The author of this document spent time as the Associate Artistic Director of The 52nd Street Project, a not-for-profit theater company dedicated to the creation and production of new plays for, and often by, kids between the ages of nine and eighteen that reside in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. Through a series of unique mentoring programs that match kids with professional theater artists, "The Project" creates over eighty new plays and serves over 125 children every year and is a well-known and well-loved institution among theater folks and the Hell's Kitchen community alike. This article discusses how the life of teenage Carmen was changed through The Project's teen Shakespeare play. The Project staff considered Carmen their big success story for 2010. Not because she accumulated enough credits to move on to her junior year of high school, or because she showed up at school more regularly, or because she stopped smoking pot, or because she stopped engaging in risky sexual behavior. It was because she was successful at the limited but challenging task they had set out for her--learning the role of Miranda in "The Tempest." At the time when we are most in search of our own identities, a great gift of The Project's teen program is the space, the time, and the language to keep asking ourselves life's big questions.