INTERVIEW: Jesús I. Valles on the difficulties, possibilities of ninth grade
Photo: Jaden Perez stars in Spread by Jesús I. Valles. Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes / Provided by The Print Shop PR with permission.
For playwright Jesús I. Valles, their time as a teacher in Austin, Texas, informed their understanding of what the ninth grade must be like for students of the 21st century. Some of the stories and insights that Valles learned in that professional experience helped inform their new play, Spread, which finishes its extended run Sunday, March 29, at the INTAR Theatre in New York City.
“I think the feeling has been a tremendous amount of trust with who I’m working with, Tatyana-Marie Carlo, who is the director, someone I really trust and care for, and I knew that under her guidance the process would be exactly what it needed to be,” Valles said about this world-premiere production. “The cast has been incredible.”
The challenges faced by the cast and crew, in Valles’ mind, had to do with understanding the reality of what ninth graders have to face in 2026. As press notes indicate, the show is centered on the characters of Jeffrey, Andrew, Chris and Jordan, who play, fight, tease, talk shit and try their absolute best to be friends to one another on the brink of adulthood.
“I think it’s difficult to work on a show about ninth graders, to work on a show about teenagers, and also not think through the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the tensions here at home,” the playwright said. “The show opened a day after the strike in Iran, which killed a school of girls, so I think it’s been difficult to think about all of the tremendous violence that we have set up for children globally while also working on this play about a time in my life where I got to be lucky enough to care for and love on people’s kids, too.”
Valles said writing Spread wasn’t that difficult; they began writing the first draft while still in graduate school in 2022. Putting pen to paper came from a feeling of being sad over the fact of no longer working with students; that time in Austin was a transformative one for the writer.
“It wasn’t difficult to write it because I think so much of the language in the play is gifted to me by them,” they said. “So much of it is verbatim memory recall, I think, and then from there sort of constructing fictional storylines inside a language that I still recall from spending time with my students back in Austin, Texas.”
The play receives its name from a type of meal called “spread” or “Texas prison brick.” There are different monikers in different regions, but the meal is shared by those in the prison system. Valles described the dish as being like a casserole. It’s “made from all of the foods that one can find in the commissary, so like ramen, beef jerky, Slim Jims,” Valles said. “And then it’s all cooked in a plastic bag using hot water, so that dish found its way to a lot of my classroom potlucks when I was teaching because so many of the kids I was working with had family members who were incarcerated or had been incarcerated previously.”
Valles’ experience as an educator was based less on the content they were teaching and more on how they created a safe space for the students.
“I think being able to provide snacks or a bus pass or let someone sleep in your classroom for a little bit because they worked the night before, being able to set up community service hours, being able to translate for parents, I think for us and for a lot of the people I worked with … I think so much of that work really was about how to make somebody’s life a little bit easier,” the writer said. “How do you make a student’s life a little bit easier? The content stuff will do itself, but how can you most easily and most immediately care for a child’s needs, I think, was the most important question I think we tried to ask ourselves.”
Valles added: “I think the system that these children live in is already so deeply difficult and I think creates a kind of necessity to be tough and to be spunky and frankly sometimes cool to the people most immediately around you, which is usually your friends. That’s who you could be the meanest to, and I think because it’s also where you learn how to apologize or think through your choices or rehearse kindness, it is also where I’ve seen students be the most swift with their care.”
The playwright, who also penned the show Bathhouse.pptx, described an instance where a student called another student ugly. Within seconds, the student who said the sentence realized that the words hurt the other person’s feelings. An apology was issued immediately.
“To watch that kind of move from injury to repair happen so quickly with a child and understand that we live in a world where adults and governments cannot respond that way, I think is kind of a marvel,” they said. “For me, that is the ninth grade I was teaching in.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Spread, written by Jesús I. Valles, continues through Sunday, March 29, at the INTAR Theatre in New York City. The show is co-produced by the Royal Exchange Theatre and directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo. Click here for more information and tickets.
