The year is 1988 and 12-year-old Fiona (Lori Prince) is trying her best to understand why she feels a certain way about her classmate Margo (Autumn Hurlbert), the feisty redhead who keeps insisting Fiona join the kickball team and finally help them defeat the boys team. Written by Caroline Prugh It’s Only Kickball, Stupid is set during that crucial time when the idea of sexual discovery first enters our brains and we must figure out who we will become and how we will achieve our potential.

Directed by Adam Fitzgerald, Artistic Director of Kef Productions, the show is a lovely valentine to childhood, lost innocence and love. Fitzgerald deftly choreographs a balancing act that includes several time jumps and is performed by a splendid cast of four rounded up by Eric T. Miller and the scene-stealing Debargo Sanyal. We caught up with director Fitzgerald the day after the show’s first preview, “the first time you have an audience is always a little adrenaline-fueled” he explained, before we discussed the rehearsal process, the play’s history and crayons.

How did you become interested in directing this play?

Caroline brought it to us when only the first act was written, Lori who played Fiona was in Caroline’s thesis project at Columbia, and Caroline actually rewrote the play she’d started to make it fit Lori. We did a reading of the first act around the table and it ended with that surprise line at the end of act one, which made me jump up and say “you have to write act two now!”. I fell in love with it from the moment I read the first act.

Talk about the casting. How did you find your actors?

They all came to it differently. Autumn did a reading of it when Caroline first finished the play and I just fell in love with her in that role. The two boys we found when we held auditions, Eric Miller was actually out of town when we held auditions but we’d always had him in mind, so I called him to see if he was available and offered him the role. Then Debargo we didn’t know, but he wowed us in the audition room.

Did you ever think of casting children?

It was written from the beginning that the adults would play the children. In fact those notes in the program that says “it’s 1988 and it’s not...the characters are 12 but the actors are not”, that’s been the intro stage direction to the play since Caroline first brought it to us.

Actors like children, can become very self-conscious of what others around them think, and you ask your cast to do just that with the audience, what was that meta-process like in rehearsals? I can only imagine this can be either very liberating for them or very stressful…

(Laughs) I’d say a little from column A and a little from column B. We spent a lot of time discussing the characters, particularly for Debargo’s character who has like eight levels of meta! And there was a lot of like “wait! Am I 12 now? Am I 38 playing 12?”. We had to label the scenes…“this is a meta scene, this is a real scene, this is a flashback” etc and we developed a vocabulary in the rehearsal room so we could always figure out what world we were in.

Was it fun for them?

We had a blast! We had so much fun, there were days I had to rein the room in because we would be laughing nonstop for 20 minutes. The actors got so comfortable with each other, they weren’t afraid to be silly and do things that didn’t always work.

The show is also very bittersweet. How did you find the right balance between making it just funny and sad enough?

We broke everything down in rehearsals, so we could track this timeline through and again, I give a lot of credit to the cast, who were able to do this broad, difficult 12-year-old comedy and then turn around and be mature. For example in a key scene we see Autumn do this and her range of emotions is incredible. We tried to find the right tone for each individual scenes and it was hard and challenging. I hope for the audience this will be the reward of our work.

Fiona points out that indeed there are very few stories about lesbians. During your research did you find any stories that helped inspire your work here?

The big theme that we started playing with was this idea that young women in the 80s had no icons. In the 80s the gay marches were men and there were no images of women and to me the most surprising thing was that I didn’t know that. I had never thought of that until Caroline brought me this play and then I went back and there really were no out women. It was fascinating, because Melissa, Rosie and Ellen all came out in the 90s and that was not very long ago. This was another meta theme in the play, the characters talking about there not being any lesbian stories as the character pursues her own lesbian story. One of the driving reasons why I wanted to do this play was because I never thought of what little girls in this era were going through.

Creating the playground the play is set in, how do you want audiences to interact with the props you leave for them? Are you worried that people will get distracted with all the crayons, puzzles and games?

(Laughs) We talked about that and our joke was that if people are more interested in crayons than in the play then we’re doing a really bad job with our play. If the audience finds themselves preferring to draw with crayons, we have to take the blame on ourselves.

I don’t mean just necessarily the crayons though, because in a way the show demands a lot from the audience with the constant fourth wall breaks, but what I mean is that I felt like the production reminded me a bit about being in school. You know you should be paying attention, but you always have the temptation to go and play instead…

That is exactly the point. That’s why we put tables on the crayons and why we made the program like a coloring book and all of that...we want the audience to get in the mindset of being 12, a time when you can’t really focus and all you wanna do is have fun but then you’re watching this play and you’re seeing this story and you have to wonder “what if I’d had these feelings at this age too?”. Fiona says that this confusion “makes you want to punch a wall”. The audience needs to be aware that if they move too much the chairs will squeak...so yeah, we wanted them to be part of this world.

It’s Only Kickball, Stupid runs through September 14 at The Hartley House. For tickets and more information click here.