Step into the world of comic book-inspired play 'Drawing Lessons'

You'll never forget the highs and lows of your middle school experience, and while it might be impossible to travel back, The Children's Theatre company invites you to jump into the comic-book styled world of Drawing Lessons , where the main character navigates middle school as her art comes to life.

Drawing Lessons opened Oct. 8 and revolves around middle-schooler Kate, who is struggling with her new school, friends and her own Korean heritage while living in Minneapolis in 1995.

"I grew up in Toronto, and I remember when I was about Kate's age, I read Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, and it was the first book that was set in a city like I was living," -playwright Michi Barall said. "Reading it made me realize my life was tied up in this larger representational framework. I don't know. It just was like, 'oh, here I am in time and space.'"

Barall graduated from NYU with a Master of Fine Arts degree and also received her Ph.D in Theatre at Columbia University. She is the New York City-based actor, professor and playwright behind Drawing Lessons. Collaborating with long-time artistic partner and friend Jack Tamburri, who also directs the show, the two came up with the concept of the play while working at the Ma-Yi Theatre Company.

"Jack is the director of the show, but he in many ways was the person who kind of prompted the show into being. We worked on a show previous to this one that was kind of a music theater piece," Barall said. "We enjoyed working together and I said, 'I've always wanted to see what live drawing looks like on stage.' And that was really kind of the origin of this piece."

The play collaborates with Minneapolis-based comic book artist Blue Delliquanti, who helps bring the stage and set design to life through their artwork, which will be projected throughout the show. Audience members will also have a unique opportunity to watch the actors on stage draw live, their art shown through cameras capturing their drawing.

"I love working with actors. I love what they do, and there's sort of two really special things going on. One is that half of the cast are young performers, they're playing characters who are 12, but their actual ages range, I think, from 14 to 18. I've worked with young people before, but I've never worked with young performers in a professional context," Tamburri said.

"Then there are these sequences where the actors themselves are doing the drawing. One of the proposals that the play makes is that everyone can draw, you just have to unlearn the idea that you can't."

Tamburri shared that while there might be moments in the play where the actors have the creative freedom to draw whatever they want on stage, in rehearsals they also discuss what is necessary for the actors to draw to advance the plays story forward.

"What Michi has written is, a play that has elements of diving into the character's imaginations, but it is essentially a piece of naturalism," Tamburri said. "The audience is watching a world pass before them, like in most plays. When we get into rehearsals, we'll sort of discover what is the necessary thing to set that 'okay, you're going to draw this every time, because that's important to the storytelling."

While the play follows Kate's life in middle school, there is a deeper theme on how the art world has changed since 1995, while at the same time celebrating the diversity of cultures within Minneapolis.

"There has been this huge shift in the number of female identifying cartoonists since the '90s, that was not a thing in the early '90s. Just thinking about a cohort of people who really made the path and created this genre has been really exciting," Barall said.

"It also kind of tracks the diversity within Minneapolis in a way that I am excited about as well. So not just the Korean American protagonist and her family, but also her friends who are Hmong American, Somali American just like a kind of portrait of Minneapolis."

Barall has always been inspired by the idea of mixing different performance styles. Inspired by European dance artists such as Pina Bausch, she shared that she went back to school initially to study dance theater, before transitioning into researching theme park performance.

"I love storytelling that really thinks of all the possibilities in the theatrical space, in terms of music, movement and sound. All that has been really important to me," Barall said.

Besides her creative inspirations, Barall says the play is also inspired by the middle school experience, both the good and the bad.

"I remember being in middle school, and it was the best and worst times of my life ever. The play captures that middle school experience, because it is definitely something that is unique to someone who is or was in middle school," Barall said.

"We're trying to capture the difficulty of finding friends and finding a voice. Adolescence is intense because you are having to leave the protections of childhood and in many ways, figure out how it is you want to engage with the world."

Running until Nov. 10, you can purchase tickets on the Children's Theatre Company website .

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