About the Play:

The Overwhelming is a full-length drama by J.T. Rogers. Seizing the opportunity to research a book, an American academic uproots his family from Illinois to Rwanda in early 1994. He begins a fervent search for his dear and missing friend while his wife and teenage son find trouble of their own. Befriended by both locals and diplomats with veiled motives, they become enmeshed in the tension, terror, professional risks and personal betrayals that they ultimately realize mark the start of a genocidal war.

The Overwhelming is a riveting examination of the mounting tensions in 1994 Rwanda shortly before the genocide. 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 all 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.

The Overwhelming premiered in 2006 at London's prestigious National Theatre. The US premiere was in 2007 at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York where it was named a Top Ten Play of the Year by Time Magazine and Time Out New York. The Canadian premiere was in 2010 at Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs in Toronto. Other productions have played throughout the United States and Europe, all to critical and popular success.

Cast: 3 female, 8 male (doubling)

What people say:

"The Overwhelming strikes me as not only the best new play I've seen this year but also one of the most entertaining." — Daily Telegraph (London)

"Shatteringly powerful but also unexpectedly entertaining… with the atmosphere, moral urgency, and hurtling momentum of a Graham Greene novel." — Sunday Telegraph (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 devastating power." — Sunday Times (London)

"I loved everything about J.T. Rogers' The Overwhelming." — The New Yorker

"An urgent new theatrical voice has arrived." — New York Sun

"The Overwhelming builds to such a chilling climax, it's not a play you'll forget." — New York Daily News

"Political theatre of the most gripping kind. J.T. Rogers' The Overwhelming handles this daunting topic with a powerful immediacy and theatricality." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

J. T. Rogers is a Tony award-winning American playwright who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His works have been produced on Broadway in New York City and in the West End of London; they have also been staged throughout the United States, and in Germany, Canada, Australia, and Israel. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Pinter Review Prize for Drama.