May 22, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Local playwright is trying  to stop genocide in Darfur
by JENNIFER DIONISIO

Playwright Laura Napier (middle), seen here with her sisters Victoria (left) and Amma of Chestnut Hill, has written a play that was performed three times last month in New York that is aimed at ending genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

As a young girl growing up in Cheltenham, screenwriter Laura Napier recalls receiving an exceptional education on the Holocaust, due in part to the large Jewish population in the area. “‘Never again,’” she says she and her peers were told over and over. “We have to teach the history, so it does not repeat itself.”

The phrase stuck in her head, and caught her off-guard as an adult when she first heard about the crisis in Darfur. Since 2003, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Darfurians have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in this region of Sudan by the Janjaweed, an Arab militia working with the support of the Sudanese government. As Napier continued reading about the situation, it dawned on her: “This is genocide.”

“Never again” was an unfulfilled promise, she realized — but that didn’t mean she should throw up her hands helplessly. Instead, in the spring of 2006, Napier decided to test the possibilities of what one person can accomplish regarding a seemingly impossible problem to solve. While living in North Carolina with her husband, producer Doug Claybourne, during the shooting of the film North Country, the New York City-based Napier began writing a play about the situation in Darfur with the intention of staging it as a fundraiser for the cause.

Two years later, The G-Word: For Those Born Later was written and performed at New York’s La MaMa’s Galleria for three nights at the end of April, with all of the proceeds going to ground support for the people of Darfur. To raise awareness of the issue, Napier is now offering the script and assistance performing the play to colleges and

theater groups across the country free-of-charge.

Napier’s sense of social responsibility came early, she recalls. In third grade, her parents took her to South Africa to volunteer for an organization promoting dialogue between blacks and whites in the area. “It was stopping apartheid,” she marvels. “It showed me what you could do.”

Around the same time, Napier was developing her artistic skills. She took acting classes at the Cheltenham Art Center, and performed in the chorus at Cedarbrook Junior High. As an adult, she lost interest in performing, and instead found her talents lay in writing and directing. Napier earned her undergraduate degree in business for practical reasons, and then moved to California at age 23 to take film classes at San Francisco State University. She supported herself by opening a restaurant. At 26, she returned to Philadelphia to attend Temple University’s graduate film program.

Napier has always worked with documentaries and movies, but for the fundraiser she was worried a film would be too costly and take a long time to complete. With precious time already wasting, she decided to write a play instead. “We started off thinking a play was going to be easy,” she laughs. “Now we both realize it’s as difficult as making a film.”

The G-word: For Those Born Later is based on Napier’s extensive research and interviews with displaced Darfurians living in the U.S. She also watched hours of interview footage documenting people’s stories from Darfur. To write the play, she took 100 of these stories and turned them into the history of an extended family, with each character talking about his or her life on one side of the stage. For context and comic relief from these heart-wrenching accounts, Napier uses the other side of the stage to present a history of genocide. “God’s one of the characters on that side, and he’s humorous and over-the-top,” she says. “Everyone’s looking to him to stop it, and he’s like, ‘Hey, the people are the ones who have to stop it.’”

Napier is up to this task, and hopes her work will inspire others to do the same. “There’s been a huge advocacy movement in the last couple years, which is fantastic, but none of the money goes to the people of Darfur,” she explains. For this reason, Napier chose to forward the proceeds from the play to organizations providing direct assistance to

Darfurian refugees, such as the Darfur Peace and Development Organization, which has an education program and recently opened a women’s rape crisis center; the Genocide Intervention Network, which has a Civilian Protection Program; and Oxfam America, which provides food and other support to refugees.

Napier believes all this helped the people who attended feel connected to the cause after leaving the theater. “There are several million people living there who are really vulnerable,” she warns. “Most of them are women and children. We have to do something to protect these people. If everyone did one thing, we could really stop this.”