FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — As part of his life-long interest in human communication and motivation, Donald P. Judges, the E.J. Ball professor of law at the University of Arkansas School of Law, co-wrote the three-act play Radio Traffic with Stephen J. Cribari, distinguished visiting professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School.

The production will premier Thursday, May 8, at the Center for Independent Artists in Minneapolis, Minn., and will feature Chris Michela and Holly Windle. It is directed by Dan Sola and produced by Kristen Gandrow.

The play portrays two emergency services radio dispatchers, Garrett and Wendell, as they struggle with events and each other during one night’s shift. Faced with a series of challenging incidents — threats to patrol officer safety, a barricaded and potentially suicidal suspect and a downed aircraft lost in the rugged Highlands area of the county — Garrett and Wendell are forced to confront their past history of broken relationships and each other.

Some of the events in Radio Traffic draw on Judges’ 10-year experience as a part-time police officer in a small town in northwest Arkansas.

Alastair Pearce, president of Rose Bruford College in Kent, England, a leading drama school in the United Kingdom, described Radio Traffic as “clever, authentic, witty, funny, tense, poignant at the end and very believable.”

This is Judges’ second full-length dramatic work with Cribari. Their other project, Our Sacred Honor, is a feature-length screenplay set during the days of the Pony Express and Montana Gold Rush, involving themes of honor, justice, love, betrayal, violence, greed and the rule of law. 

“My participation in these projects has offered lessons not only in the workings of the theater but also about the power of words, which, after all, are a lawyers' primary tools,” Judges said. “As Garrett, one of the characters in Radio Traffic, put it, sometimes 'talking's all we've got.’”

Judges said he met Cribari in 1999 and soon began working on Our Sacred Honor. Cribari is a published playwright and poet. His recent other dramatic works include two one-act plays, Crevasse Rescue and Bar Talk, and he was a 2007 nominee for poet laureate of Minnesota.