Playwright: J.T. Rogers. At: Next Theatre at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street, Evanston. Phone: 847-475-1875; $23-$38. Runs through: May 17. Photo by Michael Brosilow
It's not easy to reconfigure real-life genocidal atrocities into a film noir whodunit, but that's precisely what J.T. Rogers has done. Our setting may be Rwanda instead of Chinatown, but the famous tagline from Roman Polanski's movie lurks in the shadows, waiting to be uttered.
Our story begins with the arrival in Kigali of young American professor Jack Exley. He is there to research the AIDS-relief project administered by his former college chum, Joseph Gasana. Jack has brought his African-American wife, Linda, and estranged teenage son, Geoffrey, with him—after all, it's 1994 and the United Nations forces have imposed a cease-fire on civil strife. But even before we learn that Dr. Gasana has mysteriously disappeared, we suspect that things in this newly independent country are not what they seem.
It's not just hindsight that alerts us, nor even the vague paranoia that infects any excursion into an alien culture, but the preternatural naiveté inflicted by the author on his Yankees: Jack scurries from one office to another, demanding information regarding his missing colleague and protesting indignantly when none is forthcoming. Linda is squired about town by a seductively oily host lifted straight from the Victorian villains' mug file. And young Geoffrey pays a visit to a whorehouse, accompanied by a friendly houseboy. Their thorough obliviousness to ominous remarks reflecting the social order of their surroundings, and their reluctance to exercise the most elementary cautions prescribed to tourists make us wonder how these hicks ever survived at home. ( Linda claims to be from Detroit, for chrissakes! )
Although the action encompasses extensive exposition of world events and recent history ( but remarkably little onstage violence ) , there's no denying The Overwhelming's primary appeal as good, old-fashioned, hankie-twisting, neo-colonialist melodrama. Kimberly Senior directs a cast adept at lending solemnity to quasi-comic book characters, led by Si Osborne as the innocent hero whose existential escape routes are undermined by mistrust and corruption until he breaks like Winston Smith ( cf. George Orwell's 1984 ) when finally cornered. Driving him to this crisis are Kenn E. Head, Dexter Zollicoffer, Jamie Vann, John Byrnes, Christoph Horton Abiel and John Nyrere Frazier, playing assorted spies, thugs and inscrutable four-flushers.
If you come expecting a dryly academic liberal-humanitarian social tract ( like I did ) , you'll miss valuable exposition and a lot of the fun, too. There will be plenty of time during the after-show discussions for righteous pronouncements on serious issues.