Finding words to address gun violence

For the first time, M.A. Players will perform a play written by a current student — and take it to a summer festival in Scotland

Story and photos by Maya Giefer Johnson and Josephine Johnson

It’s late February 2024, and Jaeda Hutchinson, then a junior, sat down at lunch with friends. Talk around the table centered on upcoming auditions for the spring musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Just then, Nicholas Freeman, who directs Minnehaha’s theater program, approached the group, smiled and looked at Hutchinson.

“Hey, can you chat after school really quick?” he said. “I have an idea that I want to run by you.”

Hutchinson remembers being confused.

“I was worried that he was going to be like, ‘Hey, I don’t want you to act, can you be our student producer?’” she said. Hutchinson really, really wanted to sing and act in Spelling Bee. Producing would be great, maybe someday, but not now.

Finally, after school, Hutchinson went straight to Freeman’s office, nervous about the possibility of receiving bad news. She knocked and walked in.

“I have an idea,” Freeman said to her. “How would you feel about writing next year’s spring play?”

Writing the play? Yes, students write and direct short scenes each year for January’s Student Showcase, and she’d done that before. But no student had ever written Minnehaha’s big November and April plays and musicals. Those events were reserved for the heavy hitters. 

“I was thinking we could do something to get people thinking and talking about an important topic,” he continued. It would be serious, difficult work.

Hutchinson paused, immediately feeling the weight of the project.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m interested.” 

Inspired by Scotland

That began the years’ worth of preparation, writing, and planning that was Freeman and Hutchinson’s collaboration, which debuts tomorrow night as A Dress, one part of “Two Shows, One Night,” the M.A. Players spring production. 

Poster by Nate Stromberg.

For Freeman, that workshop wasn’t just the beginning. He’d been thinking about this since late 2023 — where everything started. 

That September, Freeman seriously considered a major opportunity: the annual American High School Theatre Festival, staged in Scotland in connection with the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival. After being encouraged to participate for years, Freeman decided to take a closer look, participating in online webinars for potential directors. He learned a few key things along the way. 

“You have 90 minutes to set up, perform and clear the set,” Freeman said, explaining that the show itself needs to be shorter than usual. “It’s hard to bring over a lot of props, sets or huge costume pieces. So you’ve got to find something that’s going to work within those limitations. You gotta travel light.” 

Additionally, with copyright restrictions varying around the world, the royalties that apply in the U.S. may not apply overseas. 

“The more I talked to people, the more difficult it seemed to get rights to a show overseas, and I didn’t want to battle that,” Freeman said. “And I thought that it would be a cool opportunity for someone to step in and create an original script.”

Freeman knew that Hutchinson, then a junior, would be capable of writing an excellent play. 

“Jaeda has been a proven playwright throughout her years here. I have been impressed with everything she has written for Student Showcase,” he said. “I think she’s on her second novel that she’s writing, so I know she loves the process of writing. I also really wanted a female’s perspective for this topic. I wanted a female voice to kind of help champion that. I’m a male voice. So as the director of this piece, I want to make sure that I’m getting a balance, not just through my lens, but someone who has a much different perspective than I do. And so it was important for me to find someone who was not only a gifted playwright, but someone who could come at it with a different angle than what I would be able to do.”

Freeman also knew that this script, this Minnehaha-branded story, would have to have three things: fulfilling the time constraints, having a large number of roles and flexible casting, and having a meaningful message that stuck with people as they experienced the very widespread Fringe Festival.

So, with these things in mind, Freeman brought the idea to Jessa Anderson, M.A.’s Cultural Immersion Director (CFE), and Mike DiNardo, the Upper School Principal. They loved it — and with their approval, Freeman applied. 

Needless to say, the M.A. Players were accepted, and thus began the preparations, and original writing of the 2025 Spring Play. 

A difficult subject

The process of writing the play would have been quite different if Freeman wanted Hutchinson to write about a Spring Break crush, winning a chess tournament or searching for a lost necklace. 

Jaeda Hutchinson. Photo by Josephine Johnson.

After some deliberation and conversation, Freeman decided that a meaningful topic would be… gun violence. It had been a topic on Freeman’s mind for a long time, and he noticed the concern of others, too. For example, he said, the Danish students who visit Minnehaha each year wondered why the issue was so prominent here.

“Two years in a row, they asked about Americans and guns,” Freeman said. “I felt that as much as I would rather talk about something else, God has put this on my heart in a way that I could not ignore.”

Over the next year, both Hutchinson and Freeman, and many people around them, would learn new and unexpected things, not only about gun violence, but about the power of theater to shape public conversation.

They learned about local gun violence through Protect MN, whose executive director, Maggiy Emery, spoke in a Minnehaha assembly April 1. 

Another influential organization has been ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence, which seeks to create “space for teens to confront gun violence by creating new works of theatre that will spark critical conversations and inspire meaningful action in communities across the country.”

In particular, they were deeply affected by a webinar, presented by ENOUGH!, featuring a mother who lost two children to gun violence.

“She said, whatever we do, we MUST talk about this!” Freeman recalled.

Hutchinson also did a fair amount of research on her own. 

“It really helped me make sure that I’m approaching it with the mindfulness and respect and care that it really deserves,” she said, “because it’s a very taboo subject, but it’s also really prevalent.”

From concept to script

When it came time to write, Freeman and Hutchinson reviewed ideas and plans for a script.

Hutchinson had no issue taking up the challenge to write an original script, despite the difficult topic. Freeman would give her a basic idea, then the two would revise and edit once the draft was complete. 

Nicholas Freeman. Photo by Maya Giefer Johnson.

Discussion was a key part of the process, and clear communication was of utmost importance. So slowly, they chipped away at the project, crossing out ideas and circling new ones. The 2024 spring musical (Spelling Bee) came and went, as did the school year. 

During summer 2024, Freeman and Hutchinson met on a weekly basis to workshop the play. 

“Working with Jaeda has been one of my favorite parts,” Freeman said. “I love spewing ideas out there, and in my head, it’s just a bunch of puzzle pieces. And then the next time I meet with Jaeda a week later, she’ll have put all those puzzle pieces together.” 

Hutchinson experienced something similar. 

“Freeman was like, ‘Okay, here’s how I want the show to be,’” Hutchinson said. “He gave me the major plot points and then I kind of filled in everywhere else.”

They quickly agreed on the big picture.

“Freeman and I wanted it to be a conversation about kids’ day-to-day lives,” Hutchinson said. “We knew we wanted it to be set during senior year prom season, and we wanted everyday issues that people could relate to. Everybody can relate to when you’re a teenager, you feel unheard. I really wanted to touch on parents who are so involved in their work that they kind of brush their kids aside, not because they don’t love them but because they’re doing good at their jobs. I feel like that’s a big issue.”

Writing about the real world she lives in proved to be harder than expected.

“One of the biggest things that was difficult for me was that I don’t write a whole lot of contemporary stuff, like things set in the real world with real life issues,” Hutchinson said. “Most of the stuff I work with is fantasy. In fantasy, the plot beats and the pacing are way different than contemporary stuff.”

An element that stays the same across genres is character.

“My favorite thing in writing is character work,” Hutchinson said. “It’s so fun to find what makes characters tick, to see how they speak, to think of how they dress and all that. In both my personal writing and my projects I just like to experiment with different kinds of people, trying to write new characters and new motivations. I also really love writing friendships, and finding a character foil in a friendship is so fun – writing two completely opposite characters, but somehow they work. It’s like putting a puzzle together.”

One thing she tries to avoid is giving her characters the same interests and traits that she has, because, she said, “then everybody would be exactly like me, and that’s something to avoid.” Then she added with a laugh: “I think that still, the characters all have my humor…. Most of them are also bad at math. I’m really bad at math, like I’m so bad!”

By the end of July, Jaeda had a script. She proudly presented it to Freeman, and they realized the dream they shared was becoming a reality.

From writing to staging

Many elements would get revised through discussions and rehearsals. Eventually, the play came to its final stage. Freeman suggested a title:  A Dress. Not only did the story involve a prom dress, but it also was steeped in the issue of gun violence, which they strongly believe needs to be addressed.

Freeman wants to be careful not to push an agenda or a particular perspective on gun violence; he wants to use theater to spark deeper thinking and open-minded discussions about important issues.

“Whenever I do a play, I believe that as an artist, it’s not my job to tell people how to think or how to react. It’s my job to inspire them to react,” he said. “Good art is done well when it inspires conversation, and no matter if it’s Little Shop of Horrors, Into the Woods, Clue – name any of the shows that we’ve done – the number one goal for me is to make sure that we’re telling a version of that story that inspires people to talk with one another, to raise issues or concerns or thoughts that are in that play and to go deeper into that realm.”

Freeman expects audiences in the United States and Scotland to view the subject matter differently, but he hopes the overall impact of inspiring thought and conversation will be the same.

 “If we do our job well, they’re going to have questions that are different, and they’re going to want to talk more about it,” he said. “If we can help bring awareness to an issue that we are also trying to figure out ourselves, I think it’s a great way for us to reach out to our brothers and sisters in other countries that are able to go, ‘Wow, okay, yeah, you guys are really wrestling with this issue,’ and hopefully bring added insight to folks that don’t live in the United States.”

While their work has yet to reach an audience, it has already been transformative for everyone involved in creating it. 

“Before I embarked on this journey, if you will, I was conscious of gun violence,” she said. “I knew about it all, but I never really spared much thought about it. So the writing has really changed me because now I’m very aware of gun violence and its impacts now.”