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Albany Park Theater Project is one of this city’s great treasures — a company of teenage actors that creates highly imaginative original productions produced on both its home stage in an Albany Park area field house, as well as on the stage of the Goodman Theatre, where its audience has expanded greatly in recent years.
Clad in orange jumpsuits, a group of high school students carrying large suitcases trudged onto the center stage. Heads down with hands, feet and waists shackled, they took a seat on their suitcases while two girls dressed as nuns slithered through the “criminals” and settled in front of them.
“Watch this space for a big announcement” — that’s the message David Feiner, co-founder of the Albany Park Theater Project, posted Wednesday night to a Facebook group of current and alumni members of the theater’s youth ensemble.
This morning, Albany Park Theater Project was named a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. All of us at APTP – the youth ensemble, alumni, staff, and board of directors – are honored and overjoyed to celebrate this monumental news with the friends, audience members, donors, and partners who have nurtured our creative community over the past 19 years.
Critics and audiences have made Feast one of the most celebrated shows of Summer 2015. “Beautiful, honest, magical, thrilling, acrobatic, moving, spiced, wondrous, subversive, brave, visceral, provocative, joyful, propulsive, universal, delicious”…are some of the superlatives critics have lavished up Feast.
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.
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.”