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WINNIPEG - Genocide drama Goodness had yet to meet an audience it couldn't startle -- until it went to Rwanda.
If anyone had their eyes opened there, it was the culture-shocked cast of the 2005 play penned by American-Canadian novelist Michael Redhill, which travelled to the African country last fall, and makes it way to Prairie Theatre Exchange this week.
"I think we were all much more shocked about everything over there than they were shocked by our play," Goodness star Gord Rand says of the "mind-altering" trip.
Fair enough -- Rwanda faced inexplicable amounts of devastation in 1994, when Hutu extremists attempted to wipe out the Tutsi community -- killing nearly one million people in the process. Goodness revolves around both an unspecified genocide similar to Rwanda's, as well as the Nazis' efforts to kill off Europe's Jewish population before and during the Second World War -- an event near and dear to playwright Redhill, who lends his name to the play's protagonist.
Rand plays the character of Michael Redhill, a recent divorcee (and "extremely dislikable, spoiled jerk," he adds, though Redhill himself is "a very intelligent, articulate man") who leaves the U.S. for Poland to research the Holocaust that claimed many of his family members' lives. On his way home, he stops into a London bar and meets an ex-prison guard (Lili Francks) who shares her traumatic firsthand memories of another genocide. An Alzheimer's-afflicted war criminal now standing trial (Layne Coleman), his daughter (Amy Rutherford) and a prosecutor (J.D. Nicholsen) also come into play.
"Everywhere we've played to Western audiences, we get a similar reaction and it's stunned shock," says Rand, a Toronto thesp last in town in 2006 to star in Manitoba Theatre Centre's The Innocent Eye Test. "There's not really any shocking Rwandans. They've been about as shocked more than anybody in the world can imagine, and the genocide is that close to everybody because nobody who lives in that country wasn't affected by it, either by having family members killed or perpetrators.
"Western audiences, they're much more blown away from it and affected by the horror of it. These guys could tell it was made up."
Even so, Rand says there was a scene of the play -- part of Rwanda's Arts Azimuts festival, in commemoration of the genocide's 15th anniversary -- that sent one audience member running from the theatre. Naturally, it was during the one show where crew members neglected to put up a weapon warning announcement.
"I pulled out a machete and someone in the audience just kind of moaned and had to leave. It was a very intense theatrical moment where just the presence of the machete was overwhelming for this particular individual. It brought up too many memories; it was hard for her to stomach."
Goodness also requires a prop gun -- something the crew wasn't allowed to ship to Africa. They attempted to mail over two halves of a rubber rifle before festival organizers got the army to hook them up.
"Sure enough, we went over to meet the colonel and he sat us down in his office and pulled out a few for us to peruse and then lent us one -- which was quite intense," Rand recalls. "He knew there wasn't going to be any trouble, and he knew where to find us. He was a lot smarter than we were and a hell of a lot tougher, so I don't think he was worried."
Over the course of the two-and-a-half-week excursion, Rand and his castmates -- along with backstage staff, the film crew for a documentary he's creating about their voyage and his wife Jeannie Calleja -- also partook in impromptu storytelling and poetry sessions, picked up some of the Kinyarwanda language and drank copious amounts of beer with the suds-loving locals.
"It's so hard to describe in words what it was like," Rand says. "It was so geographically beautiful, but it was such a gentle, deep vibe to the people. The culture ran very deep there; it infused everything -- music, dance, storytelling and poetry. It's like nothing that I've ever experienced anywhere."
Rand feels the trip also breathed new life into the five-year-old work, which got its start on Toronto's Tarragon Extra Space before hitting venues in New York and Vancouver -- along with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, for which Rand took on the leading role.
"You can read as many books as you want, you can do as much imagination work and creative visualization and whatever you do when you're creating stuff to get close to the material, but you can never get as close to it as we did when we went over there," he says. "The very positive stuff that (Rwandans) said was, 'We want to know that we are not alone in this history,' and this play certainly suggests that this is not a Rwandan problem; this is a human problem. And that is a message they welcomed."
As for the Canadians left shocked by Goodness' heartbreaking content and blunt subject? Well, Rand says they should just be proud.
"Everybody always says this all the time, but I'll say it again: There's no money for art in this country. The reality is that often plays get put up for three weeks and you can only get a certain amount of work done. But if there's a creative investment in it where a play is revisited a number of times, you can come up with internationally renowned art -- which is what we have done."