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Even with her closest Rwandan colleagues, theatre director Jennifer Herszman Capraru would never discuss ethnicity. But it inevitably comes out over time.

It doesn't take much scratching to get below the surface of the official government line that there are no longer Hutu or Tutsi, only Rwandans. The physical scars from the machetes that split the lush green country apart are still visible everywhere, she says. “They're long and thin. It's not a square, it's not a circle, it's a slash,” Capraru says in a whisper. The emotional scars, in many cases, are still more raw.

It's to participate in the ongoing healing from these scars that led Montreal-born Capraru to found ISOKO, the Republic of Rwanda's fourth theatre company, in the capital city of Kigali this year. Its first production, Toronto playwright Colleen Wagner's award-winning The Monument, opened in the native language of Kinyarwanda on July 4.

The date for the company's inaugural show was carefully chosen: Rwanda's Liberation Day, marking the end of the 1994 genocide that killed more than 800,000 people.

The Monument, based on genocidal acts in Bosnia but set in an unidentified country, has successfully toured cities and towns across the country, appearing in makeshift playhouses.

Capraru is hoping that The Monument production will be the first of many in a burgeoning theatre scene. Last week, she received permission from Montreal playwright Wajdi Mouawad to stage his show Tideline.

Capraru splits her time between Toronto and Kigali, acting also as artistic director of Toronto's Theatre Asylum, where she developed a penchant for theatre focused on social cohesion. It's something of a personal theme: Her mother, Belgian-born and of Russian-Jewish descent, is an orphan who survived the Holocaust hidden by a group of brave Belgian nuns.

Over strong Rwandan tea in her simple but roomy Kensington Market apartment, Capraru talks of how early in her career, the Holocaust “kind of came to me” as a subject and came to dominate the Theatre Asylum schedule.

That left her well versed in theatre's power to speed reconciliation and healing when she was handed a last-minute invitation in 2006 to work as a script supervisor on Shake Hands with the Devil, the film adaptation of Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire's memoir of the genocide. She spent 2 months travelling Rwanda with the film crew and was later invited back to teach workshops at the Rwanda Cinema Centre.

The combination of encouragement from a local theatre director and friend, Hope Azeda, and the feeling she could be of more use in Kigali than in Canada spurred her to start ISOKO with a small team of Rwandan friends. The word “isoko” has two meanings in Kinyarwanda: “the source,” suggesting creative renewal, stories and theatre, and “the market,” highlighting the company's efforts to help build a creative economy and spur development.

Capraru was also moved by life in a culture that, outside its strong history of traditional African performance, has little modern music, few books, cinemas that primarily play Manchester United soccer matches and a culture that sees men spend their evenings congregating in bars (optimistically called cabarets) while women and children stay home.

“There's not a lot for families to do. Wouldn't it be nice for them to go out and see a play in their language that has to do with their lives?” Capraru says.

Easier said than done. ISOKO is also facing an audience that has not been exposed to theatre culture. During the run of The Monument, there was often no applause at the end of the show, as cues that the show had ended were lost on the crowd. Audience members would often bring crying babies and eat, drink beer and talk loudly on cellphones during performances. During some post-show talkback sessions that often lasted hours, some commented on how much they had enjoyed the film.

And, of course, there is the challenge of making the company financially viable.

“We always played for free – pay what you can – but most places [people still] couldn't pay. They were like, ‘You pay us.' They wanted us to pay them 200 francs, which is about 50 cents, to come watch.”

But Capraru said the Canada Council for the Arts and other funding bodies have been generous, and a Kigali lawyer is pushing to earn local non-governmental organization status for the ad hoc ISOKO, which would make fundraising and partnerships vastly easier.

The government under President Paul Kagame has welcomed start-ups like ISOKO, but infrastructure is sparse and bureaucracy plentiful.

To get a prop gun for The Monument, ISOKO had to apply to the Ministry of Defence, which sent a soldier (armed with a real Kalashnikov rifle) to guard the fake one at all times. And when leaving the country's one proper theatre to tour, the troupe ordered a large tent to play in, the lighting powered by car batteries. But it became mired in customs purgatory for months. “We called it Shake Hands with the Customs,” Capraru quips.

Capraru is steadied, though, by her belief that theatre is helping in Rwanda. Raucous audiences routinely fell silent at the moments of greatest emotional weight. Some women sat motionless, crying; others looked ashamed; some left; but she believes they were all deeply affected by what they saw. Many were stunned to learn that The Monument wasn't written by a Rwandan.

Perhaps the greatest impact has been on the actors, she says, pointing to the case of Jean Paul Uwayezu, whose family, of Tutsi origin, were angry with him for portraying a Hutu rapist and murderer, but softened when they saw him perform. Capraru thinks mending the lingering ethnic rift is a particularly urgent task in Rwanda.

“It's like Holocaust survivors and Nazis living side by side and buying bread at each other's shops and going to the post office and seeing each other every day,” she said.