The Papermoon Puppet Theatre’s Mwathirika, an adaptation of the novel and film “The Year of Living Dangerously” was brought to Lafayette College on Tuesday, September 11.

It is a largely a non-verbal performance, but its message transcends words. The words it does use are powerful though—the title, Mwathirika, is the Swahili word for victim Mwathirika is beautifully done and terribly real, bringing out the most overlooked tragedies of the Indonesian genocide brought on by President Sukarno in 1965. Those portrayals generally focus on the political side of the story or its affect on the nation as a whole, while Mwathirika tells stories of the families that were destroyed during that tragedy.

The raw devastation is almost tangible in the theater’s atmosphere—especially when a family disappeared one by one, leaving the youngest child full of grief, fear and confusion. Not many eyes were dry in the theater after that scene.

Mwathirika is the company’s debut in the United States as they raise awareness of this tragedy and how mass violence has affected the entire globe in the past century. Easton is one of the only seven cities participating in Center Stage, the public diplomacy initiative of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.