Theatre Review: Dogs of Rwanda Howls With The Pains of Trauma
Synopsis: 16-year-old David finds himself in Uganda as a church missionary. He follows the girl of his dreams into the woods as the Rwandan genocide erupts. 20 years later and half a world away, he still can’t escape what happened and publishes a book on the events. When a note arrives reading, “There are untruths here,” David finds himself back in those woods with the boy he tried to save, in a journey towards redemption and forgiveness.
Directed by Peter Napolitano and Frances Hill while scored by musical heartbeat Abou Lion Diarra, Dogs of Rwanda shows healing is a process, but how long that process takes is up for grabs. When a trauma occurs, a person changes, and their mind/ spirit becomes a house of mirrors; each one shows the reflection of one persons but distorts in different ways. Distortion is what plagues David in Dogs of Rwanda as he tries to figure out if how he remembers the past is both honest and healing.
Dan Hodge as David is exceptional, and if not for his fantastically, raw performance Dogs of Rwanda would not be an easy watch. Hodge captures the physicality of a trauma by literally becoming paralyzed because a painful thought or horrendous feeling is too powerfully overeating him. In these moments, you feel Dan Hodge is David. As someone who studied the Rwandan Genocide, Sean Christopher Lewis has written a 70 minute play that spotlights enough of this horrendous piece of history to make you want to learn more and say never again to such atrocity. He gives Hodge a plentiful, vivid script that helps you understand why David, though a charming, friendly man, still feels like a wounded 16 year old, church kid trapped in a Rwandan jungle.
Sometimes, we truly we feel we can save the world, but if we do not know how dark it is, we cannot expect to be its needed light. This is the lesson that David struggles with as a man that has written a book on his harrowing experience in the Rwandan genocide, and one that returns to Rwanda to find a country changes but it does not heal. It is something we, Americans, are experiencing now, in having so many historical wounds busting open to challenge how we have defined progress. David is sickened at seeing foreign nations investing in the country, new roads and malls being built, and the Rwandan people selling “atrocity tours” or rather asking for money, in exchange, for their story. Yet, the biggest bruise to his trauma/ ego is his friend God’s Blessing challenging him on whether he has “prettied” the ugliness of their experience.
The thing about genocide, war, or mass systemic violence is that every single person is altered and pushed to become something that, in another world, they would have never been: from survivor to monster. David grapples with the decisions he made while God’s Blessings struggles with their dismissal. While Dogs of Rwanda is a one-man show, Hodge is so vivacious and interpersonal that you feel God’s Blessing is there telling him not to paint him as a Tutsi victim but an unwilling killer. Like David, you feel torn by how much war pushes you to be horrible, even in the name of self-defense. More importantly, David, through his recounting of exes Mary and Amy, shows how much a trauma pushes away loving relationships because you cannot see that love exists in a world where hate does, as well. For More Information On Dogs Of Rwanda Click Here. It Is playing at Urban Stages till March 31, and is located Urban Stages 259 W 30th St, New York, NY 10001
