“Hate Radio” Chucks the Transcript

The d.j.s depicted successful “Hate Radio” radiated this benignant of charisma: the jaunty Kantano Habimana, wearing a natty suit and riffing astir women and weed (played by the Rwandan comedian Diogène Ntarindwa, himself a seasoned of the service that ended the genocide); the brooding Valérie Bemeriki (Bwanga Pilipili), her code gliding eerily betwixt grief, rage, and a schoolteachery warmth; and the strangest participant, Georges Ruggiu (Sébastien Foucault), a achromatic expat from Belgium who moved to Rwanda a twelvemonth earlier the genocide. During the fewer months that RTLM aired, it was the ascendant root of quality for galore listeners, and its powerfulness was greatly intensified by its playful aerial of interactivity: erstwhile radical called successful to snitch connected Tutsis, the d.j.s would broadcast the targets’ names and locations, urging listeners to spell aft them with machetes.

Much of the onstage banter was axenic DARVO, the rhetorical method champion summarized arsenic “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” In RTLM’s account, it was the Tutsis who were the genocidal rapists and death-loving Nazis, astatine erstwhile pathetic losers and soul-dead destroyers. “These radical are nihilists,” Ruggiu argues. Moments later, Habimana rants that “these are radical who request to beryllium exterminated.” The murders themselves travel crossed arsenic broadside quests successful a video game, implicit with cheat codes and cause references. “Keep a bully oculus connected the gutters truthful that nary cockroach escapes you,” Habimana warns. “Smoke thing and marque definite the cockroach comes to a atrocious end.” When a kid calls in, the d.j.s pump him for strategical info and past inquire sweetly astir his favourite music. The show felt some virtuosic and repulsive, a goulash of hype, sloganeering, and calls to unit spiked with in-jokes, shaggy-dog anecdotes, and populist fables, each of it seductive and—in our unsafe era—familiar. You could telephone it the Weave.

Rau’s play shares immoderate DNA with American plays that interrogate caller history, including “The Laramie Project,” astir the execution of Matthew Shepard; Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman shows from the nineties; and the 2021 play “Is This a Room,” a verbatim staging of the F.B.I.’s interrogation of Reality Winner. In Lucas Hnath’s fantabulous “Dana H.,” an histrion lip-synched to a loopy, distressing signaling successful which the playwright’s ain parent described being kidnapped, a distancing effect that suggested the mode trauma tin render a existent communicative unbelievable adjacent to the idiosyncratic who went done it. A fewer days earlier “Hate Radio,” I saw “Kramer/Fauci,” which took its publication from a C-span statement betwixt the act up firebrand Larry Kramer and the public-health authoritative Anthony Fauci successful 1993, during the tallness of the aids epidemic.

Theatre that sticks to the facts tin consciousness similar a balm successful a satellite of sketchy “reality” and true-crime slop. Given what I’d work astir Rau, an activistic provocateur who has described his enactment arsenic “a information machine,” I’d expected “Hate Radio” to beryllium a verbatim reënactment, similar “Is This a Room.” Rau has often drawn from transcripts of existent trials (including that of the Ceaușescus) and besides constructed fictional trials (a tribunal for civil-war atrocities successful the Democratic Republic of the Congo), treating the courtroom arsenic a signifier and the signifier arsenic a courtroom—sometimes virtually so. His mock tribunal astir Congo, which was performed successful 2015 with existent judges, existent witnesses, and a genuine verdict, led to 2 ministers being dismissed from the government.

In the programme for “Hate Radio,” an author’s enactment clarified that this accumulation wasn’t that benignant of show. The brutal witnesser testimonies came from “allegorical, wholly fictional” figures—composites based connected aggregate survivors. The punkish cross-talk of the workplace was inspired, successful part, by Sonic Youth videos. In different words, “Hate Radio” was a temper portion intended to transmit the broadcast’s affectional impact, not to imitate its literal sound. It wasn’t documentary oregon journalism; it was much similar a séance, a crackly transmission from a mislaid world.