Editor’s Note

The Armenian village of Sheyxalan, 1915. From the collection of the Armenian Genocide Museum and Institute Archive, Yerevan, Armenia.

Playwright, librettist, teacher, lecturer, and activist Catherine Filloux has been writing plays about human rights, social justice, and individual freedoms for over twenty years. Her plays often incorporate actual people and events, but are never merely biographical. By reimagining real-life characters and situations—employing temporal shifts, dreams, hallucinations, soundscapes, and other theatrical techniques—she explores the characters’ thoughts and emotions as they struggle with moral and ethical dilemmas, resist evil while searching for goodness, and react to assaults on human dignity. Her plays also question the fallibility of our collective memory, and the ways our interpretations of the past change and become distorted over time.

The plays in this volume require minimal sets, few actors, and relatively simple props, costumes, and stage business. Filloux’s forceful, precise dialogue carries the plays and makes them well suited to being read on the page as well as theatrically staged.

In 2016, naming her the first Art and Peacebuilding Scholar, at the University of San Diego, the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice described her as a “playwright, educator and activist [who] shines a light on contemporary and historic injustice, the crises that unfold as a result of such wrongs, and individual and community quests for alternatives to oppression and violence.” We are pleased to present six of her plays in this volume of Mānoa.

The following notes provide some historical background to the plays.

Silence of god

Silence of God opens in Cambodia in 1998, two decades after the end of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which killed nearly two million Cambodians and destroyed the country. In that year, Pol Pot, the regime’s supreme leader, had surfaced in the jungle district of Anlong Veng after being in hiding since 1980.

Pol Pot was seized by Ta Mok, a Khmer Rouge commander known as the “Butcher”—a violent killer who grinned and laughed maniacally. He had turned against Pol Pot for ordering the assassination of an associate and a dozen members of the associate’s family. In 1998, he offered to hand over Pol Pot to the U.S. in exchange for immunity from prosecution. If the international community could force Pol Pot to appear in court for his crimes, some measure of justice would have been provided to his victims. But before this could happen, Pol Pot—elderly and suffering from malaria—died.

Pol Pot’s brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, appears as the character named Shadowy Figure in Silence of God. He was also a mass murderer, in charge of brutal internment camps and genocidal killings in the name of Angka, the regime’s governing apparatus. However, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Ieng Sary was pardoned by King Sihanouk and given amnesty from prosecution by Prime Minister Hun Sen. He also had the privilege of a diplomatic passport, a lavish villa in Phnom Penh, and the ability to send his children abroad to study.

In 2003, the United Nations agreed to help Cambodia establish an international tribunal to prosecute Khmer Rouge war crimes. After the court began operations in 2007, its mandate was weakened, thwarted, and delayed repeatedly by former Khmer Rouge leaders who remained in high positions, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former battalion commander. By 2017, the tribunal had convicted just three elderly men. Most perpetrators died of old age, untried and unprosecuted.

Silence of God was commissioned by the Contemporary American Theater Festival and received its world premiere at the festival, in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in 2002. The cast members were Mercedes Herrero, Ron Nakahara, JoJo Gonzalez, and Christopher Mchale. The director was Jean Randich.

Selma ’65

In March 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a thirty-nine-year-old white woman from Michigan, was shot and killed while driving on an isolated Alabama road. Her killers were Ku Klux Klansmen who included Gary Thomas “Tommy” Rowe, an FBI undercover informant.

At her home in Detroit on March 7, Liuzzo had watched on television the “Bloody Sunday” brutal...