TRUTH

JEFF BARBEE/BLACK STAR“Last night opened to standing ovations.Still no money to continue, but it’s a stepin the right direction,” Lessac wrote in aSeptember e-mail. Still ahead for Michaeland Jackie is the daunting task of raising$300,000 to $400,000 for each countrythey hope to visit with the cast. Truth inTranslation has garnered significant financialsupport from private foundations andnational organizations in South Africa andthe United States, in addition to Tuscany’sministry of peace, which has pledged to cosponsora cast visit to the Balkans. But muchwork remains. Following September’s Johannesburgrun, the immediate fate of the playwas unclear. The Lessacs would like to bringthe cast to another six to eight countriesover the next 2 years, but they lack the fundsto conclusively move forward toward anylocale. “It’s a pain in the ass to raise money,”Lessac says. “It takes a long, long time,”Jackie says, more diplomatically. “You want[those] people to give to your project whobelieve in it as much as you do.”Producing the play—and now the documentaryfilm—has been a step-by-step“Even if reconciliation andforgiveness mean nothing morethan, ‘I’m going to break thiscycle of vengeance,’ it’s still astep. It’s a first step.”process for the Lessacs, a day-to-day strugglewith day-to-day benchmarks and goals.“I don’t think we ever thought of stopping,”Jackie says. “Even when it got difficult, we’dfinish one phase and figure out what wewould do next and everything would proceedfrom there.”Although clearly frustrated by the stressesof fund-raising, Lessac has confidence inthe power of the documentary he will produce.In addition to footage of the cast’svisit to Rwanda, he has already collectedvideo of the process of creating the play,including a workshop with the actual translators,a script-writing workshop withactors, and a music workshop withMasekela.Lessac believes that Truth in Translationhas potential as a commercial production inNew York, but, for now, he doesn’t want torisk becoming distracted from his purpose ofproffering hope and facilitating dialogueamong people who crave what the TRCoffered: a space to seek truth and, potentially,forgiveness. “They want to talk to us andare totally unthreatened by us, and they dotalk,” Lessac wrote in an August e-mail hetitled “Notes from Rwanda.”“So we travel from genocide memorialsand museums ... to performing in a stadiumfor 10,000 cheering people (music andsongs) ... to talking with victims ... and perps... and hearing stories about people whoactually killed their children because theywere afraid ... to people who wouldn’t talkabout anything to people who had storiesroiling inside them so that they came outlike water from an unstopped faucet....” TElizabeth Redden ’05 is a reporter for Inside-december 2006 : 23