What is left to be heard after everything we used to have has turned into rubble? The 11-year-old Harshana Rambukwella watched as a Sinhala mob burned down his Tamil neighbors’ house in Sri Lanka, while the neighbors were hidden in his family’s house until the violence stopped. What is left to be heard after all the talking humans have been rendered roadside gore, and all the descendants of Vlad Dracula stopped out of exhaustion or repentance? The adult-age Hope Azeda fell into silence as she finally uncovered the truth of the Rwandan genocide after a childhood of being told half-truths about her heritage. Such a silence lingers, haunts, and inspires these people to come together for a theater production, to which they named “Dear Children, Sincerely…”.

The play “Dear Children, Sincerely…” is a collaboration between the Sri Lankan Stages Theatre Group, Rwandan playwrights such as Hope Azeda, and Creative Writing Professor Harshana Rambukwella, who connected the former two groups together, supported by NYU Abu Dhabi. Bringing over 80 oral-history interviews with Rwandan and Sri Lankan elders born in the 1930s into theatrical production, the play invites people into the parallel histories smeared with violence and injustice of the two countries.

African and South Asian theaters have historically struggled to prove their artistic validity to the Western gaze. Indeed, many French theaters only host plays in French, and plays made by other regions have to be translated at the expense of their linguistic and contextual authenticity. Colonial histories pointed to Western crackdown on theater performances which motivated people against colonial governments. Even when artists from the Global South successfully bring a play to the international stage, their version of historical theatre might not resonate with the Western paradigm.

“Dear Children, Sincerely…” thus takes on a double puzzle: one, to represent a history that resonates and touches humanity; and two, to overcome an entrenched language barrier of the arts. For its entire two-hour duration, the production has been a playful exploration, recognition, and reunification of oral histories and contemporary commemoration using an array of silence, minimal setup, human voice acapella, and clowning.

Thematically, DCS might not be the most cohesive in its storytelling, for it aims for a diverse range of stories. With its three-part structure, the production ambitiously paints two different groups of people throughout the later half of the twentieth century in its first, and bulkiest chapter.

The chapter’s six stories switch back and forth between Rwanda and Sri Lanka: the first narrates how a colonizer turned a game of rabbits and rats into a scheme of Rwandan class segregation; the second retells the story of Sri Lankan independence, to which most are baffled and confused; the third illustrates the Sinhala-Tamil segregation in Sri Lanka through a national bus round kicking out Tamil minorities; the fourth tells the story of the Rwandan Tutsi’s post-independent exile, during which targeted humiliation and violence persisted; the fifth narrates the youth insurrections in Sri Lankan, featuring an unexpected electronic drop and a collective dance, with dancers slowly falling down one by one; the final story employs complete silence as two men clean fields of human remains after the gore of the Rwandan genocide.

Even when the screens display script translation, much of the storytelling remains non-verbal. Miming and clowning revel in story two as the actor’s overdramatic stage presence of shock, confusion, unexplainable joy over independence, and anger over the word “anti-colonialism” illustrates uncertainty of the then-current world. In one of its most impressive scenes in story three, a bus trip representing the post-independence Sri Lankan society, with both Sinhala and Tamil people, suffered a crash which sent the Tamil minority out in a slow-motion act. A “Sinhala-Tamil” chanting morphed into a cacophony of competing chants until the waves of “Sinhala” overwhelmed the other sounds, while becoming more unhinged. Such explosive use of sounds created an abrupt u-turn, as silence pervaded the space in story six, and the Rwandan genocide is portrayed in its aftermath.

DCS’ soundscape is nothing short of overwhelming: the cast tests their vocal uses to the maximum by performing from cacophonous chatting, maniacal laughter, human groaning, to imitation of animal sounds, the likes of cats, dogs, and cows; some of the most disorienting sounds come from smacking and tossing a metal barrel around a minimal stage with only three pedestals; and a limited but powerful use of English scripts were used, which is often conveyed with overdramatic, sometimes hysterical cadences. One can imagine how such a use of human sounds relates to the themes of oral history: the human voice is a vessel of the stories told through words, the landscapes painted through vocal chords, and the memories re-envisioned through word-of-mouth.

The ambition of DCS in its storytelling all coalesces in its final chapter “Upside Down Land,” where it appears a raw, theatrical, and harrowing insinuation into how traumatic histories are still currently made. Using voices from elders who retold their trauma, the play offers its own interpretation of a dystopian reality that is subtly pervading our world. DCS can be summarized in one word – “overwhelming”, for its relentless reiteration of how the best and worst of humanity can coexist. In a feat of overlapping chaos, Dracula-esque brutality intermixing with sounds of human agony, blurry shadows of decadent men and their coital craze, lifelessness hung on sepulchral threads, slow emergence of tensive silence – the play unleashes all of its unrelenting tension, and reminds oneself of a visceral cruelty; that the Mobius strip of violence and peace never splits itself.

In a moment at the end, a scaredy civilian bestowed to the hands of the exhausted executioner, a chirping dove, accidentally killed by a fellow executioner. The civilians faced what their ill-fated friends did. The executioner, holding the dead bird, keeps petting it, drained by waves of banal human cruelty. One day, the violence will end, and on the empty bereaving streets, another dove will sing.