Something special happened in Walsh on Tuesday night. It went down without much fanfare — no banners hanging from the Leavey Bridge, no over-zealous flyering in Red Square and fewer than five Facebook reminder messages. Despite the low profile, word got around, and by five minutes before curtain, if you wanted to squeeze into Blackbox, you had to carry in your own chair.

The houselights went down and a few black and white words went up: “9 Georgetown students, 24 Ballou students, 4 months: 1 Production.” Then, a single question: “What did we do?”

The production of You Don’t Know My Story! began after a community theater performance at the Town Hall Education Arts & Recreation Campus (theARC) inspired Jenn Bonsall (COL ’07) to get involved with local youth.

A sociology major, Bonsall already had experience in community-based and ethnographic research in Wards 7 and 8, and the idea of a collaboration to create an empowering theater program with Georgetown faculty and students and a community partner excited her. She pitched the idea to the Center for Social Justice, and with the help of the theater and sociology departments and a connection to Ballou Senior High School, she developed a spring 2007 course.

“Considering Georgetown’s tradition of community service, social justice, commitment to community-based research and the history of theater,” she said, “I just thought: Why can’t we combine all those elements into one class?”

And so every Wednesday, the students of Georgetown’s “Theater for Social Change” course and participating students from Ballou meet for nearly three hours to develop the play at the high school on 4th Street in South East D.C. With the help of Debbie Iverson, a perennial advocate of change at the school and favorite teacher of many Ballou students, this group was eager to take on the issues that face Ballou: low attendance rates, a high drop-out rate and a number of violent school crimes.

“We were really nervous the first day,” Terrance Davis (COL ’10) said. “It was basically cold turkey — we showed up not knowing if we were going to have 30 students or none. We had no idea what we were getting into.”

The play has been a word-of-mouth project from the start: The first after-school meeting turned up five interested students. The next, a dozen. And as word spread across grades and groups of friends, the cast more than quadrupled its size, settling in late February with a talented crew of 24 high school students.

“We were all on different levels, socially,” Ballou junior Delonte Gorman said of the performers. “And then we started telling all our friends and they started telling their friends — suddenly we were just one big group. People I had never seen in school before, I interacted with them on a real level because of this.”

Ashley Mayo, a graduating junior chimed in. “Once you see your friends or your peers being in something, you’re gonna want to join. You’re gonna be like, ‘Hey, they having fun, let me try,’ instead of being on the streets or doing nothing.”

With students coming from so many different places representing a wide range of social sets, activities, ages and acting abilities, getting down to the business of writing a play proved a learning experience for all involved.

“We wanted students to examine and challenge their existing assumptions about themselves, others and their community,” Karen Berman, a professor in Georgetown’s Program for Performing Arts said in an e-mail.

“The conversations were respectful, even when people disagreed,” said Sam Marullo,

professor and chair of the sociology department. “And people learned from each other and modified their behavior appropriately for the benefit of the group’s further collaboration.”

The students worked together to write their own scripts — composed of experiences they’ve lived, scenes they’ve witnessed and lessons they’ve learned — in an effort to tell the stories they’ve never told before. “We split up into groups and so there’s a little bit of everybody in each story,” Mayo explained. “It was a lot of different ideas in each scene.”

There were moving accounts of lives touched by alcoholism and violence, explorations of sexual identity and the causes of sexually transmitted illnesses, and the recitation of powerful poetry.

“Whatever was going on in our life — that’s what it was about,” Jessica Thompson, a Ballou senior, said. “And it didn’t happen to you — it happened to someone you know, or you’ve seen it before happen.”

It might have bordered on a typical after-school special, had it all not been so real — and creative. The performance had so much energy, sincerity and hilarity that it was easy to forget that it had anything to do with school at all.

The antics of the BooBoo Quartet (Ashley Mayo, Karl Addison, John Graham and Jonathan Steele), along with a stunning, gender-bending cameo by Georgetown’s own Jorge Amaro (COL ’07) and his girlfriend (Marquita Lester), had the entire audience giving homophobic stereotypes “the boot.”

Jarmal Harris’ courageous denunciation of myths surrounding the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases informed the audience while his classmates (Jonathan Steele, Montre Davis and Markita Jones) amused us as class clowns turned awareness advocates. Wayne Craft, Joe Sommers and Roosevelt Johnson took the level up a notch with their portrayals of an alcoholic mother, a supportive friend and a comically concerned teacher, respectively.

Ashley Hamilton showed the audience what a scream really is as James Allen looked on at teenage violence in disgust. Safiya Howard, Delonte Gorman, Alexis Lemons, Cinthya Proctor and Calvin Vaughn told the story of many students at Ballou struggling to overcome environmental obstacles to success.

And who can forget Toostie Ta, the ensemble piece that proved, despite the production’s serious implications, that the show was really about a group of talented youths making a difference and having some fun?

So, one question remains: what did they do?

Cinthya Proctor, a freshman, said it best: “We made people know that Ballou can do something for themselves that and that kids who go to Ballou will succeed. Nobody thought we could, but we showed them.”

Editors Note: ‘You Don't Know My Story!’ will have an encore presentation at 2p.m. on April 21 in the National Music Library at the Carnegie Library. The library is located at 801 K Street, NW. For information on making donations to Ballou S.T.A.Y. — the Ballou School to Aid Youth Senior High School, an alternative high school for at-risk students — please contact Karen Berman at bermankj@georgetown.edu.