Steve H. Broadnax III, artistic director of Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock, isn’t just writing what he knows—he’s staging it. With The Remarkable Resignation of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, his new play about President Clinton’s embattled first Surgeon General, at the Rep Aug. 11-29, Broadnax is celebrating an Arkansas hero who’s barely one degree of separation from him and his family.

“Dr. Elders and my grandmother are friends,” said Broadnax, for whom both the Elderses and the Clintons were “people that I saw at the local McDonald’s in Little Rock growing up.”

A co-commission of Arkansas Rep and Pennsylvania’s People’s Light, Remarkable Resignation is framed by an interview that Dr. Elders agrees to a week after she’s been forced to resign, with flashbacks taking audiences through her childhood in a sharecropping family, to her time heading the state’s health department under Gov. Clinton, and finally her whirlwind 15 months as Clinton’s Surgeon General. Her defenestration in 1994 came thanks to some controversial comments about masturbation (a speech she gave on sex education was widely misquoted to sound like she wanted kids to be taught how to pleasure themselves) as well as drug decriminalization.

Indeed, while her comments would seem tame today, there is no question that Dr. Elders, now 92 and planning to attend opening night, has always had a disarming, aphoristic frankness that’s a gift to a dramatist. The subtitle of his play, Broadnax noted, is Condom Queen, which comes directly from one of Dr. Elders’s more memorable statements. “If I could be the ‘condom queen’ and get every young person who engaged in sex to use a condom in the United States,” she once said, “I would wear a crown on my head with a condom on it!” Said Broadnax, in the understatement of the year, “She was very quotable.”