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Sword's Play

by Lindsay Branch
November/December 2007 , Page 108

Photograph by Peter Ross Leslie Lewis Sword

Now playing Fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the 37-year-old performer is winning raves in the theater world with her one-woman show. Miracle in Rwanda tells of genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza, who in 1994 spent 91 days huddled with seven other women in a three-by-four-foot bathroom as Hutu militias slaughtered at least 500,000 Tutsis. Sword focuses on the internal journey that led Ilibagiza to forgive the killers.

Credits A.B., Harvard (1995). MFA, UCLA (2004). Co-star, Starving Hysterical Naked, a short film about Beat Generation writers (2003). Author, Waiter, There’s a Fly in My Soup: How to Make Megabucks Waiting Tables (1997), and Naked Heart, a book of poems and photographs (2005). Starred as Dorothy Dandridge in Yesterday Came Too Soon at the National Black Theater in Harlem (2005).

Crimson Ties Reginald Lewis, the first African-American to have a building named after him at Harvard, was determined to send daughter Leslie to his alma mater. “He never said, ‘You have to go to Harvard.’ But what he did do, from when I was very young, was take me to the Harvard Club [in New York]. And it was just such a cool place … ”

Inspiration Sword falls into character to quote Ilibagiza: “I realized that these men could not know the evil that they are doing. They are in hell already and I could not give my hatred to them … So, I forgive them … That is what saved me.”

Art as Life In 2006 Sword traveled to Rwanda with her husband Gavin Sword (they met freshman week—he was “the cute boy downstairs”) to bring home their adopted children, Christian and Joy.

Moment of Truth In Rwanda, Sword watched as Ilibagiza came face–to–face with the man who had murdered most of her family. Recalling the encounter still brings tears to Sword’s eyes.

Itinerary “Every time we finish up somewhere they ask us to come do it somewhere else,” Sword says. “So I’ll keep doing it until they stop asking.”