Chef Rick Bayless: “Feast Is Remarkably Delicious”
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If you’re going to produce a theatrical production based on interviews with Chicagoans talking about food, Albany Park is as good a place to start as any. Not only is it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city—and in the country—it’s also home to the Albany Park Theater Project, an ensemble of teenagers that has a history of producing shows that are honest, funny, and inspirational in the best possible way: after you see them, you want to do something.
WBEZ’s Morning Shift interviews APTP resident director, Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, and ensemble member, Ely Espino, about “Feast.” Listen here.
The cast of this summer’s Feast includes 5-year APTP veterans giving their final performances before they go off to college and brand-new graduates of our middle-school program making their APTP debut. Meet the 25 youth artists who will inspire you this summer in Feast.
It’s a tough job, but some theater company’s got to do it. To gather inspiration and stories for this summer’s new production of Feast, APTP company members cooked and samples cuisines from around the globe. To whet your appetite for Feast, here’s a gallery of images from some of our culinary adventures.
APTP Artistic Director David Feiner speaks with Goodman Theatre’s OnStage Editor Michael Mellini about revisiting Feast, exploring Chicago’s thriving food scene, and the fifth collaboration between APTP and the Goodman.
Albany Park Theater Project is honored to be the recipient of this year’s $100,000 Impact Grant from Impact 100 Chicago‘s suburban chapter. Impact 100 Chicago is a women-only organization with members from all parts of the Chicagoland area. The 180 members of the suburban chapter voted to award this year’s Impact Grant to APTP to support the full-scale, world-premiere production in 2016 of Learning Curve, an innovative performance about public education that will actually place audiences within the walls of a Chicago public school and in the shoes of its students. APTP is collaborating on this groundbreaking production with Third Rail Projects, the New York-based, experimental dance-theater ensemble considered one of the foremost creators of immersive and site-specific performance.
Impact 100 members cast their votes after hearing live project presentations from 5 finalist organizations. APTP is proud to be the first-ever cultural organization to receive this chapter’s Impact Grant. All of us at APTP extend our deepest gratitude to the members of Impact 100 Chicago, especially the Culture Committee who selected us as their finalist and advocated for us. We promise that your investment in Albany Park Theater Project will truly make a difference in the world…and we can’t wait to share Learning Curve with you in 2016.
APTP’s Impact 100 presentation was made by Lilia Escobar, an alum from our Class of 2013, and David Feiner, Producing Artistic Director.
Albany Park Theater Project (APTP) has now produced over eighteen years of poetic, daring, justice-seeking work that has generated nineteen plays seen by 50,000 audience members, a yearly production slot at the Goodman Theatre, and an unrivaled reputation for the youth ensemble. APTP remains a theatre committed to authenticity, where the work is created from stories told by fellow community members—but they are always ahead of the curve. Before APTP, ensemble members Gustavo Duran, Kito Espino, Maria Velazquez, Chelsee Nava, and Kiara Lyn Manriquez thought theatre was “Shakespeare,” that it was “boring,” and that it wasn’t “for them.” But what they experienced at APTP was, as Manriquez described, “like nothing they had seen before.”
I met David Feiner, artistic director of Albany Park Theater Project, in the fall of 2013 after he wrote to Third Rail Projects about his experience at our show Then She Fell and inquired about meeting to chat about sharing this format with the APTP youth ensemble. Working with teenagers is not exactly in my comfort zone, but faced with David’s enthusiasm and excitement, I found myself just saying “Well, how about we just come out to Chicago and teach a workshop with your company?”
Two years ago we brought you I Will Kiss These Walls, a play based on the real-life stories of Chicagoans swept into the foreclosure crisis. This Friday February 20, join APTP as we perform scenes from “Walls” in the liberated home of Maria and Jorge, whose lives we depicted in “Walls” (7 PM at 7245 N. Ridge, Chicago).