OjO: What prompted you to write The Overwhelming? Did you want to write a Rwanda play, or did Rwanda's history provide the appropriate setting for the story that you wanted to write anyway?

JT: When the genocide occurred, I was riveted, appalled and confused, knowing nothing of the region or the background of the conflict. So I started reading and asking questions. When I find myself asking questions about a subject I can’t find clear answers to, this often leads me to wanting to write about that subject. From the beginning I wanted to tell a story that a Western theatre audience would invest in. If I was going to write about the politics of a place deeply foreign to almost everyone watching, then the form of the play would need to be something that they could sink their teeth into.

But I didn’t know how to approach a subject so vast. How does one “write” about “a genocide” without diminishing the scope of events that are unimaginable to those who were not there?

My ah-ha moment was choosing to set the action right before the genocide. This way I could focus on a very specific story, while the spectre of what is to come knocks on the door, louder and louder as the play progresses. Letting the audience imagine the unimaginable seemed the most dramatically effective choice, and the most ethical.

OjO: How does The Overwhelming fit in with your other plays? What interests you as a writer?

JT: I’m a fiction writer rather than a memoirist. I write about what interests me in the world, often using the writing of a play as a way to learn about something new: the history of Rwanda in The Overwhelming, microeconomic theory and the founding of New Amsterdam, now New York City, in my plays Madagascar and White People, respectively.

Each time I try to write something as different as possible from my last work. I am interested in what I call the defining moment, an event where a person’s life, everything they know and believe, is called into question and where the actions they next take will define the rest of their lives. And I’m interested in asking questions that I, and I hope the audience, don’t already know the answers to before the curtain goes up.

OjO: You visited Rwanda with Max. What did you learn, and how has that influenced the play? When you wrote the original draft, how did you know so much about the build-up to the genocide?

JT: I had never been to Rwanda. This, to put it mildly, was a hurdle. How was I going to write about a country I did not know, with dialogue in two different languages (French and Kinyarwanda) I did not speak? I read 10,000 pages of history, fiction, memoir, academic articles, government reports, and also studied maps and street plans. Then I set down a rule that scenes could only take place in locations that I felt I could accurately convey without having set foot in Kigali. After writing a draft, I contacted Rwandais genocide survivors in the States who were incredibly generous with their time, translating passages for me, pointing out what I had gotten wrong, and suggesting what I might want to look into further. Their enthusiasm for the play and excitement about how accurate its details were humbled me.

Then, getting to go to Rwanda with Max was remarkable. To see the landscape I’d only seen in pictures was surreal. While interviewing there, we tried to focus on what people thought and knew during January and February 1994, the time period of The Overwhelming. What we were told and what we saw caused me to make numerous small changes throughout.

What was most instructive was to feel palpably how small and interconnected Rwanda is. We heard more than once, “Here everyone knows everyone, and everything about you.” And how this could give rise to claustrophobia and terror. As for what I heard from people about what they experienced during the genocide, these are things I will never forget.