SCOTUS Justice Applauds KC Stage Adaption of Her Book World Premier at The Coterie Theatre Moves Sonia Sotomayor to Tears

As the first Latina, and the third woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor is noted for reasoned questioning and, at times, searing dissents.

But legal opinions, despite obvious historical weight, aren’t the writings that Sotomayor referred to as her life’s work during her recent visit to Kansas City.

The messaging within her book “Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You” drew that distinction. 

It’s her children’s book. 

Kansas City’s Coterie Theatre is staging the world premiere of a play based on “Just Ask!,” a distinction that came about through a series of decades-long theater connections coupled with the Coterie’s eagerness to challenge norms.

“You are doing a piece of God’s work in this theater,” Sotomayor said after attending the debut performance on Friday.

“Children’s theaters are so important,” Sotomayor said. “They help kids see things in different ways, and they bring them to life, not just in their imagination, but in their eyes.”

The 2019 best-seller carries Sotomayor’s deeply personal storyline about abilities and challenges, seen and unseen, especially in children.

“When it ended, I had tears in my eyes,” Sotomayor said during a small gathering where she discussed her childhood, explaining why she’s passionate about empowering children.

“This may be one of my greatest legacies,” Sotomayor said.

Sotomayor’s next children’s book, to be released in the fall, will be called “Just Shine,” and will focus on the life lessons she learned from her mother about how to be a better person.

Sotomayor ensures that her books are released simultaneously in English and Spanish.

Scenes from “Just Ask!”

Sotomayor didn’t become a reader of books until after the fourth grade.

Her Puerto Rican family spoke only Spanish at home in their Bronx public housing project, and she did not have access to books in her native language.

The lack of books also slowed her mastery of English, which she was still learning during her early primary school years.

“Just Ask!” grows from Sotomayor being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 7.

“To take care of myself, I had to do things other kids did not,” Sotomayor wrote in the forward.

“Sometimes I felt different. When kids saw me giving myself a needle shot of insulin, my medicine, I knew they were curious about what I was doing. But they never asked me, my parents, or my teachers about it. I also often felt they thought I was doing something wrong.”

After the opening performance, Sotomayor said that she was 30 before an incident “woke me up into understanding that I didn’t have to hide my condition.”

Sotomayor’s blood sugar dropped dangerously low during a party that she was throwing with close friends. She laid down in a bedroom and became unconscious.

By chance, a friend walked in and forced the future justice awake. Cake, hurriedly consumed, helped rebalance her blood sugar.

“The next day I realized that I could have died,” Sotomayor said. “None of my dear friends knew what to do.”

She’d never explained diabetes to them.

“We are who we are,” Sotomayor said. “And each of us brings to the world our own special talents. I’m a diabetic, but I’m a Supreme Court justice, two things at once. I don’t want anyone with a condition to ever feel like they have to be ashamed or hide.” 

“Just Ask!” concludes its run at The Coterie on February 23.

In May, the Kansas City production will perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as part of the Theatre for Young Audiences conference.

A groundbreaking production for accessibility

“Just Ask!” portrays an ensemble of lively children, each with a unique disability supporting an underlying strength. The characters, inspired by people Sotomayor has met throughout her life, create a community garden.

The script underscores lessons about curiosity, about asking questions of those who might seem different, and being open to recognizing strengths and talents that might not be initially obvious.

The production took five years to develop.

Actors fill roles they inhabit in life: as people with asthma, severe allergic reactions, visual impairments, Tourette’s syndrome, Down’s syndrome, ADHD, diabetes, and autism, among other conditions.

Sotomayor is played by Andrea Hobley, who was diagnosed with diabetes as a young adult.

In developing the character of a young Sonia, Hobley embraced a willingness to discuss her diabetes.

A query about how she’s doing that day might be answered with a comment about needing a glucose tablet because her sugar level is low.

“It’s been freeing,” Hobley said. “It’s changed me and how I view things and how I’ll be after the show.”

In her remarks, Sotomayor talked about the Sonia character in the play.

“That little Sonia is speaking things I never could,” she said. “So for me, it is a sort of a very special moment, not to see me, but to see the me I wanted to be.”

As the play is staged in new cities, it can adapt to the availability of actors.

The script allows for more than a dozen characters, each differently abled. For instance, the Kansas City production does not include an actor who uses a wheelchair.

Kansas City connection

“We’ve been able to create a script that can put that person’s experience into the story without having to change the bones of what it is,” said Fran Sillau, who adapted Sotomayor’s book into the play. “And that’s true accessibility.”

Sillau is the connector for how Sotomayor’s project landed in Kansas City.

He is the executive artistic director of Circle Theatre, Omaha’s theater for individuals of all abilities.

Sillau has cerebral palsy, which affects his mobility in walking. His love for acting began in childhood.

The production has become a template for ensuring that children’s theater stems from quality literature and is accessible to all.

“Any theater can pick it up and know how to do it, how to actively cast those individuals that live in their communities that have these disabilities,” Sillau said.

A Bay-area children’s theater was initially involved with developing Sotomayor’s book for the stage.

Sillau was asked to be the playwright and to direct. But COVID challenged live theaters. In 2023, the Bay Area Children’s Theatre closed.

Show must go on

Sillau didn’t want the project to fold.

He sought out Sotomayor’s literary agent, who requested writing samples, letters of recommendation, and a rundown of Sillau’s vision, including the musical treatment.

Mark Kurtz, Sillau’s husband, stepped up. Kurtz is the play’s composer, lyricist, and music director.

In keeping with the goal of diversity, Kurtz wanted his compositions to tap a range of musical genres; including jazz, rhythm and blues, bossa nova, and classical music.

They finished the proposal package within a week.

Three weeks later, an email arrived. Sotomayor would like to meet by Zoom.

“It was the most wonderful conversation,” Sillau recalled. “I asked her, ‘What do you want out of this project?’”

Sotomayor replied that the book’s message was the most important part of her legacy and wanted assurances she could put her good name on it.

Through the development process, the men found Sotomayor to be detail-oriented, with insightful guidance on what she wanted the play to convey and how it could be accomplished.

Sillau’s long friendship with Amanda Kibler, the former education director at The Coterie, is how the play landed at the theater based in Crown Center.

The Coterie’s new managing director, Jonathan Thomas, quickly signed on.

Special addition

Kibler is now executive director of What if Puppets, which rebranded from Mesner Puppet Theater.

The inclusion of puppets in the script allowed for further grounding themes that Sotomayor requested.

What if Puppets designed and created a rabbit, a squirrel, and a flower.

They’re tabletop puppets, designed so a person with limited dexterity could still manipulate them.

“There is a connection between puppets and children that is like magic,” Kibler said.

Children often confided in puppets and share information they would not even reveal to the puppeteer. 

Research by the Yale Child Study Center, tracking eye movements, found that children with autism spectrum disorder can connect with puppets in ways that neurotypical children do with humans as they speak, Kibler said.

Optimism is stronger than adversity

In early August, Sotomayor visited Kansas City to attend a reading of the play, with prototypes of the puppets.

She effusively praised Sillau and Kurtz, the Coterie, and the actors brought her book to life.

Sotomayor was in Kansas City for three days. And although there were dinners and patron events to attend, she spent significant amounts of time with area children.

She read the book to children at the Kansas City Public Library. And visited with several teen Latinas through the Police Athletic League in Wyandotte County. 

“Just Ask!” embraces an attitude that Sotomayor writes of extensively in her 2013 memoir “My Beloved World.”

Optimism can prove stronger than any adversity.

“My Beloved World” opens with a young Sonia listening to her parent’s raised voices. Their bickering wasn’t unusual during her childhood.

This time, the argument was about her.

She’d fainted in church, leading to the diagnosis of juvenile diabetes. 

They were arguing over the need for her father to master giving his daughter shots of insulin.

Papi’s unsteady hands were a problem, fearful of harming his daughter. Her father’s struggles with alcohol heightened family tensions.

She stood on a chair to reach, but that’s when Sotomayor decided to learn how to light the pilot of the family stove, heat water to sterilize a needle, and give herself the insulin.

Sotomayor was 9 when her father died of heart problems.

The book details Sotomayor’s broad family network and her emotions as a child.

“I abhorred feeling pitied, that degrading secondhand sadness I would always associate with my family’s reaction to the news that I had diabetes,” she wrote.

But she learned self-reliance, ingenuity, bravery, and an astuteness to read situations.

The attributes, she details, indeed all of her early experiences stressful and loving, helped drive her academically. Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

“How is it that adversity has spurred me on instead of knocking me down? What are the sources of my own hope and optimism? Most essentially, my purpose in writing is to make my hopeful example accessible. People who live in difficult circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible.”

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