A journalist (Joshua David Robinson) seeks the truth about a horrific massacre from Sister Justina (Heather Alicia Simms) in SENSE OF AN ENDING (photo by Carol Rosegg)
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Through September 6, $18
www.59e59.org
Ken Urban paints a searing, intimate portrait of the Rwandan genocide and the concept of forgiveness in the gripping and powerful Sense of an Ending. It’s Easter weekend in 1999, and two Hutu nuns, the younger Sister Alice (Dana Marie Ingraham) and the older Sister Justina (Heather Alicia Simms), sit in a Kigali prison waiting to be tried in a Belgian court for crimes against humanity. Attempting to resurrect his career after a plagiarism scandal, New York Times journalist Charles (Joshua David Robinson) arrives to do a story on the nuns, initially determined to prove their innocence, unable to believe that the two religious women could have taken part in a horrific massacre at their church. But as Charles speaks with the nuns, a Rwandan Patriotic Front corporal named Paul (Hubert Point-Du Jour), and Dusabi (Danyon Davis), a bitter Tutsi who claims to have survived the brutal, cold-blooded murders, he learns more than he bargained for. “There isn’t a famine, war zone, atrocity I haven’t seen,” Charles tells Paul, who responds, “You’ve never seen anything like what’s behind this door,” referring to the entrance of the church, which hovers over the play like a doorway to hell.
An RPF corporal (Hubert Point-Du Jour) watches over two nuns and a journalist in play about Rwandan genocide (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Winner of the L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Award for Best New American Play, Sense of an Ending takes place in a tiny black-box theater where the audience sits in two rows on three sides of the stage, which contains three benches. Scene changes are indicated by small shifts in sound and lighting, although some of the sound effects are hard to make out; at one point, background noise sounded like it could have been coming from one of the other theaters at 59E59. Director Adam Fitzgerald (Methtacular!, Urban’s The Awake) maintains a tense, threatening undercurrent throughout the play’s ninety minutes, although Urban (The Happy Sad, The Correspondent) ties it all up a little too neatly in the end. The acting is uniformly strong, led by a particularly moving performance by Point-Du Jour (A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes, The Model Apartment) as Paul, a straightforward Tutsi soldier who shows unexpected depth. At its heart, Sense of an Ending, which debuted at London’s Theatre503 in May with a different director and cast, is about truth, forgiveness, and faith, reminiscent of Nicholas Wright’s A Human Being Died That Night, which ran at BAM this past spring and examined the case of South African mass murderer Eugene de Kock. “All I want is the truth,” Charles says to Dusabi, who replies, “You have come to the wrong place, my friend, if you are looking for truth.” Sense of an Ending continues through September 6; the September 3 show will be followed by the talk-back “Moving Forward: Rwanda and Its Citizens, Post-Genocide” with Jesse Hawkes, executive director of Global Youth Connect, and Rwandan genocide survivor and human rights activist Jacqueline Murekatete.