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The commitment and sincerity you see on the APTP stage reflects months of rehearsal, but represents only a fraction of how ensemble members invest their time while at APTP. By joining the APTP community, our young artists also dedicate themselves to discovering their own success through education. For most teens, the culmination of their APTP journey is our free college counseling program, through which more than 90% become the first in their families to go to college.
Marta Popadiak, APTP Class of 2003, has made a career out of the passion for social justice that she developed at APTP. We interviewed Marta about her blossoming career as an organizer around progressive political issues and candidates in Minnesota.
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.
God’s Work features a multiethnic cast that ranges in age from 14 to 18 and will surely be one of the most diverse ensembles on any Chicago stage this spring.
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.
You blink twice to make sure you’re not seeing things—the little toes and dimpled chin, youthful curiosity and playful humor. You begin to see how an object can be given life and personality. This isn’t an actor, but it is much more than a prop. In God’s Work, APTP is discovering the world of puppetry, and in the process, Baby Rachel—both the character and the puppet—has been born.
A man stands alone at the end of a long runway, unable to move. On the other side are his three children and, in the middle, perch two threatening immigration officers. Each kid primally clamors to reach their father, ducking under the arms of officials, attempting to psych them out with strategy and unabashed love and determination. In this optimistic short story, they succeed, and the final searing image is a parent and child’s tightly clasped hands.
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.