Rwandan genocide survivor Mary Louise

It’s always driven me crazy that so much mainstream North American/British storytelling relies on white, male protagonists to take us into the lives of people living in other countries and cultures, as if contemporary audiences couldn’t navigate the terrain without a privileged intermediary. Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, which finished a run at the Mirvish’s Panasonic Theatre last month, poked fun at the formula, building its first act around a stereotypical imperialist daddy figure and then, to demonstrate his modern-day irrelevance, vanishing him in Act 2.

But then again, when you’re dropping audiences into an unfamiliar world, some handholding can’t hurt. The very liberal desire to universalize experiences through stories about the interaction between cultures can’t be pooh-poohed as mere voice appropriation, especially when the material is dealing with horrific events that remain incomprehensible to even close observers. The proof is in the artistic results, not the skin colour of the creator.

Written by J.T. Rogers — white, male and American — The Overwhelming follows a white, male tenure-track professor who arrives in Rwanda looking for an old friend just months before the onset of that country’s horrific 1994 genocide of Tutsis by the dominant Hutus. Acting on primarily selfish impulses, Jack Exley (played by David Storch) brings his African-American wife (Mariah Inger) and his white son (Brendan McMurtry-Howlett) on his high-risk quest. (Note that the race of each of the 11 cast members is spelled out explicitly in the script.)

Meanwhile, fellow foreigners and the locals see personal and political opportunities in the Exleys’ arrival. First produced in 2006, the play won acclaim in its London and New York productions and attracted the attention of Toronto’s Studio 180, which is giving it its Canadian premiere this month.

“The script interested me because the Americans presented are not ugly Americans, they’re not stupid Americans, they’re not objects of ridicule. They certainly look for order. They’re not used to being in a place where the rules keep changing. They’re real people who come to realize how unprepared they were,” says director Joel Greenberg, who co-founded Studio 180 back in 2002. Having made its name with wide-ranging issues-driven works like The Laramie Project, The Arab-Israeli Cookbook and the recently remounted Stuff Happens, the company, Greenberg says, struggles to find plays that are both artistically and politically provocative.

“For me, it’s an emotional filter — visceral. I’m touched. I’m upset. The play gets inside me right away on some level,” says Greenberg.

With hidden motives, overlapping dialogue and quick-fire shifts among variously accented English, French and Rwandan, language plays an important part in defining The Overwhelming’s characters and conflicts. Though there’s a strong professional cast, there are no Rwandan actors in the play, which is where the language coaches come in. Words create and overshadow identities.

“You realize that in such a complicated situation, outsiders can’t be anything but outsiders and that applies to certain black characters as well,” says Greenberg. “Just because you are the colour of most of the people there, by the way you behave, by the way you speak, by the way you look, by the way you carry yourself, you’re different.”

The mainstream Canadian perspective of the Rwandan genocide is defined by the involvement of Roméo Dallaire, the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force tasked with stopping the genocide. Although the play is too in-the-moment to reference the coming U.N. intervention, Dallaire’s heroism and frustration will inevitably haunt the viewing experience of Canadian audiences. We may even find ourselves conjuring a noble intermediary, someone like us, to help us make sense of the chaos.

“Even when I read it, I couldn’t remove [Dallaire’s story] from my sense of it,” says Greenberg. “People will inevitably bring their own education to the play.”