David Storch and Andr� Sills: This production benefits from a quickening pace and strong performances.
- The Overwhelming
- Written by J.T. Rogers
- Directed by Joel Greenberg
- Starring David Storch, Nigel Shawn Williams, Mariah Inger and Sterling Jarvis
- At Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto
For the better part of its first hour, The Overwhelming doesn't live up to its title. Then, what at first feels conspicuously like a letdown swells to life, picking up a heart-pounding momentum that carries the play to a brutal conclusion.
The story centres on an American academic, Jack Exley, who comes to Rwanda in 1994 searching for a doctor friend and becomes embroiled in the start of the genocidal war. But while the name of the play comes from the Kinyarwanda term lokeli ("the overwhelming"), it wasn't coined during the Rwandan genocide.
It comes, instead, from the Belgian conquest of the region a century earlier, which fits with some of the play's most intriguing questions. Was this country, forged out of conflict, bound to fall back into bloodshed? Did the West understand the situation well enough to stop it?
By now, the Rwandan genocide has had countless treatments on stage, in film and in books. But opening just weeks after French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted "grave errors of judgment" in his country's handling of the tragedy, such questions seem well worth posing again.
And this particular take on Rwanda has an impressive pedigree: Written by Brooklyn playwright J.T. Rogers, the play debuted at London's Royal National Theatre in 2006 and eventually earned a spot in Time Magazine's 10 best plays of 2007. Its Toronto run is the eighth effort by Studio 180, a company with a mandate to "tackle difficult and divisive issues."
At the outset, The Overwhelming feels clinical, detached, a collage of embassy cocktail parties and principled debates across tea trays. As the play progresses though, the realities outside the guarded walls here close in like a tightening noose. Director Joel Greenberg and lighting designer Kimberly Purtell create scenes of considerable intimacy (even claustrophobia) out of Michael Gianfrancesco's bare-bones set, comprised only of a brick backdrop and sparse wooden furniture.
As Exley, David Storch is a standout, cleverly balancing the many facets of his character, a nervous bundle of theories, morals, emotions and inadequacies. Nowhere are the foreigners' helpless good intentions more evident than in his whinging.
Mariah Inger nails the good-natured naivete of Exley's second wife Linda, but some of her more emotional moments feel forced.
The show thrives off a quickening pace, brought about largely by several strong performances: Hardee T. Lineham as a delightfully brash U.S. ex-pat; the serpentine, too-sweet Hutu extremist Mizinga played by Sterling Jarvis; and Paul Essiembre, effortlessly changing hats as NGO worker Jan Verbeek and French diplomat Jean-Claude Buisson. One of the most morally chilling moments comes from Buisson's assertion that for "tribal" Rwandans conflict is "in their blood."
But it's Joseph Gasana (Nigel Shawn Williams), the doctor Exley is tracking, who at last lends the show the weight one expects from a genocide tale. His hands tremble with moral outrage and he embodies hope that one suspects has already been dashed.
Williams, an audience favourite as Colin Powell in David Hare's Iraq war play Stuff Happens, again deftly plays the dove among hawks, steamrolled - along with his friends' best intentions - by a runaway human catastrophe.
The Overwhelming continues at the Berkeley Street Theatre through April 3.