THEATRE REVIEW: THE OVERWHELMING
12 Mar'10

Play shines light on humanity's dark side

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

If you’re looking for truth in packaging, check out Studio 180’s production of THE OVERWHELMING — and prepare to be overwhelmed.

Produced in association with Canadian Stage, THE OVERWHELMING opened at the Berkeley Street Theatre on Thursday, under the confident direction of Joel Greenberg. This is playwright J.T. Rogers’ attempt, it seems, to give theatre goers an inside look at the Rwandan genocide of 1994 — by showing it to us through the eyes of a trio of outsiders.

The story is set in early 1994, dropping us smack into the middle of an uneasy Kigali, the Rwandan capital, just moments after American academic Jack Exley (played by David Storch) touches down in search of a pivotal interview — one that will, he hopes, form the spine of a book on which he is labouring in order to save his job.

And while he interviews his old friend Joseph Gasana (Nigel Shawn Williams) about his work with dying children, Jack hopes his young new wife Linda (Mariah Inger) and his teenaged son Geoffrey (Brendan McMurtry-Howlett) will have a chance to explore and hopefully bond in the process. Linda, for her part, hopes to spin the trip into a personal essay or two, while Geoffrey is still sorting out his mother’s death.

They represent, of course, the ultimate innocents abroad, cloaked in the smugness of academia, the American middle-class and youth respectively — and Rwanda, circa 1994, is no place for innocents. Problems are quickly obvious, as Joseph not only fails to show up for his first meeting with Jack, but appears to have fallen off the face of the earth as well.

As the search for Joseph intensifies, and as they slowly learn thei way around the political society of Kigali, things grow more complicated, as American diplomats (Hardee T. Lineham), French diplomats (Paul Essiembre), United Nations officials (Essiembre again and a powerful Andre Sills) and local politicians (Sterling Jarvis) each try to put their own particular spin on things. Even young Geoffrey is drawn into the intrigue when he discovers that their houseman Gerard (Karim Morgan) is not what he seems — and they are all soon overwhelmed by first the complexity and then the horror of the events around them.
Reviewed here in its final preview, this is a complicated, text-heavy work that is as much history lesson as it is theatrical drama. Greenwood and his committed cast, bolstered by Dorothy A. Atabong and Audrey Dwyer (each triple cast in small but pivotal roles), attack the project with a potent mix of passion and restraint.

Working on a sprawling and, frankly, overly fussy set created by Michael Gianfrancesco and lit by Kimberley Purtell, they don’t so much offer up a history lesson as bring history to life. Illuminated by a complete range of human emotions — both the base and more rarely, the noble — they offer dramatic context for events that will shake humanity to its core.

But in the final analysis, THE OVERWHELMING — the title comes from the word the Mongo tribe used to describe the Belgian takeover of the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — is not so much about the Rwandan genocide, as it is about the complicated circumstances that led to it. It is also about the inability of a world beyond Rwanda’s borders to comprehend what was going to happen, or to stop it when it did, anymore than we could have stopped the excesses of the French or Russian revolutions.

The contemplation of man’s inhumanity to man may indeed be overwhelming, but the only way it will ever be stopped is if we shine a light in its darkest corners — and THE OVERWHELMING does just that.