Theater

The Overwhelming

Michael Brosilow

Using Rwanda

A play as self-involved as the Americans it critiques

The Overwhelming Next Theatre Company
Through 5/17: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, also Sat 5/9, 2 PM, and Mon 5/11, 7:30 PM, Next Theatre, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, 847-475-1875, nexttheatre.org, $23-$38.

By Justin Hayford

April 30, 2009

“Not having context is a dangerous thing,” sniffs the French diplomat, dressing down American academic Jack Exley, who’s come to Rwanda to prove that earnest hard work can conquer any social ill. Exley, an expert in international relations, is doing a comparative analysis of grassroots international activism, hoping to uncover the shared attributes among ordinary people who change the world. He plans to spend a few months interviewing an old college friend who runs a pediatric AIDS clinic in Kigali, and he’s brought his wife and 17-year-old son along.

Trouble is, it’s January 1994, and the context that Exley’s overlooked is the bloody, decades-old conflict between the Tutsis and Hutus, which is about to erupt into genocide.

When the doctor he’s come to interview, a Tutsi, goes missing, Exley parades around Kigali waving his U.S. citizenship like a magic wand, demanding that Hutu government officials investigate the death of his “friend,” whom they consider a murderous terrorist. As if to prove the French diplomat’s point, a mob of bloodthirsty Hutu extremists, sweeping the city in a well-organized Tutsi massacre, eventually storms Exley’s house and prepares to slaughter him and his family.

J.T. Rogers’s The Overwhelming—a hit at London’s National Theatre in 2006, now receiving its Chicago-area premiere at Evanston’s Next Theatre—works overtime to show how disastrous the American penchant for self-absorption can be in the international arena. But despite a well-acted, smartly paced production—and harrowing finale—under Kimberly Senior’s agile direction, the play reveals a cultural narcissism in the playwright that exceeds that of his American protagonist.

Like many contemporary playwrights tackling politically charged stories, Rogers spends the preponderance of his script making points rather than drama. Nearly all of his hour-long first act is a succession of illustrations of the play’s issues: Exley’s misguided high-mindedness, Rwandans’ deep-seated mistrust of one another, international indifference to African civil strife. Sure, all these issues might affect the action, but there isn’t any. About the only dramatic scene in the entire act occurs when Exley shows up at the AIDS clinic and the staff emphatically denies ever having heard of his friend. It’s one of the few moments when something consequential happens.

Rogers compounds the schematic feel of the play by including a UN peacekeeper and that snooty French diplomat, whose sole functions are to display fatalistic indifference to the Rwandans’ plight and to point out Exley’s academic solipsism (he can’t understand Rwanda without having lived there, they repeatedly admonish him). He also spends a good deal of energy attempting to hide his schematism by highlighting the strained relations in Exley’s family—the son resents dad’s new wife, dad has been largely absent from the son’s life, the new wife doesn’t understand her role as quasi-parent—none of which affects the course of the plot. And at nearly every turn Rogers strains credulity. His international relations expertise notwithstanding, Exley has an infinitesimal understanding of Rwanda’s internal tensions. His wife, meanwhile, is an accomplished essayist bent on asking “hard questions” that rarely get beyond asking people how they feel.

Reducing a real-world mess to a set of talking points allows Rogers to make valid if obvious points, but without drama little onstage feels true. And while Rogers takes great pains to indict American self-involvement in the face of international atrocities, he commits the same sin. After all, The Overwhelming is essentially about the toll that the Rwandan massacre takes on a white American professional and his family—the intricacies of the Rwandan predicament are always secondary. For Rogers, the Rwandans’ lives have meaning primarily because they offer moral instruction to hapless Americans.   

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