Mission

We don’t know all that theater is and we don’t know all that a theater can do.
We’re always trying to discover what more our theater can be and do.

mISSION

Theatre Y wants to participate in people’s lives in ways that matter, here and now.
Rather than telling stories about a community, we seek to participate in our community’s story. 
Theatre Y serves to manifest imagined realities, living global citizenship to better understand our shared humanity.

Who we are:

Theatre Y is a Chicago-based international incubator that creates connections between diverse artists seeking mutual growth through collaboration. Since 2006, Theatre Y has been a point of convergence for diverse activisms, and all of the uncomfortable conversations that happen as a result. Artistic director Melissa Lorraine and the Theatre Y ensemble are committed to continuously re-thinking the practice of theater as a tool of liberation and a revolutionary practice, bringing Theatre Y to venues ranging from LaMaMa’s historical theater to Illinois prisons. As an organization committed to prison abolition, Theatre Y is in partnership with men serving natural life sentences on arts campaigns towards reparative justice for the incarcerated and continues to innovate in the fight for social justice. Theatre Y, which is now in its 19th year of experimental productions, challenging international content, and a member-based FREE theater model, occupies a unique place in Chicago's theater community.

However, we have a long way to go in the fight towards geographically equitable allocation of the arts economy in Chicago.

vISION: Revitalization without Gentrification

In partnership with community leaders, designers, urban planners, city officials, and local artists, Theatre Y has launched a new campus in North Lawndale as part of a revitalization concept that centers cooperative artistic residencies. At the helm of Theatre Y’s reinvention is the multidisciplinary artist, musician, and educator Marvin Tate. Originally from North Lawndale, Marvin Tate has brought his unique, futuristic genius to the direction of Theatre Y’s project, taking the lead on everything from the building’s aesthetic to Theatre Y’s programming. 

With a $250,000 grant awarded in 2021 from the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund, Theatre Y’s plan for urban renewal will reimagine connectivity, integrating high-end architectural, landscape, and spatial design with the same thoughtfulness previously reserved for wealthier areas of Chicago. Worldview Solutions will document our ‘revitalization without gentrification’ initiatives.

Our Next Steps

This year, while continuing to produce world-class, global theater, Theatre Y will also host weekly salon-style events and roll out a Paid Youth Apprenticeship Program. This initiative will foster 1:1, 1:2, and 1:3 relationships between Theatre Y artists and young people in North Lawndale and encourage multidisciplinary, lateral thinking in North Lawndale’s future artists and community leaders. With Marvin Tate as the program’s coach and core visionary, we hope to teach the necessary hard and soft skills for successful careers in the arts or social justice fields, but more generally to occupy any career with fullness of self, confidence, and imagination.

The Firehouse Community Arts Center occupies a portion of the 3rd floor of our building and provide a lifeline between Theatre Y and North Lawndale’s young people. By 2024, Theatre Y also hopes to be home to Beelove Cafe’s third location, and North Lawndale Reads/Open Books’ Pay-What-You-Want Bookstore. As we imagine Theatre Y’s growth and future, we retain our commitment to creating strong bonds between ourselves and our environment. We invite North Lawndale to think of our building as another place for the community to gather, witness its own power, and rehearse its imagination of the future.

Theatre Y is partnering with Worldview Solutions to create and document a comprehensive vision, listening and responding to the desires from inside the community itself, making new solutions and new intersections with and for BIPOC communities, and under their leadership and instruction. We believe that this documentation of Theatre Y’s integration into the Lawndale community will spark questions about how to move an organization into a deliberately neglected neighborhood in a way that promotes revitalization without gentrification, and will provide a template of the successes and challenges of restorative justice through a global conservatory.

Dear Friends, 

We find ourselves at the limits of the sayable.  No statement is sufficient to name our disgust with the systems of oppression that target, marginalize, and brutalize black bodies and all persons of color.  No expression of solidarity, from us or any other theater company, is enough.  Language can be self-protectionist and hollow, a way to excuse ourselves from the difficulty of action, a way to signal theoretical values that never make their way to implementation.  We encourage all of our ensemble members, board members, and audience members to take direct action to address not just police brutality, but the whole web of injustice and discrimination that sustains a society whose original sin was the enslavement of our black brothers and sisters.  We have no justice until there is justice for all.  

We reject any form of capitalist society built on the inequities of slave labor, on the theft of land and freedom, that profits off of racialized imprisonment, that uses a militarized police force to uphold the privilege and accumulated wealth of whiteness while villainizing systemically impoverished communities of color.  Where there is fear for one, there is no freedom for all.   Political change is necessary—we must fight to overturn the insidious law of qualified immunity.  But this will never be enough.

Theatre Y believes in pursuing radical, self-effacing, sacrificial love.  We believe in staring down the ugliness of the truth and the ugliness in our own hearts.  Although our company is on the long road of fighting for equity, diversity, and inclusion within our own ranks, this is not enough.  Although we are in the midst of re-evaluating our own mission and values, this is not enough.  We will continue to embrace a free theater model to eliminate economic barriers to our community, but this is not enough.  We will continue providing movement therapy for trauma rehabilitation in Chicago’s prisons, but this is not enough.  This whole statement is not enough.  A statement is a declaration, not a dialogue, and no one needs more ineffectual declarations of good intentions.  We commit ourselves to the infinite conversation of justice.  We commit ourselves to holding ourselves accountable.  We invite all of you to hold our feet to the fire.  

 With love and solidarity, 

Theatre Y