A head-on confrontation of issues such as school shootings, child abuse, and more, The Suicide Kings’ In Spite of Everything is a seminal work in both spoken word performance and activist art. Featuring one of the fiercest Bay Area hip-hop collectives, under the direction of GOLDIE award-winning, Bay Area legend Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the story weaves through the days following the tragic event and the lives of both the perpetrators and victims to reveal the underlying issues, both institutional and personal, that lead to bullying and youth violence in schools. Opening with a group of writing workshop leaders at the head of a classroom, the fun is quickly stilled as the scene shifts to a police interrogation of one of the instructors about the biggest school shooting since Columbine. What happens next is as riveting as it is heartbreaking. The artists take the audience on a critical journey through fear-inducing journalism, violent video games, and more to reveal that violence and shootings in school cannot only be blamed on the perpetrator.