Remarkable Document: Belser and Miller.

When a playwright tags a work with a 16-word title, it usually indicates a want of show-biz savvy or a stubborn determination to ballyhoo the drama's theme with a hard-to-misread literal headline. In the case of Sonja Linden's I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given To Me By a Young Lady From Rwanda, it seems to have been both.

The British author reportedly so-labeled her 2002 play as "a deliberate challenge to our short attention span when it comes to Rwanda" - referring to the cursory international outcry and reaction to the horrific genocide that wracked that African nation in the spring of 1994. Counter-productively, though, those mental leg-jigglers that Linden most passionately wants to instruct are the most likely not even to have the patience to finish perusing her title, let alone assiduously attending to the gravely troubling matter it proclaims.

That's regrettable, because the matter is important and because Linden is far more sensibly economical when it comes to composing the drama itself, currently being mounted by Dobama Theatre. Set in 1999 London, her 90-minute one-act comprises relatively brief monologues and duologues delivered by and between the young Juliette, a survivor of the Rwandan massacre, and Simon, a writers'-blocked Brit poet. He's signed on to help out at a charity-run refugee center that encourages its dislocated clients to vent and purge themselves of their appalling experiences by writing about them (a position Linden also apparently held).

But when the strong-willed Juliette shows up with a book already completed that details her entire family's obliteration, the evening turns into a pas-de-deux involving Simon's struggle to convince her that even the most devastating stories need to be told with animating poetic expression, her reawakening him to the necessary incitement of real life in such poetry, and the invigorating clash of the pair's amiably contentious ages, cultures and histories.

In the effort to humanize her politics, Linden injects much bantering humor into the proceedings, along with her characters' good-hearted, if cranky, attempts to relate to each another, leaving the horrors of Juliette's recounting of her family's slaughter until the play's final passages. The dramatic result, however, contrarily tends to distance us from those atrocities and render the bulk of the occasion less as a shattering reminder of how monstrously indelible is man's inhumanity to man, but as an ingratiating account of how a minor poet overcame his writer's block by helping an unfortunate young woman regain normalcy through publishing a book.

Director Brian Zoldessy seems well aware of the piece's minimal theatrical resources, encouraging, for instance, Scott Miller toward perhaps somewhat more active behavior to hype up matters than the depressed and reticent Simon would reasonably allow himself (which Miller nonetheless bravely accomplishes). Added visual variety, though, might have been gained by more inventive ambulatory staging. In her professional debut as Juliette, Andrea Belser is radiantly beautiful, confident and - beyond a few no doubt thoroughly accurate, though indecipherably Rwandan-accented passages - affectingly convincing.

Rwanda plays through Jan. 20 on the Tri-C East campus, 4250 Richmond Rd., Highland Hills, and then tours various church and library locations through Feb. l. For info, call 216.932.3396 or go to dobama.org.