Interview: Michi Barall of DRAWING LESSON at Children's Theater Company

Drawing Lessons will be playing at the Children's Theatre Company from October 8 to November 10, 2024. We had the opportunity to speak with playwright Michi Barall about this production.

What inspired you to write the Drawing Lessons?

The play has two sources of inspiration.  My friend Jack Tamburri (who is currently directing the production at CTC) and I collaborated on a project together with Ma Yi Theatre in 2017.  We had so much fun, we wanted to continue working together in some way, and Jack proposed a new play that would incorporate live drawing on stage.  At about the same time, my daughter (and many of her friends) had become obsessed with middle grade graphic memoirs.  I was struck by both the popularity and narrative power of these graphic novels and wondered what an exploration of the form might lend to performance.  Middle grade memoirs are often coming of age stories (as well as stories about the  (re)construction of memory) and so I decided to write a play centering an Asian American adolescent girl, coming of age as a a comic artist in Minneapolis in the 1990s (a kind of "portrait of the artist as an adolescent girl" if you will).  

What is your favorite moment in Drawing Lessons?

My favorite moments have to do with watching the characters draw live.  When we started workshopping the play, we didn't know if these moments would communicate, if we could really ask the audience to spend the time watching the actors create images.  But we found that the process is so interactive: audiences are always "filling in" the images as they are drawn.  The drawings both complete and disrupt our own imaginings.   We so rarely get to see (and interact with) a creative process onstage, and even though the moments are crafted, they have an element of improvisation and play that comes from the liveness and theatricality of the event.  

What do you hope the audience takes away from seeing this production?

I hope that audiences come away with a sense of the power of art (particularly visual art) to produce what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the interspace, an experience of connection and a sense of wholeness with the world around us.  But on a much smaller (and more realistic scale!), I want audiences, especially young audiences, to know while being an artist requires skill and determination (although determination is really just a synonym for skill), anyone can draw, and everyone has their very own "line" that communicates something about who they are.  The play also highlights the experiences of second-generation children, who are both metabolizing and reshaping what it means to them (and their larger community) to be Americans.  

What are your favorite local spots?

In NYC, I love a little bakery called Patisserie Fouet (my mental map of Manhattan is mostly made up of bakeries!).  In Minneapolis, I've really come to love spending time at CTC, the MIA (Minneapolis Institute of the Arts) and the Walker.  The play references a number of actual locations in Minneapolis, but i haven't yet found a bakery to add to the play (or my list!), so I welcome suggestions

Thank you Michi for your time. For more ticket and show information for Drawing Lessons, please click the ticket link button below.

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