Reading Richard Siken's "You Are Jeff | Crush" led to conversations about "coming out," the challenging process of accepting one's sexual orientation or gender identity and sharing it with individuals or the world. This connected to broader themes of emotional indifference and the challenge of making human connections in today's society. In the spirit of the poem, we present an abstract experience that combines various scenarios with an audio landscape, unified by one young man's journey towards self-love.
A group of Michigan State University students virtually came together throughout fall 2020 to create a series of 5 new audio plays, each connected to the themes of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As a starting point, we all brought in poetry to share. We read and discussed dozens of poems from diverse artists and used those as a jumping off point. The poetry evoked frank and honest conversations about race, gender, and sexuality, and every member of the ensemble shared deeply moving personal experiences about how these impact the way they move through the world today. We then created scenarios and improvised scenes until the basic structure for each play began to take place. Individuals and groups of students took on the challenge of weaving these experiences into cohesive audio dramas.