What is a conflict?” Levi Holloway asks.

Holloway and the students are talking about playwriting, specifically how to build a story, but they’re also talking about the state of the world. It’s the last week of September, and there are examples of the three classical forms of conflict everywhere. The weekend before, NFL players had protested against police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, much to the displeasure of President Donald Trump. (Man versus Man.) Puerto Rico, ravaged by Hurricane Maria, was underwater and without power. (Man versus Nature.) “Everything is horrible,” one student told Holloway before the bell rang. “I just want a day to sleep.” (Man versus Himself.)

“There was a very dramatic shift, an overt fear of South Asian or Middle Eastern people, as if they were all complicit,” Khoury recalled in 2011. “On a community level, people were dealing with hostility, thrown on the defensive. One’s Americanness was called into question.”

The program culminates in a staged reading of the students’ plays by professional actors of color, many of whom have previously performed in Silk Road Rising productions. The staged reading is one of the most exciting parts of the program for the students, Reilly says: hearing their words read aloud by a real actor—instead of a friend or a classmate—makes them sound more important, more real. The readings are recorded and posted on the Silk Road Rising website so, as Gillani puts it, “Work migrates from the island of the school into the mainland of the community.”

One of the requirements of the EPIC curriculum is that each student write from at least one perspective that’s different from their own. Some students have used their plays as a way to examine issues that are relevant to their own lives, or the lives of people they know, such as what to do about a teen pregnancy or how police violence affects a community. Others use the play as a way to imagine themselves in other times or places, like France during the Revolution or present-day North Korea.

“It’s a way of giving back,” Gillani adds, “a way to give to a system that’s underfunded and underserved.”