5 Questions with Drawing Lessons Playwright Michi Barall

Kate, a 12-year-old girl who lives in 1990s Minneapolis, loves drawing. She’s so passionate that she starts putting together her own graphic novel, while balancing school, art, and her Korean heritage with her life in America. Audiences can watch live depictions of the character’s visual art come to life at Drawing Lessons, a Children’s Theatre Company show, running through Nov. 10. 

The play, aimed at middle schoolers, uncovers how Kate navigates her community being a Korean American and expressing herself as an artist. The show also helps mark the beginning of new artistic director Rick Dildine’s first season with the theater.

We sat down with Drawing Lessons playwright Michi Barall to discuss her inspiration behind the show. 

This play was co-commissioned by CTC and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. When did you start writing it?

The show has been in development for a couple of years, although the kind of seed for the idea for this play precedes that. As early as 2018 or 2019, my friend [director] Jack Tamburri and I were trying to figure out a play that we could work on together that would be our next project, because we had completed a rock musical adaptation of Peer Gynt previously. Jack has been a lover of graphic novels and comic art since he was a kid in the ‘90s himself. The proposal had less initially to do with graphic art than it had to do with watching live drawing on stage. What could we do to sustain an interest in watching someone build an image in real time, and letting audiences in on the creative process. That was one of the first prompts for the play.

What about the form of graphic novels inspired you?

There were two things that struck me about form. One is the way that it’s formally so innovative and interactive. It is sophisticated in terms of visual and emotional storytelling. The other piece of it was that I just was struck by the diversity of stories that were being told by predominantly young women and women of color about their own experiences growing up. It was a range of stories that I had not encountered when I was a kid at all. I was really impressed by that. I felt like sometimes, theater can be a little slower to catch up than literary forms in terms of representation, and so I wanted to see what it would mean to take this form and the idea of telling a story that we’ve not heard before yet, from a specific community, voice and staging that used the vocabulary of the graphic novel.

Are you a visual artist yourself?

I want to emphasize that even though the play is kind of a chronicle of this particular historical moment in which comic art is becoming more popular, I have zero background in the visual art field. So, part of the challenge and fun of this play has been building that and beginning to do more research and have more fluency in certain kinds of visual storytelling. My background is in the theater. I have been an actor. I did a degree in modern thought and literature, and then I went right from college to an MFA program in acting. I was an actor for a good 10 years off-Broadway and regionally, and I worked on a lot of new plays. I was lucky enough to have downtime to write plays. I come at the theater from different angles as a performer. Predominantly in my heart, I’m still very much an actor, and I think that’s my favorite way to be in the theater, although writing also has incredible rewards.

What made you want to write a show for kids?

I think this is really a play for multigenerational audiences. Even though I knew that I was gearing it toward a younger audience, I also was writing for their parents, for their grandparents, for art, and for people who see themselves in these characters, either because of their racial identities or other kinds of identities. I think all of us remember that people still dream about being in school even when they’re in their 50s. There’s something so important about middle school as a period in your life when you come into yourself. You’re figuring out what kind of music and fashion you like and who your people are. I really was writing the play not just for kids, but for the kid in all of us, and the ways in which we can take care of that person in ourselves.

Why is this show important for audiences to see right now?

I keep going back to the idea of our phones. One of the great pleasures of writing a play that’s in the 1990s is you’re not tethered to the fact that everybody is reachable or trackable at any given moment. The kids in the show, like what I had growing up, have more freedom than kids do today, who are constantly surveilled in some way or another. Their parents are trying to figure out where they are every second of the day. I completely implicate myself as a parent in that too. There’s no judgment here. One of the reasons why I feel like the play is important is that  it reminds people of what it means to engage in a world that is not entirely networked by technology. It gives back authority and autonomy in a person’s own creativity. It also reminds us of the importance of building local connections. I didn’t grow up in Minneapolis. It’s set there because I wrote the role of Matt for my friend Matt Park. He’s the dad, and he grew up in Minneapolis. When you come to the theater the actors should also be local, right? At some point you should have the opportunity to see your neighborhood, your city, your place, on stage. It’s important to be reminded of the ways in which we’re located and the ways that a place defines us in both time and space.