[citation needed] She worked on the play for the entire semester, revising and reworking the text, which concluded in a final performance.
She told the Theater Development Fund's periodical, Sightlines, "When it came time to do scenes from our plays, I was embarrassed when mine lasted 30 minutes when everyone else's was only five (they were all supposed to be five), but I was soon gratified when the lights came up and I saw how my writing affected the other students."
According to Corthron, that moment, when she was able to communicate on such a deep level with her classmates, made her realize that she wanted to touch people like this again, to share and awaken feelings about important issues.
Corthron was accepted and attended Columbia where she studied under professors such as Howard Stein, Glenn Young, and Lavonne Mueller.
Upon graduation in 1992, Corthron began writing plays and was granted a commission from the Goodman Theater in Chicago to write the play Seeking the Genesis, a piece dealing with parents drugging their children with Ritalin and the proposed government drugging of urban youth to prevent violence.
[8] In other plays, she has examined the land mine issue, female gangs, prisons, capital punishment, youth violence, and disability.
[9] One of Kia Corthron's most influential plays is Force Continuum,[10] which centers around "an African-American police officer who struggles with the contradictions of his race and profession while confronting the black community he is bound to protect and being haunted by his cop father's violent death".
Throughout this play Kia Corthron draws parallels to the real world through the controversial topic of police brutality, which helps the audience perceive these types of situations from the perspective of both sides.
The play concerns Abebe, an African preacher-in-training who arrives in a drought-stricken rural American town intending to further his studies in religion and water conservation.
Hosted by a mother and daughter haunted by tragedy, he takes an interest in a young orphan starved for guidance – all the while maintaining an infectious optimism in the face of his obstacles.
[citation needed] With their aid, In 2004, Kia chose to travel to Liberia while the country was recovering from its civil war, and has since been working with the theater on her play Tap the Leopard, chronicling the historical relationship connecting the U.S. and Liberia, from the initial tensions between immigrant American free blacks and the majority native population in the 19th century through the strife of the late 20th and 21st centuries.