks English and her interaction with Maryka is so intense and believable—as are the rest of the cast. Lucas Best (Carlos) plays an American physician who tries to help the people. Deidra LaWan Starnes (Jan) is the Times editor who through the phone tells Maryka the Times needs an I.D. in order to publish this earthshaking story. Jessica Frances Dukes (Hamida) adds to the almost spiritual pleadings about the genocide. Carl James and Brandon White scare us with their military brutality. Yes, “In Darfur,” is tough to watch, but must be seen. It runs through Apr. 18 at Theater J in the District.