From bearing witness to writing drama

Sonja Linden's play "I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda" was inspired by a Rwandan woman she met at a London foundation for torture victims, where she was helping refugees write about their experiences. Her play, which tells the story of a Rwandan refugee and her writing tutor, premiered in London and has had about a dozen U.S. productions, including a run last year at the Colony Theatre in Burbank.

Tough topics

DRAMATISTS have tackled the subjects in a variety of ways. "Maria Kizito," by Erik Ehn, dean of the CalArts School of Theater, revolves around a nun who aided the Rwandan genocide.

Max Stafford-Clark has directed not only "The Overwhelming" but also an Africa-set, Rwanda-inspired "Macbeth" and the Royal Court's production of Stella Feehily's "O Go My Man," about a TV journalist who walks out on his wife and daughter in part because of the horrors he sees in Darfur.

In October of last year, London's Tricycle Theatre created an evening of six short plays about Darfur. Many dealt with rape, while others were less direct, such as Lynn Nottage's "Give, Again?," a satire about an American couple deciding whether to donate to Darfur.

Western plays about Rwanda and Sudan face a particular challenge: How do you make a play resonate with audiences thousands of miles from Africa without being too preachy or too gruesome?

Rogers felt the key to avoiding such pitfalls was to keep the details specific. He put a 1993 map of the Rwandan capital of Kigali on his wall and researched how often it rained and what nightclubs were hot. And while many plays involve survivors discussing the genocide after the fact, Rogers started "The Overwhelming" beforehand: An American academic and his family travel to Rwanda in early 1994 to find a mysterious AIDS doctor and eventually fight for their lives as the crisis begins.

Being there

"MY goal was to make the political and ethical situation something people [in the play] had to talk about," Rogers says. "It wasn't, 'I'm glad you asked me about the Hutus and the Tutsis.' It was all they could talk about that moment because it was life and death.

"I became gripped by the question of what would I do if I were placed in a situation like that, where every choice was monstrous," he adds.

Like "The Overwhelming," many of these plays have a Western character who leads the audience into an unfamiliar world -- a journalist in "In Darfur"; an investigator in "Rash"; a writing tutor in "I Have Before Me."