The Overwhelming

Philip Gourevitch, the American journalist who famously recounted the 1994 Rwandan genocide, noted that the only fresh corpse he witnessed in his postwar travels was the victim of a car wreck. Gourevitch observed that if he labeled a photograph of the body either a Tutsi butchery victim or a Hutu one, not only would Americans not know the difference, “the appeal to your sympathies and your sense of outrage would be the same.” American sympathy and outrage—two vaporous virtues barely worth the paper they’re printed on, but often the launching pads for foreign policy—are hardly substitutes for aid, strategy and nuance. As Rogers’s 2006 thriller demonstrates so deftly—it’s set just moments before the massacre, as an American professor searches for his old Tutsi physician pal—Americans’ knee-jerk assessments of other peoples’ problems can be manslaughter by way of naive diplomacy.

It’s a pleasure to see a relatively new play by an American so packed with surprises, changing identities and gasp-inducing horrors that plot points must be cautiously rationed. Suffice to say that Rogers’s story of a loser academic from Illinois and his broken family sponging off the Rwandan controversy for book fodder is as taut as trampoline mesh. Senior’s production, so spartan in its acting and design but an intellectual and emotional bonanza, is almost completely in sync with the material. Though uncommonly schematic—many of the 50-plus scenes last less than a minute—The Overwhelming is in the tradition of horologist-like, surface-level suspense tales slickly packaged to convey a political message (Graham Greene’s shadow is always on the back wall). For the first 90 minutes, I was admiring Senior’s 11-actor ensemble; for the last 20, I was so frightened I couldn’t remember my name.

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