Michi Barall ‘93, an actress and playwright, premiered her play “Drawing Lessons” on Thursday at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Barall graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in theater and performance arts and went on to do her master of fine arts in acting at New York University. She then began her career as an actor for around a decade before focusing on playwriting.

Barall sat down with The Daily for an interview prior to the premiere of her play.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The Stanford Daily (TSD): Could you give me a summary of “Drawing Lessons”?

Michi Barall (MB): The play is about a 12-year-old Korean American girl who loves to draw and is struggling in school. She meets a mentor in the art shop — a comic strip artist — who, along with all of her friends and family, help her develop her voice as an artist and as a person. I really wanted to center on an adolescent girl who isn’t particularly chatty — whose strength is visual communication. The play explores the strength of her abilities and her determination as she becomes a comic artist. 

I was really interested in this phenomenon of the middle grade graphic novel. There’s a cohort of kids who grew up with these graphic novels that were about eighth grade and surviving eighth grade. I wanted to see what it would be like to put that on stage in some way: to use the vocabulary of the graphic novel in staging practices, but also as part of the design world, so that we have access to her thoughts and feelings much in the same way that you do through a thought bubble in a graphic novel or through text or color or image. 

So my hope is that what it does is it, in effect, puts a graphic novel on stage. And at the center of that graphic novel is this 12-year-old Korean-American girl growing up in Minneapolis in the ’90s. 

TSD: Your play is inspired by comics and graphic novels. You mentioned text bubbles and colors. What should the audience be expecting going in? Are there going to be actual speech bubbles on stage?

MB: There’s the equivalent of that. We have two designers who have been incredible, who also work in collaboration with our set designer. It’s an integrated design plan between set projection and illustration. The illustrator that we’re working with is a person named Blue Delliquanti. 

There are explicit instructions in the text for what we see on the backdrop, which is the projected surface. We have multiple panels in the projection design. Sometimes they come to complete a full image like the backdrop of the classroom. Sometimes those images are actually fragmented in some way. But we have the chance to move around inside [the main character’s] mind and inside her actual physical setting through the projection, illustration and stage design. 

We don’t have anything animated per se, but the illustrations, which are just like the kinds of illustrations that you would see in a graphic novel, are storyboarded through the projection design. So they run at a pace that actually begins almost to feel like animation, even though it’s not continuous.

TSD: Why did you choose to go with a children’s theater for this? You’ve mentioned your daughter serving as artistic inspiration — how much of a role did your daughter have? Did she advise on the play?

MB: No, she’s a musician and totally not interested in theater. There’s always a backdrop of music [in my role as a playwright], maybe because I’m always listening to her practice.

I think [the team of creators and I] made this proposal for a play that would have drawing in it, and I didn’t really quite know how we would set it. Because of the setting of the middle grade graphic novel, I kind of knew that it would be a play that featured a young protagonist.

I was writing it really as a memory play to be performed by actors who double as kids and grown-ups. 

I think what’s a little bit unusual about this is: The lead character of Kate really is never offstage. If I had it to do over again, I would try to get her a break. It’s a lot for a kid to do, especially when they’re up at 6:30 in the morning and then go to school all day and then come to the theater from 4:30 to 9:30 in the evening.

It’s also just really wonderful to hear [kids’] perspectives on the characters, on the relationships, on the histories and what it means to them, how they’re processing it. 

TSD: How did your identity influence your work?

MB: I am Japanese Canadian. I am mixed race. And actually the character was initially mixed race, in part because there are so few mixed race characters on stage yet so many mixed race people.

It can be difficult [to grow up mixed race] but it is also an important way of growing up. Kamala Harris is Black and she’s South Asian — that’s just who she is, you know. There’s no contradiction in that, and often people read a contradiction. We have two [actresses playing the main character] Kate, one is mixed race and the other not. She’s Korean American, so we have slightly different languages for both characters. 

Stanford was, I think, a huge moment for me in terms of thinking about Asian-American identity, because I came from Canada, where we have official multiculturalism and questions of racial and political identity were not at the forefront when I was growing up. And so coming to Stanford in the sort of early ‘90s was this moment of being awakened to this identity, particularly through the Asian American Theater Project. 

Because I had grown up with this, I just jumped into this cohort of Asian American writers who were writing both within the politics of the community, but also within the larger umbrella of Asian-American identity — I just realized all of us need help. 

I had cultural consultants who were both in theater and outside of theater, which I felt was important to read this script. We also had a cultural consultant on the production, who’s helping the actors with the Korean language. There’s a little Korean in the play, but there’s also some of the cultural aspects that are embedded in the play. 

TSD: How did your time with the Asian American Theater Project at Stanford impact you both as an actor and a playwright? 

MB: I would never have been an actor without the Asian American Theater Project. I came to Stanford to do International Relations. I was in SLE (Structured Liberal Education) my first year, which I really loved. And so I think it was a kind of pull towards the humanities and towards theater through the Asian American Theater Project.

I saw a flier for auditions. It was for the part of Maya Lin, the architect, in Jeannie Baroga‘s play “Walls,” which is a play that hadn’t actually been done in many places yet. It’s a really beautiful play about Maya Lin’s own struggle for recognition and the discrimination that she faced after her proposal for the Vietnam War Memorial. 

Being in that play made me feel, one, that I could get cast. It also put me inside a community of people who really cared about theater. While I was there, I did learn very quickly that I’m a terrible producer because I produced The Crucible [by Arthur Miller] of all things.

It was a real opportunity to see theater in 360, like what are all the aspects that go into a production? Actors can have a tendency to just be a little bit in the world of their character and inside the envelope of their own arc. 

Something about working with the Asian American Theater Project was that it was pretty scrappy, and we had to do a lot of the work ourselves of producing, finding directors, and being point people for production elements.

It taught me very early that a play is a thing that’s meant to be on stage. It is a collaboration between design, production, staff, and actors and directors. I think that was always in my head when I started to write for the theater.