'In Darfur' at TimeLine Theatre: TimeLine finds the heart in Africa story despite some obstacles
THEATER REVIEW: "In Darfur" ★★★ Through March 20 at TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes; Tickets: $28-$28 at 773-281-8463 or www.timelinetheatre.com. With Kelli Simpkins and Mildred Marie Langford.
In 2006, a young playwright named Winter Miller persuaded the globe-trotting New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof to let her hitch a ride as he travelled along the border of Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan. He was reluctant — it's a very dangerous part of the world — but Miller was his research assistant, a persistent research assistant, and she told Kristof that a consciousness-raising play about the genocide in Darfur would result.
As Kristof has written in his blog, the two travelled in an area that had been mostly abandoned by aid organizations, with the notable exception of Doctors Without Borders. And they talked to genocide survivors, who courageously recounted narratives of unspeakable horror.
“In Darfur,” which opened this past weekend in a very accomplished Nick Bowling production at the TimeLine Theatre in Chicago, is the play that Miller promised Kristof she would write.
It's not a straight-up docudrama featuring characters based on the author and her mentor (which would, I think, have been a better idea). Instead, Miller creates a fictional, hard-bitten correspondent for the New York Times (played here by Kelli Simpkins) and a young and passionate doctor (Gregory Isaac) for an aid organization clearly based on Doctors Without Borders.
The play is about both the experiences and personal strength of Hawa (Mildred Marie Langford), an English teacher who watches her loved ones die and suffers all manner of horrific physical abuse, and about the attempts of the reporter to get past her confounding editor (played by Tyla Abercrumbie) and get the story of the genocide in Darfur on the front page of the Times — and in the consciousness of the world.
Thanks in no small measure to a simple and straightforward but rich and moving performance from Langford, the piece is very successful in encapsulating the struggles of a character surely based on the survivors whose stories are no doubt etched on Miller's soul. It is less successful at telling a tale of journalistic power and politics, mostly because Miller struggles to do so without subtlety or verisimilitude.
Instead, we get reporter and editor barking at each other like characters out of “The Front Page.” And in an attempt to inject some tension into the piece, she conflates whether or not Darfur will be noticed or ignored by the Western world for all time, with whether or not a particular story lands on page A1 or A19. The Times is a powerful organ, and thus tool for consciousness-raisers, and I understand Miller was on one of its writer's payroll. But there's a big media world out there.
For sure, a crucial part of any story set in Darfur is how and why the West chose to ignore the suffering taking place there. And editors can be a pain in the neck, trust me, especially when a writer has to explain something she is seeing on the ground to someone who seems more interested in internal politics. But it's a fact of journalistic life that we don't advertise our more mercurial instincts (we instead hide them well in our language), and also that editor and writer generally try to get on the same side, especially with this kind of heart-wrenching story. Abercrumbie does her best with a one-dimensional (and seemingly cruel) character, but it's tough. And although Simpkins also fleshes out her reporter as much as she can, I fear you'll have seen this hard-bitten, soft-centered type in a few too many other plays and movies.
So this isn't a great play. But Bowling and his videographer Mike Tutaj (truly a peerless master at the terribly tricky combination of video and intimate live action) have turned it into a very powerful 100 minutes, including an automobile escape that really should look trite but that Bowling and Tutaj turn into a genuinely tense and thrilling sequence of theatrical events that make the dust and dirt of Darfur rise up to meet you.
The piece is theatricalized with such immediacy that you won't turn away for a moment.
Isaac, a young Chicago actor with a lot of potential, skillfully captures a character who has suddenly been confronted with terrifying depths of human cruelty and that shakes him to the core. And when Langford has the stage, when this fine actress gets the chance to represent the real human pain on the ground, the piece hits you in the gut.
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