In January 2018, I decided that I wanted to write a play.

 

My usual genre of choice is narrative nonfiction; historically, I have luxuriated in long, drawn-out discursive descriptions, and avoided writing dialogue at all costs. The idea of writing a play presented the much needed—if slightly terrifying—opportunity to branch out, as well as the chance to combine both my arts degree and my writing minor into a project that I hoped would create change in my community.

 

In January, I knew I was going to write a play. So, then, the question became: What was I going to write a play about? What did I care enough to spend so much time and so many pages writing about, and eventually casting, staging, rehearsing, marketing, and producing?

 

What do I care about? Maybe, this: A lot of my time at the University of Michigan had been spent trying to increase the awareness and empathy of first-year students. I found myself inclined to write a play for a similar demographic: young adults being introduced to a bigger world and community than they might have known before.

 

In much of this work with first-year students, we started from an assumption that they cared about the people in their community and about our topics, yet I often found myself met with a level of apathy indicative of a lack of such “caring.” I decided that I wanted to write a story about people learning to care—realizing why it’s important to be empathetic in our approach to the world or figuring out how they can best direct their efforts.

 

In this way, my play started out as hugely theoretical. I didn’t have a solid idea of plot or characters, just an idea that I wanted to affect change through art and demonstrate this idea of “learning to care.”

 

Throughout my work with Kickball, my focus has been on finding a way in which to crystallize these theoretical  “big ideas” of caring, allyship, and empathy into a tangible, accessible form. I’ve worked to develop characters within whom my audience can recognize a part of themselves, and a plot within which these characters visibly begin to recognize their weaknesses—the areas in which they don’t yet “know”—and take a step toward fixing them.

 

It is my hope that by watching Riley and Jonah fail at things that matter to them and slowly start to figure out their path forward toward change, my audience will realize that maybe they have the capacity to change, too.