State of Denial

Odette is a young Rwandan-Canadian filmmaker who has travelled to Turkey to investigate stories of genocide and hidden identity for an upcoming film. When she interviews Sahana, an elderly Muslim woman who has spent her life assisting survivors of the Armenian genocide, she learns a devastating secret about Sahana, one that she resolves to share with the world at any cost, even if it means revealing her own shocking secret.

AUTHOR

Rahul Varma

Rahul Varma is a playwright and artistic director of Teesri Duniya Theatre in Montreal, which he co-founded in 1981. In 1998 he co-founded the quarterly alt.theatre: cultural diversity and the stage, where many of his articles have appeared. He writes both in Hindi and English. Some of his recent plays are Land Where the Trees Talk, No Man’s Land, Trading Injuries, Bhopal, and State of Denial. His plays have been translated into French, Italian, Hindi and Punjabi. He is a recipient of Special Juror’s Award from the Quebec Drama Federation.

Reviews

“State of Denial is by far Rahul Varma’s best work as a playwright since Bhopal. Most astonishing is that he has mastered the voices of women in crises and in extremis with elegance and poetic savagery.” —Anna Fuerstenberg, The Rover
“Varma’s work will not be easily forgotten, and it is an important exercise in raising awareness of the story of the Armenians in Turkey. This play humanizes this part of history, and shows us how, in the words of Sahana, ‘hatred is an acid that will burn through its container.’ “—Chris Lane, Charlebois Post