By Carolyn Weaver
New York City
28 November 2007
 

An American play that deals with the most difficult of subjects -- the ethnic hatreds in Rwanda that led to the genocidal killings of an estimated 800,000 to one million people -- has drawn critical acclaim and theater audiences in New York City. Now playing off-Broadway in a Roundabout Theatre production, “The Overwhelming” – which premiered in London in 2006 – is by a New York-based dramatist who’d never been to Africa when he wrote it.

Playwright J.T. Rogers

A scene from “The Overwhelming” (courtesy, Roundabout Theatre Company)

Sam Robards and Owiso Odera in “The Overwhelming” (courtesy, Roundabout Theatre Company)

Exley is there to write a book about his old friend, an AIDS doctor who is a Tutsi. But his old friend is missing. As fear and violence ratchet up, the professor is uncertain whom, or what, to believe. Are the Hutus he met truly the victims? Are there really lists of Tutsis to be killed, as some insist? Must he make a choice, when he isn’t even sure what is happening?  “We are in a civil war, Jack,” a Tutsi character tells him. “To not choose a side – this is as bad as choosing the wrong one.”

Ron Cephas Jones, in the role of a Rwandan doctor in "The Overwhelming" (courtesy, Roundabout Theatre Company)

He says Rwandan audience members have a particular reaction to the play. “The comment I get over and over,” he says, “is ‘It was so hard to watch, I wanted to jump up at points and stop the play. Thank you so much for not only writing this play, but for writing it in a way that shows how complicated and morally ambiguous it was’.”