THEATRE Y celebrates 20 years!

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,
claiming global citizenship to better understand our shared humanity.

Chicago Premiere Running NOW

Translated by May-Brit Akerholt

Directed by Evan Hill

Starring Melissa Lorraine
& Hank Hilbert

September 24 - November 1, 2026
Thu-Sat @ 7pm, Sun @ 5pm

FREE and open to the public.  PLEASE RSVP
Location: Theatre Y - 3611 W Cermak Rd, Chicago, IL 60623

TICKETS

"I urge and implore you to experience this piece. It is a rare and eloquent rumination on living and dying, and an exquisite statement on existence. I can explain it all day long but it is nothing compared to physically being in this profound moment in person." - Chicago Stage and Screen, by Angela Allynn (Full Review)

“I Am the Wind” Illuminates the Foggy Unknown. This delicate play at Theatre Y stages the precipice—the line between life and death—and what it means when someone chooses to cross it.” - Robert Eric Shoemaker, NewCity Stage (Full Review)


"...Riveting...thrilling to watch...I Am The Wind is raw, confrontational, and a brilliant mix of naturalism, existentialism, and the surreal."- Third Coast Review, Kathy D. Hey (Full Review)

”If you tune into its wavelength, it’s a theatrical experience that will shake you to your core. This production is clearly a labor of love. Director Hill is also responsible for the sound design, along with Sutton, and the set design, along with Lorraine. The actors are exquisite, and that’s without taking into account the physical difficulty of their performances. They spend the entire seventy minutes suspended five feet above the ground—with no safety nets, real or metaphorical—balanced on two gently moving planks, which look to be only about a foot deep. Lorraine and Hilbert are perfectly matched; his physical stolidity provides a valuable counterpoint to her tremulous body language. But that same stolidity makes his emotional fragility especially moving.”

“For a show that begins with what appears to be an attempted suicide and ends with a death, I Am the Wind is striking in that it is not depressing. Some of that has to do with the otherworldly look and sound of the production, which creates a distance between the performers and the audience. Some of it has to do with the rhythm and quality of the dialogue. But what it mostly comes down to is the extraordinary connection between Lorraine and Hilbert as The Other and The One.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever viewed a play where I wished there were no one else in the audience but me. This is a powerful, evocative piece of theatre that has much to say about the human condition…”
- CJ Fernandez, Stage and Screen (Full Review)

"Those who don’t mind a foray into the great nothing will have more than enough to keep themselves occupied." - Highly Recommended by The Chicago Reader, Dmitry Samarov, Read Full Review

"In a world that often moves too quickly to allow us to truly feel, I Am the Wind reminds us of the importance of connection, friendship, and simply being present with one another. With its poetic writing, compelling performances, and thoughtful production design, Theatre Y’s I Am the Wind is a moving theatrical experience that stays with you even after leaving the theatre." - Emily Werner, Werner’s Theatre Review (Full Review)

“Even torrential downpours couldn’t keep us from Theatre Y’s moving masterpiece production of I Am The Wind last night. This one’s a meditative, slow build that will leave you with deep thoughts and feeling all the feels. There’s something powerful about sitting in community while exploring a piece on isolation and disconnection. Poetic visual metaphor here, by a Nobel winning playwright. Stay for the talk back!  - Bonnie Kenaz-Mara(ChilL Live Shows)

"Everything is - yes imagined, yes somehow created, somehow made up,
yes - yes, even if it actually happens."

Two lifelong friends sail into open water: one edging closer to the pull of oblivion, the other with a question neither can escape. Nobel laureate Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind is a poetic, aching meditation on companionship, loss, and the fragility of life. Staged with physical risk - actors suspended on narrow swinging planks with nothing to catch them - the delicate reality of the body hangs in the balance.

Our Latest Production:

CHARGES (The Supplicants) by Elfriede Jelinek (February 26-April 12, 2026)

”I implore your attendance to one of the most moving theatrical performances I have ever seen to one of the only free theaters in the world…Melissa Lorraine and Héctor Álvarez have struck something better than gold…Left everyone in the room feeling present, revolutionary, and riotous…Your discomfort is political…Steven Stoll’s Masterful set is the star of this production, revealing layers of our onion brains as audience members more than we could have ever expected. You will not see a more important play this season. Required reading.”
- Ella Boyd Wong, Freelance Critic

READER RECOMMENDED - “This panoptical spin on theater in the round speaks to the precision that Lorraine and Álvarez bring to the piece, which thankfully never feels self-serious or grave. Rather, the production anarchically wrestles with the delicacy needed to make theater about refugees and the global north’s refusal to help them…should serve as a stark reminder of what we lose when we reject our inherent empathy.”
- Rob Silverman Ascher, Full review Chicago Reader

“This play is brilliantly directed, staged, and acted. I highly recommend that you see it and tell people about it. This is an important play done by a theater with an important mission. One of the quotes used by Theatre Y is from Friedrich Nietzsche: "One should open one's eyes and take a new look at cruelty." That distills the purpose and meaning of Charges (The Supplicants).”
- Kathy D. Hey, Third Coast Review

Private Screenings by Request

For five years, The Incarcerated Mass was a sanctuary for men serving de-facto life sentences in Illinois—
Theatre Y’s ‘Inside Ensemble’ with collective dreams of liberation. In July 2018 they staged their first and only performance, amplifying calls to restore parole in Illinois and across other states without pathways home.
This performance was called
NOT TO BE.

THEATRE Y's film NOT TO BE was an *official selection*
of two prestigious Film Festivals in 2026!

This April, Theatre Y launched a television series on CAN TV
to educate the public on the absence of PAROLE in Illinois.

Americans are watching masked agents vanish their neighbors off the streets and calling it new. It isn't.

Illinois abolished parole in 1978. Since then, thousands of men have been buried alive. Not killed, just disappeared. Erased from public life, from their families, from the future. Stateville Correctional Facility held some of the most hard-won wisdom, scholarship, and moral depth you will never encounter --  because we have made certain of it.

Kill Them Already goes inside. It asks what we lose when we permanently remove human beings from society, not just what they lose. These men have earned degrees, built philosophies, and cultivated an empathy that shames the world that locked them away. But without parole, none of it reaches us. Their healing cannot reach ours.

We are in a cycle of endless violence, and we engineered it ourselves.

The disappearance machine is not new. Learn from those living inside it now, before we forget how to recognize it on our own streets.

Reinstate parole in Illinois.

If you are not yet a member, you can become one today and support free, public theater in our community (the average membership is $20/mo, but as little as $5/month guarantees you a seat to each Theatre Y performance and opens our doors to those who can’t afford a ticket)!  

Reach out to info@theatre-y.com to learn about our

Theatre Y Youth Apprenticeships

Theatre Y is a community of humans fully committed to reimagining the ritual of theater as a tool of liberation, a revolutionary practice, and a path to understanding our shared humanity. To that end, since 2018, Theatre Y Co-Founding Artistic Director Melissa Lorraine – together with a team of filmmakers, actors, activists from DePaul and PNAP, and 25 men sentenced to die in prison –– have been engaged in movement therapy for trauma rehabilitation while co-creating original works of art.

Hear Melissa share more about her “Y”:

We would love for you to meet the 25 amazing human beings who have become our beloved brothers, but these men are currently serving life sentences without any possibility of parole. (Learn more about parole in Illinois.) Perhaps you’ve seen their pictures on the Inside Ensemble wall at the theater or read about the Incarcerated Mass on our website. Tragically, when Stateville was closed by court order this September, our friends were scattered and sent to prisons all over Illinois, shattering our community. Please contact info@theatre-y.com to host a screening!

Past Events

Theatre Y’s Program Inside of Stateville Correctional Facility