J. T. Rogers

J. T. Rogers is an internationally recognized American playwright who lives in New York. Rogers has authored more than five plays, including Oslo, Blood and Gifts, The Overwhelming, White People, and Madagascar.

His work has been staged at theaters including London's Royal National Theater, New York's Lincoln Center Theater and Roundabout Theater, and Australia's Melbourne Theatre Company.

Rogers serves on the board of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, is a member of New Dramatists, and holds an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Rogers is known for plays that deal with what he called “theater that engages the public realm” in his much-discussed Laura Pels Keynote address to the New York theater community in 2008. The speech was published as an essay in American Theatre magazine called “Writing Without Borders”. His play The Overwhelming, in which an American family who arrive in Kigali, Rwanda, in early 1994, must confront life-and-death realities of the Rwandan Genocide, had its world premiere at the Cottesloe Theatre, Royal National Theatre, London, in association with Out of Joint, in May 2006. It then toured throughout the UK and was performed on BBC radio. Its American premiere was at the Roundabout Theatre in September 2007. For the play, Rogers received the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award at the 2007 William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kansas. The Overwhelming has since been done throughout the world, selected as a Top 10 Play of the Year by Time Magazine, Time Out New York and the Chicago Tribune, and nominated for Best Play of the Year by London’s South Bank Show and Boston’s Elliot Norton Awards.

In 2009, Rogers was the sole American playwright along with 11 British authors to create The Great Game: Afghanistan for the Tricycle Theatre, London. The cycle of plays was a sensation, garnering an Olivier nomination for all involved.

Rogers wrote the full-length play Blood and Gifts, which debuted at the Lyttelton Theatre, Royal National Theatre, London, in September 2010, starring Lloyd Owen with direction by Howard Davies. The play premiered in the US Off-Broadway in October 2011 at the Lincoln Center Newhouse Theater, directed by Bartlett Sher. Charles Isherwood, in his review in The New York Times, wrote that the play was "superb", with a "first rate production...the characters...really seem to be living in this turbulent history..." The reviewer for The Guardian, Michael Billington, criticised the writer's "advantage of hindsight which lends much of the action a self-conscious irony" but otherwise praised him for a "complex, demanding play." The play was nominated for the 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Lead Actor, Jefferson Mays and the 2012 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play and Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play, Jefferson Mays.

J. T. Rogers' play Madagascar is set in a hotel room overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome. It is about a mysterious disappearance that haunts the life of the play's three characters. It was commissioned by and had its world premiere at the Salt Lake Acting Company in November 2004. The play received the American Theatre Critics Association's 2004 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award and the 2005 Pinter Review Prize for Drama, which included its first publication by the University of Tampa Press and a related public dramatic reading. It was also a finalist for the ATCA's Steinberg New Play Award and performed at the Summer Play Festival in New York City in July 2005. The play had its Australian premiere at the Melbourne Theatre Company in February 2010, directed by Sam Strong.The play had its European debut at London’s Theatre 503 in May 2010, directed by Tom Littler and featuring Sorcha Cusack, Barry Stanton and Miranda Foster.

Rogers’s other plays include White People, which had its world première at the Philadelphia Theatre Company and then received the L.A. Drama Critics Circle and John Barrymore Award nominations for "Best Play of the Year". The revised play was produced by Starry Night Entertainment Off-Broadway in 2009, and has been seen at the English Theatre of Berlin. The play was seen in repertory with Madagascar at the Road Theatre in Los Angeles in 2010. His Seeing the Elephant was nominated for the Kesselring Prize for "Best New American Play", and his play Murmuring in a Dead Tongue was produced by Epic Rep, in New York City, where he is a company member, in its 2003–2004 season. In 2008, it was mounted as part of the inaugural DC Theater Alliance. His works have been seen at the Williamstown Theater Festival, New Theatre of Coral Gables, Florida, New Actors Union Theatre (Moscow), Road Theatre (Los Angeles), and often at the Salt Lake Acting Company. He is a founding member of The Next Stage, in New York City, which produced his plays Bob Comes to Life, Above the Beasts, and Frankfurt. In September 2004, he was artist-in-residence at the Eugene O'Neill Center. He has also been a guest artist at Truman State University (Missouri), and lectured at the schools of drama at Columbia University, Northwestern, Yale, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and the University of Utah and at the Claremont McKenna College School of Economics.

Rogers' 2016 political drama Oslo has become his most successful work to date, now on a highly acclaimed Broadway run. Oslo premiered Off-Broadway at the Lincoln Center Newhouse Theatre to nearly universal acclaim. Oslo transferred to the Lincoln Center Beaumont Theatre, a Broadway house, where it opened on April 13, 2017. Of the new, larger production, Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote that "J. T. Rogers’s 'Oslo,' an against-the-odds story of international peacemaking, is undeniably a big play, as expansive and ambitious as any in recent Broadway history. So it is particularly gratifying to announce that it has been allowed to stretch to its full height in the thrilling production that opened on Thursday night, directed with a master’s hand by Bartlett Sher." Oslo's cast features Jennifer Ehle and Jefferson Mays, who also appeared in the Off-Broadway production.

Shortly before the Broadway opening, it was announced that Oslo will transfer to London for a September 2017 run at the Royal National Theater, followed by a three month transfer to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End.

He was selected as one of ten playwrights in the United States to receive a NEA/TCG Theatre Residency for 2004–2005, through which he was playwright in residence at the Salt Lake Acting Company (Salt Lake City). In 2004 and 2008, Rogers was awarded playwriting fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His plays are published by Faber and Faber in the US and UK and in acting editions in the US through Dramatists Play Service and Playscripts. Rogers is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a resident playwright at New Dramatists. In 2012, he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his work.

• Oslo (2016)
• Blood and Gifts (2011)
• The Overwhelming (2004)
• Madagascar (2004)
• Murmuring in a Dead Tongue (1998; 2003)
• Seeing the Elephant
• White People
• Above the Beasts
• Bob Comes to Life
• Frankfurt
• Penetrating Malaysia
• Guy Talk
• Lionel's Blue
• Chicks 'N Beer
• The Saddest Lines

Rogers has written the screenplay for the upcoming film Tokyo Vice. Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is a 2009 memoir by Jake Adelstein. Adelstein enlisted J.T. Rogers to co-write the story for the upcoming film version, and Rogers then wrote the screenplay for the work.

The film was expected to begin production in Tokyo in mid 2014, with Daniel Radcliffe to play Adelstein.

Anthony Mandler will direct the film.

See also

• Rwandan Genocide
• Bibliography of the Rwandan Genocide