The Overwhelming: A Play

by J.T. Rogers

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.

In The 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.

Genres: Plays, War, Drama

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

J.T. Rogers’ plays include Blood and Gifts, The Overwhelming, White People, and Madagascar. He was nominated for a 2009 Olivier Award for his work as one of the original playwrights for The Great Game: Afghanistan. He is a 2012 Guggenheim fellow in playwriting. Other recent awards include NEA/TCG and NYFA fellowships, the Pinter Review Prize for Drama, the American Theatre Critics Association’s Osborne Award, and the William Inge Center for the Arts’ New Voices Award.

Reviews

[Jack Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The play itself was a worthwhile read and worthy of four stars. The additional material prompted me to add the fifth star.

[LindSay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really intense play. The final scene gave me goosebumps - and that was just from reading it! I really wish now that I'd taken the opportunity to see this when I had the chance. I really liked the slow build. Everything seemed not quite right in the beginning, and there's a certain discomfort that just continues to increase. I also liked how the audience isn't ever given a clear definition of who's right and who's wrong. Nothing is clear-cut black-and-white, and I liked that. All the tension and distrust builds, and you never get a real resolution to any of it. Mizinga's last lines hit you like a punch in the chest:

\"This will mean nothing to you soon. All of us, we will mean nothing. This is so unimportant to you. You will go home and forget. How fortunate you are.\"

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second of Rogers' plays I've read, and he has an uncanny, maybe unique ability to make dramatic and understandable some fairly complex political issues, in this case the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Wish I had been able to see this performed in London with Andrew Garfield in one of the leading roles. If one reads the play, be sure to read all the supplemental material at the end, as Rogers' story of getting his play 'vetted' by two Rwandans, who turned out to have an astonishing connection, is perhaps even more chilling than the play itself.

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

J.T. Rogers took the title for his play from a translation of the Mongo word lokeli, used to describe the conquest of the Congolese people by the Belgians in the late 19th century. But "overwhelming" is also an apt description for the events depicted in this drama--the implosion of Rwanda in the mid-1990s--particularly as they feel to people like me, outside of this troubled African nation and comfortably safe in America, seemingly powerless to make them stop.

Several of the Rwandan characters in The Overwhelming tell us more than once that Americans don't know anything about their country and don't care about it. That's the reason why Rogers's play is so important.

It takes place in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, in early 1994. An American professor, Jack Exley, has come here to write the book that he is sure will earn him tenure and secure his career, a book about a Rwandan doctor named Joseph Gasana, founder and operator of a children's AIDS clinic. Jack has come here with his new wife, Linda, a journalist; and his 17-year-old son from a first marriage, Geoff. Geoff's mother recently died, and Jack is hoping that this trip will help him bond with this young man whom he does not know very well.

But it turns out that Jack's old friend Joseph is the enigma here: though he wrote to Jack just one week before Jack's arrival in Rwanda, Joseph is now nowhere to be found. The hospital where he is supposed to have worked says they've never heard of him; the AIDS clinic has shut down without a trace; and Joseph's wife, Elise, shows up saying she hasn't seen her husband in days. The shape of The Overwhelming is a suspense thriller a la John Le Carre or Robert Ludlum, as Jack and Linda search for clues to explain Joseph's disappearance.

The answer is easy to predict, at least with the hindsight of history, for Joseph is a Tutsi, and at the same time that Jack and Linda arrive in Rwanda, the destruction of the Tutsis is being planned by extremist Hutus who are taking control of the government. The Overwhelming depicts, in the context of this personal story, the days leading up to the genocide of the Tutsis, in which (according to Wikipedia) about 800,000 were killed in about three months.

What Rogers does best in this play is to show us how insidious and persuasive cultural hatred can be; it is personified largely in the play's most interesting character, Samuel Mizinga, a well-educated, sophisticated government official who turns out to be one of the leaders of the anti-Tutsi forces. Rogers also does a good job putting a human face on this monolithic event, though more so in the case of the American (innocent?) bystanders than that of the Rwandan victims. So there's real value to this play, trying to reverse the notion that lies at its center, namely, that Americans could care less about what happens in Africa.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read, studied, and watched this in sixth form Theatre studies class. Very enjoyable.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This play is set in 1994 in Rwanda right before the massacres began. Now I have read a few other books on this topic, including Paul Rusesabagina's An Ordinary Man and Samantha Powers' A Problem of Hell. It was interesting reading a fiction piece on the topic rather than non-fiction because it allowed the author to represent events in different ways than an overview or than just through the eyes of one man. I think it raised a lot of questions, but I didn't like the answers it gave. The sense of futility is overwhelming and demoralizing. Rusesabagina took actions as an individual to protect people from slaughter. A Problem From Hell condemns the US from doing anything (but the premise is clearly that the US could have and should have done something). This play throws up its hands and says "nothing could be done:"a formidable perspective, but a sad one. I gave it 4 stars because of one scene in the second act where suddenly the author is dabbling in magical realism, which I found out of place in an otherwise well-crafted narrative structure.