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Library Journal Reviews
January 15, 2008
The Overwhelming: A Play
by Larry Schwartz
REVIEWS; Arts and Humanities; Pg. 101
Rogers, J.T. The Overwhelming: A Play. Faber & Faber . 2007. 158p.
ISBN 978-0-86547-974-6 . pap. $14.
The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays About Mass Murder in Rwanda,
Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia. Univ. of Wisconsin . Feb. 2008.
c.232p. ed. by Robert Skloot . ISBN 978-0-299-22470-7 . $75; pap.
ISBN 978-0-299-22474-5 . $29.95. DRAMA
Artists and playwrights have the responsibility of reporting and
exposing the lies that accompany terrible things humans do to one
another. Theater, notes editor Skloot (The Theatre of the Holocaust )
in his introduction, is itself a strategy to prevent genocide.
Playwright Rogers, whose Madagascar won two awards, and Erik Ehn in
Maria Kizito (in Skloot's anthology) each write about the Rwandan
massacres; The Overwhelming is the more conventional of the pair. The
stage action is more literal, though the setting is defined by the
lighting, a common feature of these five plays (which could all be
nicely produced in the barest of black-box theaters). It tells of
things beyond imagination and successfully brings the audience into
its time and (nether)world; its two hours' traffic is as monstrous as
any Restoration tragedy. Ehn's piece-a true story of Benedictine nuns
complicit in the deaths of thousands of refugees seeking shelter in
their convent-demands a more expressionistic production. Two of the
other plays in Skloot's volume-Lorne Shirinian's Exile in the Cradle
and Catherine Filloux's Silence of God -would be hard to produce
outside of a large urban area or a widely diverse campus, simply
because of the demands of casting. Exile is less about the actual
events surrounding the Armenian-Turkish horror and more about how the
greater Armenian diaspora today responds to it. Silence conjures up
Pol Pot and the ruination of Cambodia. Its four actors take on 16
roles, and many shifts of scene and characters make it less striking
than the other plays in the collection. Kitty Felde's A Patch of
Earth mixes actual trial transcripts with re-creations in its
depiction of the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian conflict. Studying these
plays would benefit political science and history departments, as
well as theater departments. Both titles are recommended for large
academic and public libraries. [The U.S. premiere of The Overwhelming
ran off-Broadway October-December 2007.-Ed.]-Larry Schwartz,
Minnesota State Univ. Lib., Moorhead
From: Baghdasarian
January 15, 2008
The Overwhelming: A Play
by Larry Schwartz
REVIEWS; Arts and Humanities; Pg. 101
Rogers, J.T. The Overwhelming: A Play. Faber & Faber . 2007. 158p.
ISBN 978-0-86547-974-6 . pap. $14.
The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays About Mass Murder in Rwanda,
Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia. Univ. of Wisconsin . Feb. 2008.
c.232p. ed. by Robert Skloot . ISBN 978-0-299-22470-7 . $75; pap.
ISBN 978-0-299-22474-5 . $29.95. DRAMA
Artists and playwrights have the responsibility of reporting and
exposing the lies that accompany terrible things humans do to one
another. Theater, notes editor Skloot (The Theatre of the Holocaust )
in his introduction, is itself a strategy to prevent genocide.
Playwright Rogers, whose Madagascar won two awards, and Erik Ehn in
Maria Kizito (in Skloot's anthology) each write about the Rwandan
massacres; The Overwhelming is the more conventional of the pair. The
stage action is more literal, though the setting is defined by the
lighting, a common feature of these five plays (which could all be
nicely produced in the barest of black-box theaters). It tells of
things beyond imagination and successfully brings the audience into
its time and (nether)world; its two hours' traffic is as monstrous as
any Restoration tragedy. Ehn's piece-a true story of Benedictine nuns
complicit in the deaths of thousands of refugees seeking shelter in
their convent-demands a more expressionistic production. Two of the
other plays in Skloot's volume-Lorne Shirinian's Exile in the Cradle
and Catherine Filloux's Silence of God -would be hard to produce
outside of a large urban area or a widely diverse campus, simply
because of the demands of casting. Exile is less about the actual
events surrounding the Armenian-Turkish horror and more about how the
greater Armenian diaspora today responds to it. Silence conjures up
Pol Pot and the ruination of Cambodia. Its four actors take on 16
roles, and many shifts of scene and characters make it less striking
than the other plays in the collection. Kitty Felde's A Patch of
Earth mixes actual trial transcripts with re-creations in its
depiction of the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian conflict. Studying these
plays would benefit political science and history departments, as
well as theater departments. Both titles are recommended for large
academic and public libraries. [The U.S. premiere of The Overwhelming
ran off-Broadway October-December 2007.-Ed.]-Larry Schwartz,
Minnesota State Univ. Lib., Moorhead
From: Baghdasarian