J.T.
ROGERS was selected as one of ten playwrights in the
nation to receive a NEA/TCG Theatre Residency for 2004-2005, through
which he is currently playwright in residence at the Salt Lake Acting
Company. His latest play, Madagascar, received the American Theatre
Critics Association’s 2004 M. Elizabeth Osborne Award and was
a finalist for the ATCA’s Steinberg New Play Award. Madagascar
will be seen this July in the New Play Festival in NYC and at The Adirondack
Theatre Festival. In 2004, Rogers was also awarded a playwrighting fellowship
from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is the author of White
People (L.A. Drama Critics Circle and Barrymore Award nominees for best
play of the year), Seeing the Elephant (Kesselring Prize nominee for
best new American play), and Murmuring in a Dead Tongue, which was presented
last season in NYC by Epic Rep, where he is company member. Regionally,
his works have been seen at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Philadelphia
Theatre Co., the New Theatre of Miami, New Actors Union Theatre (Moscow),
the Road Theatre (L.A.), and many times at the Salt Lake Acting Co.
His plays Bob Comes to Life, Above and Beasts, and Frankfurt have been
seen in NYC at The Next Stage, where he is a founding member. Rogers
has been an artist-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Center (Sept.
’04), a guest artist at Truman State University (MO), and has
lectured at the North Carolina School of the Arts’ and University
of Utah’s schools of drama and at the Claremont-McKenna School
of Economics. For three seasons he was on faculty at New York University
as part of the Creative Arts Team, where he taught conflict resolution
through drama in at-risk junior high schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Rogers is a graduate of the professional actor-training program at the
North Carolina School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn.
THE
OVERWHELMING
is the gripping story of an American family, newly arrived in Kigali,
Rwanda, in early 1994, who come face-to-face with the realization that
nothing and no one around them is what they understood it to be. Finding
themselves embroiled in events beyond their understanding, three Americans
struggle to discover who they can trust and what they will do when faced
with matters of life and death.
