Sophomore theater major Laurel Hill sits alone at a table. The dim lights cast a warm glow on the olive-green cash box before her. A tall girl in a black coat bounds up to the table.
"Would you like to make a donation?" Hill asks her.
Hill is one of the volunteers for Thursday night's performance of "In Darfur" in the Cooper Science Building. She is collecting the Genocide Intervention Network donations that are being collected in lieu of ticket money.
"Yes, I would!" the tall girl says cheerfully.
But once inside the lecture hall — the makeshift theater — the mood is anything but cheerful.
Two "bodies" lie facedown and lifeless over the front-row desks. By the end of the play, one more will be dragged over the desks. These are the corpses left in the wake of the government-backed genocide in western Sudan.
The plot of "In Darfur" follows a New York Times journalist as she tries to shed light on the genocide in Darfur. The play is set in the early 2000s when, despite evidence of mass murders, mutilations and rapes, the United States government would only call the situation a "humanitarian crisis" rather than a genocide.
The play shows the ludicrous nature of such formalities by the stark juxtaposition of scenes.
The audience watches Hawa, a Darfuri woman, cry as she tells Maryka, the journalist, how six Janajaweed militants gang-raped her and left her for dead — as she tells Maryka how she spent nights searching the streets to find and bury her family.
The audience hears Hawa's gut-wrenching screams as she is brutally raped by two Sudanese police officers because she told her story to Maryka.
The audience sees photographs flash across the screen of the real-life charred bodies, the real-life dead babies and the real-life burning villages in Darfur — this is what the Sudanese government is doing to its own people.
And then the audience listens as Maryka's editor tells her there isn't enough room in the paper for the story, as she tells Maryka there isn't enough proof to run a story implicating the Sudanese government in crimes against humanity.
Since the early 2000s, the Sudanese government has been explicitly charged with genocide. Congress made that move in 2004. In addition, massive advocacy campaigns have been waged.
But as Megan Gorman, the actor who plays Maryka, said at the end of the play, the violence continues.
Since 2006, the Janajaweed have been murdering and raping in Chad. And just last week, three Rwandan peacekeepers were killed in Darfur.
Senior Joshua Henry came to "In Darfur" because he has been following African genocide since the mid-'90s. He said it is important for students to educate themselves about humanitarian issues.
"As young Americans, we have the opportunity — the responsibility — to make things change," he said.
Co-director of the play Casie Smith shares Henry's sense of responsibility. She knew little about Darfur until Alyce Householter, the other director, sent her the script for "In Darfur" this summer.
After reading the script, she immediately began researching the situation.
"This play is about the cause against apathy," she said. "Even when you think you can't make a difference, you can."
Henry agreed, citing the existence of Darfur-like situations around the globe.
"If we don't work to stop it," he said, "it's going to continue."
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