Recess
Recess is a new, interactive play that follows 5 elementary school students over the course of a school year as they navigate some of life's biggest questions. This one-act play combines humor with a heartfelt search for the empathy we lack in our politically polarized world.
Recess is co-written by Kate Mullis and Melissa Wilson. It has been produced once through the Atlas Intersections Festival in Washington DC in March, 2026.
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The story
Recess takes place over the course of the 2024 - 25 school year, following 5th graders Bird, Ashley, Sam, Nora, and Phineas. Bird conducts a science experiment on the other 4 to see if he can foster a culture of empathy and listening in these unlikely friends.
The topics
at hand
Recess covers a series of political questions -
- The 2024 Presidential Election
- Abortion Rights
- Gun Rights
- LGBTQ+ Rights
audience interaction
Engaging around such difficult topics shouldn't just be done by the actors, so we pull the audience into the show. Recess includes interactive elections, scripts for audience members to hop in with, and a time for the audience to discuss the issues brought up by the play amongst themselves.
The goal
The goal of Recess is to present a wide spectrum of political and life perspectives with no particular bias or opinion to promote apart from empathy. So many times, we get stuck in our echo chambers, and the goal of this show is to break us out of those, hearing from the mouths of these young characters in non-threatening ways we can receive.
The origins
Recess started with a series of interviews with a diverse mix of people from around the country - from every political, geographic, racial, cultural, religious, economic, and age demographics we could find. They were all asked the same list of questions about both political and heart-related topics. The hypothesis was that while the political answers would vary greatly, the heart answers would remain consistent. We leave it to the audience to decide if we were right.