Quantum stages the lengthy but powerful ‘Red Hills’ about the Rwandan genocide
This is Africa: Uganda partly, but mainly Rwanda and its red sand hills, the killing fields of the 1994 genocide (largely Hutus killing a half million or more Tutsi), which givesthe redness of the sands a lurid tinge.
In addition to its place, “Red Hills” takes place in shifting time, the now in which the academic visits the Rwandan in search of truth about the past (which is also truth about the present); then that past, as they travel back; and then a liminal space where they experience the past in the present and both past and present in a futurepresent in which they invoke the participation of the audience.
As participants, we help tell the story (very clever, this), but more important, we serve also as witnesses and ultimately Where: Quantum Theatre at Recycling Building, 32nd and Smallman streets, Strip District.
Through Sept. 10; 8:30 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; 8 p.m. Aug. 30 through Sept. 10.
$38-$55 (students $18), 412362-1713 or quantumtheatre.com. judges: We are the community that, in Rwandan tradition, provides a communal arena for confession and justice.
The action at the heart of the play is the search of one character for forgiveness and thus reconciliation — perhaps not the character you might expect. The other character needs forgiveness, as well, but not until he recognizes what he’s done, on several levels. And surely, if the play works as intended, the audience is enlisted in its own search for guilt and forgiveness.
This is not as simplistic as “What did you do during the Rwandan genocide?” although you might also ask that. No, it opens out to suggest other catastrophes and also narrows down to an individual confrontation, challenging us as moral beings.
It’s a huge project, hugely tackled, but at its best only partly successful. This came over me somewhere in the late-middle of the play, when the talk began to pile up and I thought longingly back to when that startling vista of sand was new and the play was still about doing. Finally, it gets back to the doing, with a surprise twist that drives home what we most need to learn.
The westerner is David, now a