Growing up, I (Kyle) spent a lot of time at my grandfather's house in Jennings, MO. I remember staying with him for a short while one summer and playing ball with this kid who lived next door with his grandfather. I had been told by my grandpa that I wasn't allowed to go over and play with this kid in his yard so I invited him over to my yard to play instead. He told me that he wasn't allowed to come over and play with me either. But I'll never forget the way he told me he couldn't come over. This feeling of unease hit me as he looked back at his grandpa's house. There was something in his voice, how he said it. Most of the time when you're kids you don't really think about why the rules exist, you just know you have to follow them. Well, we ended up just throwing the ball back and forth over the fence. Still managed to find a way to have fun. But years later that memory popped into my head and something clicked. While I didn't know at eight years old why that particular rule existed, he did. And now, nearly a decade later, I do too. My grandfather was a great man, and I never once heard him say anything racist. But there was clearly hesitation in letting us play together from both of our grandparents for prejudicial reasons. And because discrimination is so often unspoken and made up of subtleties in real life, we decided to take the same approach with creating this play.  Hatred and intolerance are not always yelled in your face, most of the time they are conveyed with a look or a word phrased a specific way. That small interaction with this kid stuck with me all these years. I don't remember his name, I wish I did. I've often hoped that I would run into him some day because if we'd had the words to articulate, investigate, and ask questions when we were younger, who knows how good of friends we'd be now. After a while I brought this idea to Dom and we got together and broke down how that conversation might go, if I were to run into this kid nearly twenty years later. Turns out, there was a play underneath that conversation. Certain liberties have of course been taken, names have been changed, most of the finer details come from our own imaginations and out of necessity for plot, but the heart behind everything, the setting, the rule itself, the way we still managed to play together, and the desire to talk to this kid from my childhood about that experience is absolutely true.