“Beautiful & Honest” Feast Is One of the Summer’s Most Celebrated Shows

CHRIS JONES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE: “At one point in Feast, the moving and provocative show by the Albany Park Theater Project, a young performer asks the audience a direct question: How many have been to the public aid office?…At first no hands went up. The performer stood there, staring. Slowly, a cluster of arms were raised in the air. Heads turned. Complex thoughts swirled around the theater. And then attention snapped back to the kid asking the question, a teenager who was not moving on without a full and fair accounting. That little social experiment was an example of the guts of the Albany Park Theater Project.” On CBS News, Jones also called Feast “beautiful and honest” and proclaimed APTP “a world-class theater company.” Read the Tribune review.

HEDY WEISS, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: “In a Chicago summer marked by an unusual number of outstanding shows, the most remarkable one of all is Feast. A unique celebration of the role food plays in the lives of this city’s immigrant families, this altogether astonishing work has been devised by Albany Park Theater Project, a creative universe that simply has no equal. And it is being performed by the 25 members of that youth ensemble, who easily can compete with any Equity cast, and…display a virtuosity, ease, charm, polish, humor, political bite and, above all, an emotional depth and cohesive spirit that, ideally, should be experienced rather than described….A rare experience on every level.” Read the Sun-Times review.

JOHN CARRUTHERS, NEW CITY: “The themes at play—satisfaction, ritual, heartbreak and catharsis—are universal and resonant. That a troupe of teenaged actors can capture them so effectively is a tremendous achievement….Feast offers flavors both sweet (a really adorable series of interstitials with Carlos Desantiago and Kiara Lyn Manriquez as two children who bond over sweets) and bitter (a bracingly feminist and surprisingly scathing indictment of food as a method of control over women, delivered by a handful of actresses dressed as traditional dolls of varied ethnicity). But the real achievement is in the sense of balance….The choices of storytelling vehicles—song, monologue, dance and a tremendous remix of all three with two paleta carts, food-sign scaffolding and full-on foley work—keeps the show varied and propulsive. Like the best food experiences in Chicago, Feast is recommended without reservations.” Read the New City review.

BECKY SARWATE, EDGE CHICAGO: “The quality of the performances in Feast are simply overwhelming….A prime example occurs in the LINK Card vignette. Featuring three young ladies with diametric views of the digital food stamps, the script is brave enough to consider Link as an application process fraught with bilingual tension, a source of well-fed joy, however brief, and a bottomless source of social shame. There are no wrong interpretations and no judgment. But there are amazing acrobatic feats, a child’s soliloquy and an angry, defiant determination to break the cycle of poverty….There are beautiful but haunting voices, dancers, drummers, gymnasts, physical comedians and touching dramatists. The tapestry of an imperfect reality held up for our collective examination…in a deliberately hungry celebration.” Read the EDGE review.