Theatre Y is inspired by András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy
which frames the ritual of theater as one in which
we willfully incarcerate ourselves with a group of strangers around a problem,
and no one is allowed to leave until we arrive at a new place together.


Theatre Y is a community that is
continuously re-thinking the ritual of theater as a revolutionary practice, employing radical hospitality, vulnerability, and confrontation
as tools of liberation.

Theater as Friendship: We create award winning FREE theater with an ensemble of all ages and backgrounds with the purpose of transcending the fears that have kept us apart. Every performance is followed by a conversation led by the audience. Art is the fire, the ritual, around which we gather to have long, difficult and transformative communion with each other.

Sanctuary Against the Prison Industrial Complex: Our newly purchased 30,000 square foot warehouse will operate with the intention of providing sanctuary against the Prison Industrial Complex. We have Youth programs to keep our local children out of the school to prison pipeline. We have programs inside prisons, our Inside Ensemble for example, and activisms to return our community members back to their families. Illinois has not had a parole system for 45 years; this has created more than 5600 people serving life or de-facto life sentences, and we want to end that practice. We also hire as many returning citizens as possible (up to the board level). We are renovating our 3rd floor so it can be rented to a cohort of mission aligned non-profits run by formerly incarcerated citizens.

Revitalization without Gentrification: We understand that theaters have been historically wielded against underserved communities as the front line of gentrification. We are here to serve this community, a community that is 95% a community of color. How to revitalize? One idea we have proposed is a geo-thermal heating and cooling pilot site to the Citizens Utility board of Chicago - and they are interested. What this means is we would provide geo-thermal heating and cooling to an eight block radius surrounding our building, thus reducing their utility costs by approximately $1000 per year per household, and providing money toward any increase in property value or rent that our presence might precipitate.

MANIFESTO

We’re continually grappling with and adding to these defining beliefs, in the order we learned them in:

1. Good theater is soul food. 
2. Our theater lives in the tension between flesh (physical) and poetry (dreams). 

3. Humans have the memory of goldfish. The ritual of theater helps us re-remember again and again. 
4. We facilitate cultural exchange toward global citizenship because

5. What matters to me and what matters to you is likely less important than what matters to us both.
6. We maintain a beginner’s mindset to protect endless discovery, rigorous growth and improvement.

7. We are inspired by the synergy of an intimate theater and promise never to take for granted the live audience in the room. We see you and address you - you are not anonymous.
8. We pledge to be continually responsive, as creators, neighbors, citizens...

9. We embrace and protect the freedom to risk. 
10. Self-abnegation: We welcome discomfort in pursuit of insight, justice and pleasure.

11. Love is a verb embodied through community, from our ensemble of actors to our therapy in prisons.
12. We affirm the right to assemble - the theater as a ritual and catalyst of public dialogue - and offer our community free of charge - accessible to all.

13. Bioluminescence: When we gather together, somehow, we are more than the sum of our parts. 
14. It matters where the art appears, who is present in the audience and onstage.

15. We will build a diverse community - calling ourselves and others in.
16. We pledge ourselves to healing action. “To know, and not to do, is not to know.”

17. We seek justice, freedom and reparations through urban renewal.
18. Intentional integration without gentrification: We understand the role that theaters have played in gentrifying under-resourced communities and accept responsibility for proactive innovation and sustainable new solutions to resist profit-above-all.

19. We seek to carry our creative labors to their greatest positive social impact.
20. We understand that we are participating in intergenerational labor and that this work is never-ending.


ACTIVISM

…until we arrive at a new place together

Theatre Y is actively committed to prison abolition and partners with men serving natural life sentences in Illinois. An element of this partnership is facilitating arts campaigns toward restorative justice for the incarcerated. We have been present in Illinois prisons since 2018, working to introduce the world to the people on Life Row and to reinstate parole in Illinois.

Theatre Y is a point of convergence for global artists and diverse activism. Co-Founding Artistic Director Melissa Lorraine was compelled to start this company when she encountered the work of Romanian playwright Andras Visky. Under communism, he was sentenced to prison with his family at the age of one and a half, an experience which forged in him and his work a thirst for freedom. Theatre Y is a community that is continuously re-thinking the ritual of theater as a revolutionary practice, employing radical hospitality, vulnerability, and confrontation as tools of liberation.

Part of our revolutionary practice is found in our work in the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) and our Inside Ensemble, a group of 25 men sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. We work to amplify their incarcerated voices through original films, and to mobilize ourselves for legislative change and the renewal of parole in Illinois.