In 1997, 50 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, Spokane Civic Theatre Playwright-in-Residence, Bryan Harnetiaux, was working on a new play for Civic’s 1997 – 1998 Studio Theatre Season. In the midst of this work, he picked up, for casual reading, Arnold Rampersad’s Jackie Robinson: A Biography. This book “grabbed him by the throat.” As a playwright, lawyer and life-long baseball fan, he was stunned at how little he really knew about the story leading up to this iconic event in American history. With the blessing of then-executive director Jack Phillips, Bryan abandoned the current play-in-progress and began intensive research to determine whether Jackie Robinson’s epic journey could be brought to life on the stage. What he discovered was a compelling need to tell the story of how this seismic shift in American culture came about.