Have you wondered how a beloved novel like Freak The Mighty leapt from the page to grace the stage? Seattle Rep Communications Manager Nicole Bearden recently had the chance to ask that very question of the show's creative team. Read on to hear the first part of our series, Bringing the Page to the Stage, with Freak The Mighty director Michael Barakiva.

Nicole Bearden (NB): From your perspective, how did Freak The Mighty come to be?

Michael Barakiva (MB): I was still the artistic director of Cleveland Play House (CPH) when my friend and mentor Chris Ashley called me to tell me about an amazing new musical he was working on with the producers of Come From Away, based on the young adult (YA) novel Freak The Mighty. When I'm not directing plays or running theaters, I'm writing YA novels, so my interest was certainly piqued—the project had so much else going for it, including the impressive list of people attached. I fell in love with the material on first read and decided to commit to co-producing it with Seattle Rep. Chris was then selected to be the next Artistic Director of Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, and he had to pull out of the project. The team (writers Anthony Drewe and Ryan Fielding Garrett and producers Sue Frost and Randy Adams of Junkyard Dog Productions) asked me to take over directing, and I said yes with profound joy and gratitude. The rest, as they say, is history.

^{The cast of Freak The Mighty (2026) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwen Houck.}

NB: Can you tell us a bit about your "Five Principles"? 

MB: For our production [of Freak The Mighty], I focused on Time, Space, Genre, Perspective, and Story.

When I teach directing, I encourage my students to think about Time through The Three Frames: 

1. When was the play written?
2. When is the play/our production set?
3. When are we presenting the play?

When working with stories about historically excluded characters, the relationship between these things is especially important because as artists, we want to make sure that we are portraying stories authentically, as well as not causing any undue harm to our audiences (which is a good time to mention our extraordinary access team, Talleri A. McRae and Sofiya Cheyenne, who have informed so much of this work and all of the work that we did on this show).

Freak The Mighty was written in 1993 and we're setting it in 1993—and presenting it in 2026. Luckily, I was alive in the 1990s, so even though it is a period piece (nothing like your childhood being a "period" to make you feel old), it is familiar to me. That didn't stop me from doing research, which varies from gathering images that might be character inspiration to reading about essays about culture, history, and access. Specifically, we wanted to make sure that all of the language/concepts were authentic, but the words that we used wouldn't be harmful to audience members coming to see the show today.

My Space work synced up with much of the Time work. The production is set in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (NH), one of the few parts of NH that has coastline. The Time work was helpful here, as well, since Portsmouth has changed dramatically in the last few decades. 1993 is pre-internet, and it's easy to forget how different the world was then. 

There is something about the resilience of the New England character that is in the bones of this material, as well as the sometimes small-mindedness that sometimes accompanies small town living. These images became the starting point for my discussions with Wilson Chin (scenic designer) and Suzanne Chesney (costume designer), whose own research and beautiful work helped realize our visual world.

^{Netza Jimenez and Cornelius Kittrell in Freak The Mighty (2026) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwen Houck.}

Genre was probably my favorite part of the research—one of our protagonists has a sci-fi/fantasy imagination, much in the same way that I do. Getting specific on what he was watching ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"), what he was reading (the 14-book Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I read IN ITS ENTIRETY because it was so damn good), the comic books he liked (Superman, X-Men), was integral to my understanding of this play.

It's also amazing how much this story lines up with the Campbell Hero Myth, which of course was written decades before but had already been influencing pop culture and mainstream writing. What makes a hero? How does our fantasy of being heroic and the reality of heroism work together, or when is it at odds?

Thinking about Perspective came from Freak The Mighty, Rodman Philbrick's beautiful YA novel, which is written in first-person, like many YA novels. In fact, YA is one of the few genres in which first-person POV is often used (the YA novelist in me has theories about that, but this is not the time or place for them). It was a clue that we confirmed after the first leg of our production, that our play is most successful when we really feel like we are in the perspective of these unique protagonists.

^{Wade McCollum, Netza Jimenez, and Cornelius Kittrell in Freak The Mighty (2026) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwen Houck.} 

Because we had an access team heavily focused on disability and access in the show, I focused my pre-production research on how witnessing and surviving violence and trauma affects young people. This was the most capital "R" Research I did on this play, reading articles and briefs from psychological studies, as well as studies on how to break cycles and patterns of violence.

Finally, I try to synthesize all of this research into a one-sentence story that we use as a guiding light for the production. I don't usually share that sentence with the public, but if you come to see the show and email me afterwards, I'd be happy to send it along.

Now's your chance to see Freak The Mighty for yourself—on stage through September 6 at Seattle Rep!

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