VALDOSTA — “Holler Me Home” is a play about clashing cultures, old vs. new, and seeking a balance between where you’re from and where you’re going.

It is also, as the title suggests, a story about home.

The play marks a homecoming for Debra Fordham, a Valdosta State graduate who wrote “Holler Me Home.” This week, Valdosta State University Theatre presents the world premiere of Fordham’s “Holler Me Home” in Sawyer Theatre.

“It is very gratifying to be a part of the first step in creating a new play,” says show director Dr. Randy Wheeler, “but like a child’s first step, it is often the most exciting.”

A long-time VSU Theatre professor, Wheeler came out of retirement to direct “Holler Me Home” at Fordham’s request.

Fordham is an Emmy-nominated writer on the NBC comedy “Scrubs,” where she has worked since the series’ inception several years ago. Her Emmy nominations came from songs in the show’s musical episode.

A 1991 Valdosta State graduate, she worked professionally in the Bert Reynolds Theatre in Jupiter, Fla., before moving to Los Angeles. In L.A., she discovered a world of job choices in the entertainment industry. She landed a job as a production assistant on the sitcom “Murphy Brown.” A show-business job, however, does not necessarily equal wealth. Fordham had a job with a popular sitcom, but she could not afford to return home to the Tallahassee, Fla.-area where her father worked as a prosecutor, or the more rural homes of her grandparents, aunts and uncles where her father was raised and she spent many a childhood day.

Writing and submitting spec scripts to producers, Fordham was hired onto the writing staff of “Scrubs.” With her new job and its pay, she could finally return home for a visit.

“I came home feeling like this big success,” Fordham says, “but, by the time I went back to L.A., I felt like a failure.”

Her family greeted her as the successful Hollywood writer but, in returning home, she didn’t feel like a success at all. In L.A., she had her writing career, shops, restaurants, money, entertainment, and friends. But she didn’t have the closeness of family, her rural roots, the hustle-and-bustle support of being surrounded by people who knew her and loved her.

In Los Angeles, she had her career but she also lived alone in an apartment. Yet, she couldn’t imagine giving up her career and returning home either.

She recalls that first return home from L.A. to find her aunt skinning a bear in a bathtub. She felt like she was from two different worlds but a member of neither.

This experience, this feeling, would form the basis of “Holler Me Home.” The play is set in the 1930s Okefenokee, before the federal government took control of the region and people, often called “swampers,” lived in the swamp. A Harvard-educated government worker arrives and meets a family of swampers. The play centers on this clash of cultures, swirling around the dueling natures of clinging to the past and progressing toward the future.

Writing the play has given Fordham a catharsis. It is about change, how lives and ways of life change.

“It’s like Dr. Wheeler said, change isn’t necessarily good or bad,” Fordham says, “it’s just inevitable.”