The Overwhelming A Play

As a middle-aged American academic who desperately needs to publish a book in order to gain tenure, Jack Exley leaps at the chance to go to Rwanda to write about his old college classmate Dr. Joseph Gasana, who has in the intervening years has specialized in treating children stricken by AIDS. But when Jack, along with his African-American second wife, Linda, and his disaffected teenage son, Geoffrey, arrive in Kigali in the fall of 1994, they are not only unable to find Joseph, they are unable to find anyone who will even admit to having known the Tutsi doctor. Befriended by both a cynical American diplomat and a perhaps too-helpful Hutu political powerbroker, Jack and his family slowly, then urgently, become enmeshed in the tension and terror, the professional risks and personal betrayals, that they ultimately realize mark the start of a genocidal war--a horror that they can sense but cannot comprehend or control. InThe Overwhelming,J.T. Rogers has written a play that is both a brilliantly crafted piece of writing and a tense, suspenseful exploration of one of the great human tragedies of our time. It will have its U.S. premiere off-Broadway in November 2007. J. T. Rogersis the author of several plays, including the award-winning Madagascar. He received a NEA/TCG Theatre Residency in 2004 and has been a guest artist or lecturer at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the University of Utah, and Truman State University in Missouri. He lives in Brooklyn. As a middle-aged American academic who desperately needs to publish a book in order to gain tenure, Jack Exley leaps at the chance to go to Rwanda to write about his old college classmate Dr. Joseph Gasana, who in the intervening years has specialized in treating children stricken by AIDS. But when Jack, along with his African-American second wife, Linda, and his disaffected teenage son, Geoffrey, arrive in Kigali in the fall of 1994, they are not only unable to find Joseph, they are unable to find anyone who will even admit to having known the Tutsi doctor. Befriended by both a cynical American diplomat and a perhaps too-helpful Hutu political powerbroker, Jack and his family slowly, then urgently, become enmeshed in the tension and terror, the professional risks and personal betrayals, that they ultimately realize mark the start of a genocidal war--a horror that they can sense but cannot comprehend or control. InThe Overwhelming,J.T. Rogers has written a play that is both a brilliantly crafted piece of writing and a tense, suspenseful exploration of one of the great human tragedies of our time. It will have its U.S. premiere off-Broadway in November 2007. "I loved how messy the play's structure is, and Rogers's great ambition as a writer . . . the Third World is seen in the harsh glare of a bare light bulb--the author's intelligence . . . [Rogers] explores a kind of anthropology of the self, making a narrative out of his own disenfranchisement."--Hilton Als,The New Yorker "I loved everything about the young American playwright J. T. Rogers'sThe Overwhelming. I loved how messy the play's structure is, and Rogers's great ambition as a writer.The Overwhelming. . . is like a combination of Wallace Shawn's dissection, in his 1991 monologueThe Fever, of the political elements that are endemic to the tourist's way of seeing things and the poet Derek Walcott's examination of the poverty-stricken island-locked native in his 1990 epicOmeros. In each work, the Third World is seen in the harsh glare of a bare light bulb--the author's intelligence. Neither Shawn nor Walcott allowed us to fall back on the Westerner's dreamy rhetoric a

J. T. Rogers is the author of several plays, including Madagascar, which received two awards for best play. He received a NEA/TCG Theatre Residency in 2004 and has been a guest artist or lecturer at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the University of Utah, and Truman State University in Missouri. He lives in Brooklyn.

 â€œA gripping political thriller . . . captures the sense of terror when the division between political discussion and murder is membrane-thin.â€� –Rachel Halliburton, Time Out London "The theatre is a tribunal whose task is to present the bloody evidence and ask what you think of yourself as a member of the human race. I have seldom seen this task performed with such unprejudiced but devestating power." –John Peter, The Sunday Times