Sense of an Ending ticketholders for the Thursday, August 27 and Thursday, September 3 performances have the opportunity to stay for two fascinating panels put together by dramaturg Jeremy Stoller. 

On August 27, Rob Fruchtman and Susie Linfield  discuss Shaping the Narrative: Documenting Human Rights Violations and Recovery. 

Rob Fruchtman is an award-winning director, producer and editor of documentaries and television programs. He won the Documentary Director award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival for his feature film, Sister Helen, which aired on HBO. He has won three Emmys for his work with PBS. His film, Trust Me, a documentary produced for SHOWTIME, follows Christian, Jewish and Islamic boys at an interfaith camp in North Carolina. Fruchtman directed and produced Seeing Proof in 2007, a film about Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime and its lingering effect on Cambodia's society, for George Soros' Open Society Institute. His documentaries have explored the arts, history, world cultures and social justice issues and have aired in festivals and on television around the world.

Susie Linfield is the author of "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has been translated into several languages. She writes about culture and politics for a variety of publications, including "The Nation," the "New York Times," "Dissent," "Aperture," and the "Boston Review." Linfield is an associate professor at New York University, where she teaches cultural journalism.

On September 3, Jacqueline Murekatete and Jesse Hawkes explore Moving Forward: Rwanda and Its Citizens, Post-Genocide. 

Jacqueline Murekatete is an internationally recognized genocide survivor and human rights activist. Born in Rwanda, Jacqueline was nine years old when she lost her parents, all six siblings and most of her extended family to the 1994 genocide. Jacqueline was inspired to share her story of survival and hope for the first time in 2001 after listening to the story of the late Holocaust survivor David Gewirtzman, who became a dear friend and mentor. Since then, Jacqueline has delivered hundreds of genocide-prevention and human rights presentations at schools, NGO events and faith-based communities across the U.S and in Germany, Israel, Ireland, Bosnia, and Belgium. She has also addressed the UN General Assembly and regularly participates in high-level human rights conferences. Jacqueline’s work and story has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Jerusalem Post, Al Jazeera America, UN Africa Renewal Magazine, Newsday, Fast Company, People, Teen Vogue, NPR, Voice of America, CNN, PBS, NBC, ABC, MTV, and other media outlets worldwide. 
For her work, Jacqueline has received a number of prestigious awards including: the Kay Family Award from the Anti-defamation League, the Global Peace and Tolerance Award from Friends of the United Nations; the Moral Courage Award from the American Jewish Committee, the Imbuto Foundation's Celebrating Young Rwandan Achievers Award from the First Lady of Rwanda, the Do Something Award from Do Something and the Ellis Island Medals of honor award from the National Ethnic Coalition, which put her name in the U.S Congressional record.
Jacqueline is the founder and president of Genocide Survivors Foundation (GSF), a New York based not-for-profit organization, which educates people about the crime of genocide and raises support to serve and support survivors through comprehensive and holistic programs and services.
Jacqueline has a B.A. in Politics from New York University and a J.D from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Jesse Hawkes is the Executive Director of Global Youth Connect (GYC), a human rights organization founded in 1999, specializing in short-term, intercultural programs for young leaders in post-violence/post-genocide countries. Jesse began working with GYC as the Rwanda Program Director in 2007, and has organized 15 intercultural programs in Rwanda in collaboration with local Rwandan partners, promoting the human rights of numerous groups such as youth, survivors of genocide, historically marginalized peoples (indigenous peoples), LGBT persons, women, and refugees. Before working with GYC, and having worked on youth and arts projects in Haiti and in South Africa, Jesse co-led an HIV prevention program for over sixty Rwandan high schools and their communities, utilizing interactive theatre methods and outreach activities conducted in collaboration with local associations of people living with HIV. He also participated in various films shot in Rwanda, such as Sometimes in April, Shake Hands with the Devil, and Beyond the Gates. Jesse re-located to NYC in 2010, where he built Global Youth Connect's Human Rights in the USA Program, collaborated with Global Kids on USAID's American Youth Leadership Program in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and serves as editor of GYC's blog (gycvillage.org). Jesse has consulted with international NGOs such as the Global AIDS Alliance and Population Services International and is a member of Actors' Equity, having performed with companies such as the American Repertory Theater and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He holds a BA in History from Harvard University.

Sense of an Ending runs approximately ninety minutes, with no intermission. The panels will immediately follow the performances. No need to RSVP for the panel- just get your ticket for the show at 59E59.org! 

What inspired the writing of this play?

 Ken Urban: I started the play because I had read Philip Gourevitch’s book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.” I knew the basic details of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but reading that book haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the details of the massacres that took place in Catholic churches.

Shortly after finishing the book – this was 2001 – I started following the stories in the Guardian of two nuns who were being tried in Belgium for their role in a church massacre. I was raised Catholic, and I attended twelve years of Catholic school. I had long since abandoned my faith. But there was something about seeing the faces of those nuns. Again, the only word I can think of is haunted. They haunted me.


I was pretty firm in my belief that I would never write a play about Catholicism, but I couldn’t resist. If I told other writers that they should write the very play they didn’t think they could or should, I must take the same advice.

What was your process for this? How do you sit down and get into material this challenging?

Ken: I am not going to lie: it was a pretty difficult play to write. It took me a long time to get a solid draft. A few years into the project, I realized I was too beholden to the actual biographies of the nuns. I had to put all the research away and write a story that was emotionally truthful. Again, I looked to my Catholic education, and found inspiration in the Stations of the Cross, the graphic depiction of the death of Jesus. The goal when you meditate on the images in the Stations of the Cross is to imagine his suffering; you put yourself in his place and experience empathy for him. That is, of course, what theater asks of us: to identify with the characters in the play. It was that realization that cracked open the play for me.

Before I would write, I would watch interviews with genocide survivors, their eyes so empty because of what they had seen; they lived through, but never recovered from what they had experienced. I wanted to make sure I really understood the world I was writing about. I would watch until I was physically ill and then begin work on the play. It was my way to honor them.

 Your writing goes back and forth between pieces focused on political or historical events on a grand scale, and ones that zoom in on specific aspects of contemporary adult relationships (even as they all feature some aspects of both). Is it a conscious choice or need to vary the scope? Or is this simply how you are inspired?

Ken: It’s how I am feeling inspired, to be honest. I get inspired, then I let an idea marinate until I know how the story starts and finishes. Then I write. It is always about the story and the characters.

 It is true that all my plays are about the relationship between the personal and the larger world. I began writing my first play while I was living in London. British theater, as a general rule, is  idea-driven. Plays are about something there and that’s what I like in theater: passion married with ideas.

What effect has the writing of this play had on you? Do you hope viewing the play will have a similar impact on audiences that making it had for you?

Ken: Writing this play changed my life. Spending time with the research made me think about the cruelty of men and women, as well as their unspeakable kindness. I hope an audience feels the same as they leave the theater. The things the Hutu militias did are evil, and yet within that evil, exists the potential for some people to do so much good.

To call a play "political" suggests that it has an agenda -- either in sharing facts, arguing an opinion, or inspiring discussion or action. What are your thoughts on the potential of theater to effectively do these things? Is it something you looked to create in this or other of your plays?

 Ken: A play is political when engages the larger social world. When it tells a personal story, and that story is understood against the backdrop of the larger social world. Most theater is political.

 Sarah Kane, the British playwright, talked about the experience of watching a play as world-changing. When you put someone through an experience, that person sees the world in a different way. I have no interest in educating in any pedantic way. If seeing a performance of Sense of an Ending makes you go out and do something that helps reduce the barbarity of this world, that would be great. But I would be barking up the wrong tree, if that’s what I thought the end goal of making theater was.


What is that end goal, then?

 Empathy

The ability to see the world in a new way

To have an experience in a room with others

To feel like your brain has been re-wired

That’s why we go to the theater. That’s why I write plays.

 

Portions of this interview are drawn from previous articles in ThisWeek London and Actors&Performers.