Laura
Collins-Hughes

July 17, 2015

She never says Bosnia, never says massacre, never tells us the year the soldiers came to her village on her neighbors’ wedding day. Irene (Carey Van Driest), the woman at the center of Tim Ruddy’s “The International,” begins her story by savoring joy: memories of the life she and her family had before that brutal interruption. The slaughter of thousands of Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica, 20 years ago this month, was a catalyst for the play, though the setting of its war is never specified. Directed by Christopher Randolph, this drama is a skillfully acted set of three interwoven monologues, two of them spoken by men who are, if not exactly villains, certainly far short of heroic. One is Dave (Ted Schneider), a Los Angeles layabout with the half-focused gaze of a habitual drunk, who hopes to profit from the bloodshed he finds so riveting on CNN. The other is Hans (Timothy Carter), a bungling, low-level Dutch peacekeeper sent to the region, where his path crosses with Irene’s.