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We bid a bittersweet farewell this fall to APTP’s Class of 2013 as they embarked on their college careers: Jancillin Chacko to Coe College, Randy Dang to Northeastern Illinois University, Lilia Escobar to St. Olaf College, JP Marquez to Beloit College, Nichole Martinez to Wittenberg University, Stephany Perez to Kalamazoo College, and Raul Rico to Middlebury College. Most were APTP ensemble members for five years, since 8th grade.
Albany Park Theater Project visited The College of Wooster in Ohio as artists in residence for a long weekend in Fall 2013. As part of the College’s fall forum, “Facing Race,” APTP youth ensemble members performed select works from APTP’s repertoire for an audience of 300 students and faculty.
Paloma Morales joined APTP when she was thirteen years old, four years and three plays ago. Audiences will remember her as the young Ahlam selling her treasured dolls to audience members in Home/Land, and as the young heroine who loses her childhood home in I Will Kiss These Walls. Paloma took a break from rehearsals to reflect on APTP’s new play, God’s Work, and her four years with the company.
I was 14 when I joined Albany Park Theater Project in the spring of 2000. That same year I started at a high school notorious for after-school shootings and a high dropout rate. My own family fell victim to schools with similar statistics; not one person had graduated from high school. I remember my grandmother having tears roll down her face because my uncles had all failed out of the system, and there was a continuing sense that there’s violence in this neighborhood, and we’re being swallowed up by it.
When APTP decided to start college counseling, we committed to building a program as holistic, rigorous, and successful as any in the country – and as loving as everything we do at APTP.
The struggles of undocumented immigrants take center stage in a revival of a play based in Chicago’s Northwest Side. The Albany Park Theater Project tells the story of day laborers, and a teen struggling without a Social Security number. Chicago Public Radio’s Lynette Kalsnes has this report.
ArtBeat Chicago on WTTW-Channel 11 produced this feature on APTP’s first production of God’s Work in 2006.