“Hate Radio” Chucks the Transcript
“Hate Radio,” which was recently onstage at St. Ann’s Warehouse, began with a series of quiet, affecting accounts of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—among them, a story about a young Tutsi woman who saw her sisters’ legs get chopped off by her Hutu neighbor. Videos of these harrowing monologues, prerecorded by actors speaking in French, were projected onto a mysterious opaque box at the center of the performance space, as audience members listened through headphones and read English subtitles. Then venetian blinds shrouding the box slowly rose to reveal glass walls and, inside them, a sinister diorama—a replica of RTLM, or Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the radio station that fuelled the catastrophe.
What followed was a seemingly real-time French broadcast from RTLM, which felt as if it were being piped straight into our ears from July, 1994, in streams of transgressive, intoxicating invective laced with dirty jokes, a warped Rwandan-history quiz show, and bouncy pop music, from silky Afrobeat to American rock, including, at one alarming juncture, the song “Rape Me,” by Nirvana. Three shock jocks sat before microphones trading wisecracks; a happily stoned colleague spun records and patched in callers beneath a poster of the nineties icon MC Hammer, bearing the album title “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em.” The broadcast was rhythmic and insistent, full of propaganda deriding the country’s Tutsi minority as “cockroaches”—hate speech that helped lead to the death of more than eight hundred thousand people. Yet the trio spitting this poison seemed full of joy. When they laughed, it was easy not to laugh along. When they danced, it was harder not to join in—Gen X Brooklynites around me swayed to “Rape Me,” glancing at one another uneasily.
Milo Rau, the Swiss playwright and director who began staging this pungent project back in 2011, and who has toured it worldwide, has made a specialty of examining atrocity onstage. (He has two more projects coming to New York this season, one of which is about the Gisèle Pelicot trial.) In the States, he’s less well known, as is the story of RTLM, which culminated with two of the d.j.s being convicted of war crimes. (The third went on the lam.) Still, everything in that glass box felt instantly recognizable, an analog cousin of the slick disinformation that streams from our phones—a neon slurry of deepfakes and memes scored with the hits, like that sickening viral video from the White House of detained immigrants in shackles, accompanied by “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” Deep in my headphones, I flashed back to a day I’d spent watching Alex Jones as he howled like a horned-out id, the Tasmanian devil as a newscaster. He was impossible to ignore, the goal of all theatre.
The d.j.s depicted in “Hate Radio” radiated this sort of charisma: the jaunty Kantano Habimana, wearing a natty suit and riffing about women and weed (played by the Rwandan comedian Diogène Ntarindwa, himself a veteran of the army that ended the genocide); the brooding Valérie Bemeriki (Bwanga Pilipili), her tone gliding eerily between grief, rage, and a schoolteachery warmth; and the strangest participant, Georges Ruggiu (Sébastien Foucault), a white expat from Belgium who moved to Rwanda a year before the genocide. During the few months that RTLM aired, it was the dominant source of news for many listeners, and its power was greatly intensified by its playful air of interactivity: when people called in to snitch on Tutsis, the d.j.s would broadcast the targets’ names and locations, urging listeners to go after them with machetes.
Much of the onstage banter was pure DARVO, the rhetorical technique best summarized as “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” In RTLM’s account, it was the Tutsis who were the genocidal rapists and death-loving Nazis, at once pathetic losers and soul-dead destroyers. “These people are nihilists,” Ruggiu argues. Moments later, Habimana rants that “these are people who need to be exterminated.” The murders themselves come across as side quests in a video game, complete with cheat codes and drug references. “Keep a good eye on the gutters so that no cockroach escapes you,” Habimana warns. “Smoke something and make sure the cockroach comes to a bad end.” When a child calls in, the d.j.s pump him for strategic info and then inquire sweetly about his favorite music. The performance felt both virtuosic and repulsive, a goulash of hype, sloganeering, and calls to violence spiked with in-jokes, shaggy-dog anecdotes, and populist fables, all of it seductive and—in our dangerous era—familiar. You could call it the Weave.
Rau’s play shares some DNA with American plays that interrogate recent history, including “The Laramie Project,” about the murder 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 excellent “Dana H.,” an actress lip-synched to a loopy, distressing recording in which the playwright’s own mother described being kidnapped, a distancing effect that suggested the way trauma can render a true story unbelievable even to the person who went through it. A few days before “Hate Radio,” I saw “Kramer/Fauci,” which took its script from a C-span debate between the act up firebrand Larry Kramer and the public-health official Anthony Fauci in 1993, during the height of the aids epidemic.
Theatre that sticks to the facts can feel like a balm in a world of sketchy “reality” and true-crime slop. Given what I’d read about Rau, an activist provocateur who has described his work as “a truth machine,” I’d expected “Hate Radio” to be a verbatim reënactment, like “Is This a Room.” Rau has often drawn from transcripts of real trials (including that of the Ceaușescus) and also constructed fictional trials (a tribunal for civil-war atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), treating the courtroom as a stage and the stage as a courtroom—sometimes literally so. His mock tribunal about Congo, which was performed in 2015 with real judges, real witnesses, and a genuine verdict, led to two ministers being dismissed from the government.
In the program for “Hate Radio,” an author’s note clarified that this production wasn’t that type of show. The brutal witness testimonies came from “allegorical, completely fictional” figures—composites based on multiple survivors. The punkish cross-talk of the studio was inspired, in part, by Sonic Youth videos. In other words, “Hate Radio” was a mood piece intended to transmit the broadcast’s emotional impact, not to imitate its literal sound. It wasn’t documentary or journalism; it was more like a séance, a crackly transmission from a lost world.
This type of slippage would ordinarily nag at me. Instead, I found the performance more profound than “Kramer/Fauci,” which stayed close to the C-span transcript. Not that the latter production—at N.Y.U. Skirball, directed by Daniel Fish—was untheatrical. There were dashes of surrealism (roller skates, a chicken suit) and one audaciously weird effect: a machine belched white foam that coated the stage, then melted, like a glittering snowdrift. The gloppy pileup suggested multiple metaphors: pandemics? semen? the mess of history itself? But the bulk of the evening was a simpler recitation of the 1993 debate, including viewer call-ins. Thomas Jay Ryan was a funny, cranky Kramer, Will Brill a shrewd, amiable Fauci. Their intimate sparring reflected vexed, unresolved tensions about science and government. And yet the night didn’t add much to what you’d get from streaming the interview online. Audience members chuckled at Kramer’s legendary spleen; they moaned in response to bigoted callers. It was the phenomenon a college friend calls “hissing at Nazis,” a curse of so much well-intentioned theatre.
“Hate Radio,” in contrast, was too disorienting to hiss at. It aimed to rattle, not soothe: to lock us into our headphones, where we couldn’t escape our thoughts. If the actors didn’t recite the precise words that were spoken back then, that hideous spell that turned listeners against their neighbors, they offered something just as potent—a jolting reminder of how easy it is to go numb when we are being entertained. ♦