Alum Jenny Kokai premiere's "Zombie Thoughts" a mother-son collaboration.

The play was co-written with her son, Oliver Kokai-Means. It will debut this fall with Plan B Theatre in Salt Lake City and also touring to Annapolis, MD with Building Better People Productions.

Jennifer Kokai graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with an MA in 2003. Her son Ollie is 11.  In addition to her job as a professor, she works as a playwright professionally and was commissioned by Plan B Theatre Company in Salt Lake City, Utah to write a play for their annual elementary school tour.  She decided to collaborate with someone in tune with that demographic wanted/needed.  According to Kokai, "Ollie and I had a lot of talks and we decided to write a play about childhood anxiety, which is something he deals with (he has Generalized Anxiety Disorder)."   

Ollie created the characters, the ideas, and the structure (it's structured like a video game, so the audience gets to make a lot of the choices about where the characters go, what lines they say, even which actor plays which character at the beginning). He would act things out for me or improv and then Kokai wrote the words down. They had a few early workshops with Plan B and also had a licensed therapist sign off on it for accuracy in its depiction of Anxiety and appropriate coping skills. Which makes it sound very serious, but it's also super funny. 

In May it was announced that Plan B production received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce the play.

The tour will go to around 8000 elementary school kids in the Salt Lake City area and the Maryland tour will also be to a bunch of different schools. Plan B commissioned it and then another theatre in a Facebook group for artists Kokai belongs to was looking for a 2 person show to tour that helps kids develop empathy. So Kokai sent it, they loved it, and now there are 2 productions! 

Ollie performed in the hit musical Fun Home with the Salt Lake Acting Company April - May 2018.