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The Overwhelming: A Play

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  • The Overwhelming: A Play

    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
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