Urbanite's 'No One is Forgotten' shines light on plight of hostages

Winter Miller’s play “No One is Forgotten" strips its story to the existential bone. While it's a work of fiction, the play is based on the stark reality of the hostage experience.

Two women, one room. Two prisoners. Who locked them up? The play doesn’t say. Who are these women? Beng (Casey Wortmann) and Lali (Dekyi Rongé) might be aid workers or reporters. The play stays silent about that, too. 

But we do know one thing. These women aren’t going anywhere. They’re hostages. Human bargaining chips. They’ve got no exit and all the time in the world. All they can do is talk. Or fight. And that’s what they do.

Urbanite Theatre Artistic Director Summer Dawn Wallace is directing this two-hander, which runs from March 21 through April 29. She notes that the play’s claustrophobic isolation puts a heavy demand on the actors. 

“It’s a very minimal set,” she says. “It’s a bare concrete cell, that’s it. There are no bells and whistles for Casey and Dekyi to rely on; it’s all on their shoulders. They need to make you care about their characters — and pull you into their story.”

If that story feels painfully real, there’s a reason. The playwright is also a reporter. During Miller’s stint as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s research assistant, she covered brutal scenes of genocide in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those encounters informed her first play, “In Darfur” (2006). 

Miller’s latest play reflects her anger and alarm at the fate of journalists and activists around the world. The horrific, brutal murders of Jamal Khashoggi and Daniel Pearl shocked her to the core. Miller devoured true accounts of captured reporters and humanitarian aid workers. “No One is Forgotten” distills their traumas. It paints a true picture of the human damage of hostage-taking.

According to Miller, the play probes the nitty-gritty, existential issues faced by hostages. “If you lost everything, and you were left with one other person and you were together day after day, what would it take to keep you alive, particularly if you had doubts if anyone was still even looking for you? How do two people pass the time in these heightened circumstances in which there is a fear of death or violence all the time?" she asks. 

Trapped in a vicious circle

Wallace uses staging-in-the round to get the audience up-close-and-personal with the characters. “I made the space as immersive and intimate as possible," she explains. “We created a tight, small world for our characters. It feels like a real prison cell.”

Circular staging also posed logistical challenges. “Movement is key,” says Wallace. “But theater-in-the-round has a different movement vocabulary. At times, a character might turn their back to part of the audience. The actors have to use the space dynamically while staying true to the emotional core of the play’s characters.”

Lali and Beng’s concrete cage evokes the worst parts of Samuel Becket, Franz Kafka and Christopher Marlowe. Despair might seem like the appropriate emotion in their hopeless situation. But they hold it together. 

How? “Because they support each other,” says Wallace. “They talk, they exercise, they refuse to lay down and die.” She adds that they don’t always get along. “They also fight sometimes. Captivity brings out the best and worst in people. But in the end, they stand together. And they don’t break.”

After three weeks of intense rehearsals, the actors know their characters like old friends. How do they see Beng and Lali?

“Beng’s spent her life playing it cool, and thriving in her own independence,” says Wortmann. “As a hostage, she gradually realizes that facade has kept her from ever fully loving herself, let alone another person.”

“Lali wants to help people and save lives,” says Rongé. “This came out in her humanitarian work before she was taken prisoner. Within captivity, her empathy becomes a compass for survival. Lali forms a civil society of two with Beng. Their bond fortifies their resilience against oppression.”

The oppression gets heavy at times. It’s tough material. Wallace approached rehearsals with a balance of depth and lightness. “There’s both violence and intimacy in this play,” she says. “We made sure the actors felt safe.”

Time itself is a recurring motif in the play’s harsh realm. “We talked about what time feels like when you can’t measure it,” says Wallace. “What routines do you create? How do you maintain autonomy when you're stuck with the same person every day?”

The actors repeatedly practiced this experience. They often rehearsed with little or no light. The director took a similar approach with ‘Northside Hollow.’ “We rehearsed in total darkness to simulate being trapped underground,” she says. “The actors’ physical memory made their performances much more authentic."

According to Wallace, the litany of bad news has numbed the American mind. “Authenticity is the key to empathy,” she says. “If the hostages’ experience feels real on stage, the audience will feel for them.”

Urbanite Theatre partnered with Hostage US to get it right. This non-profit organization supports the families of Americans taken hostage abroad; their support continues after detainees come back home.

Hostage US provided research materials during Urbanite’s rehearsals and connected Wallace with former hostages. They also recommended books by two real-world hostages of Somali pirates. Wallace devoured those accounts. “Their stories helped me understand what it’s like to have no control over time or your surroundings," she says.

The director hopes this production will help the Urbanite audience understand.

“Atrocities in other countries seems distant and far away,” Wallace says. “News blips about hostages and murdered journalists pop up on social media. But they don’t grab our interest. These horror stories are happening to other people. They’re not like us, and it’s not happening here. So, we scroll to something else. Miller forces us to witness this abuse up close. Lali and Beng are people like us. Like it or not, you feel their pain.”