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Excerpt:
The following is from the Sept. 4, 2007, edition of The Dallas Morning News

'Truth in Translation' opens first American tour

By LAWSON TAITTE
Theater Critic
The Dallas Morning News

One of the biggest critical hits of this summer's Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, opens its first American tour Thursday at Southern Methodist University. Dallas hasn't often been on the circuit of such international theater events – but this one is out of the ordinary in a number of ways.

  Ticket Information
Because of overwhelming public response, all seats have been reserved. However, the orchestra area has been opened for seating, to be allocated to patrons in the wait line who do not have reservations. Please arrive at least one hour before the performance and wait to be seated. Orchestra seats cannot be reserved in advance. 
The performances are at 8 p.m. Sept. 6-8 and at 2 p.m. Sept. 8.

Truth in Translation commemorates the efforts that both blacks and whites made in South Africa a decade ago to understand their mutual history and be reconciled with one another. It seeks to bring about healing and social change as much as it seeks to move and entertain.

The play about forgiveness was created by an American theater and TV director who grew up fighting on the streets of New York.

It is coming to Dallas for four free performances because area actress and philanthropist Lauren Embrey just happened to be in Kigali, Rwanda, the same two nights in August 2006 that Truth in Translation was presenting some of its first performances anywhere.

Ms. Embrey was overwhelmed by this account of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard from the perpetrators and victims of some of the most heinous incidents of the apartheid period. The play's storytelling device is to focus on commission translators, who simultaneously repeated the words of both the injuring and injured parties to make them understood in all of the country's 11 official languages.


See a sample of Truth in Translation

"I was moved by the different languages, the history of their country coming through these different doorways," Ms. Embrey says. "It was an interesting concept to use the translators telling both sides of the history, using the 'I' form. It also showed how it affected their lives, just by speaking the words."

Ms. Embrey immediately decided she wanted to bring the show to Dallas, and was in a unique position to make it happen. An occasional Dallas actor and a former producing partner of Theatre Quorum, Ms. Embrey is also president of the Embrey Family Foundation. The foundation had recently given SMU $2.2 million, partly for human-rights education. Ms. Embrey was in Africa on a human-rights fact-finding trip with SMU professor Rick Halperin, the director of the new program and a former chairman of Amnesty International.

She spoke with Michael Lessac, the New York-based director who had conceived and directed Truth in Translation, on that same night she saw the show in Rwanda, where its theme interlocked with recovery from the 1994 genocide there. He agreed then and there, in principle, to bring the show to Dallas.

The artistic credentials of those who put Truth in Translation together are impeccable. Mr. Lessac was the founder and director of the Colonnades Theatre Lab in New York. He has staged plays in theaters all over the world, directed pilots and episodes of many top TV series, and wrote and directed House of Cards, a 1993 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Kathleen Turner.

The original score is by South Africa's most famous composer, Hugh Masekela, who will be in Dallas for the premiere.

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