I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after

In the words, “I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after graduation as an intern at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It's a town that has many people living the polygamous lifestyle,” Stephen Karam offers more than a recollection of time and place — he opens a window into the heart of observation, difference, and human complexity. Beneath this quiet statement lies the seed of understanding that would one day shape him as a playwright: the ability to see life not as a single thread, but as a tapestry of contrasting truths, woven together by circumstance and belief.

Fresh from graduation, Karam found himself in Cedar City, a place both ordinary and extraordinary — small in scale but vast in the depth of its human contradictions. To work at the Utah Shakespearean Festival was to breathe the spirit of the Bard, whose plays themselves grappled with the paradoxes of love, morality, and identity. Yet beyond the stage, in the rhythm of the town’s life, Karam witnessed a world that defied the conventions he had known. Here, in a community where polygamy was still practiced, he confronted a reality both alien and deeply human — a culture of love structured by rules the wider world often condemned.

This encounter was, in essence, an education in empathy and perception. For the young artist, fresh from academic ideals, to meet such diversity of belief was to realize that truth is not monolithic. Every community, every faith, every way of living holds within it a logic of survival, love, and longing. As the ancients taught, “He who knows only his own path knows not the breadth of the earth.” Karam’s experience in Cedar City became his apprenticeship in understanding humanity — a lesson no classroom could teach.

From this experience, one senses the quiet birth of an artist who would later create works like The Humans and Sons of the Prophet, stories suffused with tenderness for the flawed and the struggling. Just as Shakespeare’s characters embody the tension between sin and sanctity, Karam learned that to write truthfully about people, one must first learn to see without judgment. The playwright’s craft, after all, is not to condemn, but to illuminate — to bring even the strangest of souls into the light of recognition.

History holds parallels to this awakening. Consider Leo Tolstoy, who, born into privilege, wandered among peasants and soldiers to understand the heart of Russia. It was in witnessing lives so different from his own that he gained the wisdom to write War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Like Karam in Cedar City, Tolstoy discovered that truth is not found in comfort, but in contact — in stepping beyond the borders of one’s upbringing to listen to the voices of the unfamiliar. For both men, artistic maturity began not in theory, but in encounter.

Thus, Karam’s words remind us that the artist’s journey is an act of immersion. To grow is to walk among those who live differently, to see the sacred in what once seemed strange. The four months in Utah were, in truth, four months of initiation — a passage from youthful certainty into the humility of observation. Through this, he learned that art, like wisdom, is born of witnessing, not of presuming.

The lesson is simple yet profound: never shrink from what challenges your understanding of the world. Seek out places and people who unsettle you, for they are the mirrors that show you who you truly are. Difference is not a threat to truth; it is its crucible. The one who dares to look upon the unfamiliar with open eyes will always find a deeper humanity waiting there.

And the practical action is this: go where your assumptions tremble. Learn from those whose ways are not your own. Whether you are an artist, a thinker, or simply a soul in search of wisdom, remember that the world’s richness lies in its contradictions. As Stephen Karam discovered beneath the desert skies of Utah, to understand others is to begin understanding oneself — and that is the first step toward creating anything of lasting worth.