Free Street finds a new home in Back of the Yards

Free Street Theater, the oldest continuously operating off-Loop company in the city, began life in the wake of the 1968 riots. Since then, their commitment to social justice and building community has remained unwavering. As they note on their website: “We were one of the first interracial theater companies in the city, and one of the first to commit to performing in public spaces across Chicago. For a long time, we were one of the only places a Black actor could earn an Equity card, and one of the first companies to start a youth ensemble.”

Long housed in Wicker Park’s Pulaski Park field house, Free Street also opened a small space called the Storyfront in 2017 in Back of the Yards, using a former refrigerator repair shop owned by the late Jose Guadalupe Ornelas Guerra, a Mexican immigrant who also lived in the building. That space provided a home for rehearsals, performances, community events, and more. Now they’re expanding into a larger home in the neighborhood and reopening an updated version of their touring show from last summer, There Is A Future/Tenemos un Futuro, next week. (The show will go back into touring rotation after this run.)

There Is A Future/Tenemos un Futuro
2/23-3/3: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Free Street Storyfront Back of the Yards, 4627 S. Ashland, thereisafuture.eventbrite.com, free or pay what you can ($5-$50 suggested)

Free Street’s producing artistic director Katrina Dion notes that the company in some ways outgrew the original Storyfront, which had also been used by Free Street as a food pantry for the community during the pandemic shutdown. The landlords, according to Dion, “were kind of ready to have a new chapter at the Storyfront for themselves.” They officially decided to part ways in 2022.

But the company (which still has its space in Wicker Park) was committed to maintaining a south-side presence. They partnered with Plant Chicago and Star Farm last year to present programs in an unused storefront. And now they’ve found a new place for the Storyfront to set down roots.

Free Street’s engagement manager Elizabeth Nungaray (who codirects There Is a Future with Free Street’s former artistic director and current strategic director Coya Paz) recalls how she and Paz found their new home. “We were walking down Ashland and we saw, across the street, a handwritten sign on a poster board saying in Spanish ‘to rent.’ And so we called, and that’s how we found the space. The landlords there are from the community. And they were excited to have a theater and art space there.”

Nungaray, who grew up in Brighton Park, feels particularly strongly about the need to create and foster community art and engagement spaces in those neighborhoods.

“Our plan for it is to also be, ‘If you need a space to have an X, Y, and Z thing, we wanna host it. For free. Just come and have a meeting.’ So within the first week that we moved into the space, we had a brainstorming meeting for the show and shared the space with community partners and environmental organizations. We’ve also had the #LetUsBreatheCollective in to do a cooking demonstration.”

There Is a Future focuses on environmental justice issues, which have been foregrounded in much of Free Street’s work in recent years, including WASTED and Parched (Stories About Water, Pollution & Theft). Dion says, “We’ve added environmental justice as a formal part of our mission as of last year. We’ve really been able to ask, ‘What does it really mean for a theater company to be doing this?’ And so in preparation for this new show, Coya and Elizabeth invited 15 to 20 different environmental justice organizers from a collection of different organizations to come together to talk about this new version of the show and sort of seeing how it can evolve, what else is urgent, is there anything the show could be addressing that it’s not?” (One of those organizations, notes Dion, is Neighbors for Environmental Justice.)

Nungaray notes that there is a direct connection for south-side residents between the stories Free Street puts onstage (and in the parks) and their lived experiences. She cites a story about a woman whose baby got lead poisoning from the soil in their backyard—a toxic legacy from the factories in the neighborhood.

“These are real-time side effects of what’s going on,” Nungaray says. But she adds, “So the beautiful thing that we just talk about in the story [in the show] and what she was sharing also was how we as people who are living in the community have to remediate our community. We also even have to remediate that soil with sunflowers. So that’s something that’s just really taking an intimate look at what does it mean to live in a quote, unquote ‘sacrifice zone.ʼ”

Of the new revised version of There Is A Future/Tenemos un Futuro, Paz notes in an email, “The summer run was really silly and energetic in ways that were designed to grab people’s attention and invite them to catch the show, even if it was mid-performance. One of the fun parts of doing a reboot indoors is that we can build in a different throughline for our characters.”

For Free Street, it’s also important just to be able to provide arts programming that’s geographically accessible to the neighborhood. Nungaray remembers, “Growing up around there, the concept of theater wasn’t there for me. I had to take two or three buses [to get to a show].”

For many of the people they’re reaching out to in the neighborhood, Nungaray says, “Theater is like ‘Oh, what is that? We kind of know what it is, but we know storytelling. We really want to reclaim our narrative of what does it really mean to live in Back of the Yards.’ And there’s so much beauty there and we just want a place to hold, cultivate, and create stories with community members.”

The Revival moves north

As Free Street opens their new space, the Revival moves from Hyde Park to the South Loop. The comedy company first opened in 2015 at the corner of 55th Street and University Avenue, deliberately choosing the location where the Compass Players (the precursor to Second City) made history by introducing improvisational theater to Chicago audiences in 1955.

Since then, the Revival has presented a revolving calendar of company-created shows and classes in a 150-seat cabaret theater. They also made their space available last year to Definition Theatre as the latter prepares to open a new permanent home in Woodlawn. Definition is still using the space temporarily and just opened Loy A. Webb’s Judy’s Life’s Work.

The Revival also made a point of publicly committing to diversity. As founder John Stoops told Reader contributor Wanjiku Kairu in 2021, “Racial matters have prompted our community to consider who attends and teaches the classes, performs and directs the shows, and staffs the theaters. . . . We are financially and geographically accessible to people.”

The Revival
906 S. Wabash, the-revival.com

The move to the South Loop, says Stoops, is also prompted by a desire for accessibility, as well as the logistics of running a comedy theater that, like most theaters of its kind, has to balance space for revenue-generating classes with performances.

Stoops notes, “As we grew and the programming increased, there were times when [we realized] trying to do two things concurrently is a real value, a real benefit. ‘Let’s have a rehearsal in this space and a class in that space. Let’s have a show here and a staff meeting there.’ And that was off the table in the original space. So there was a very real sort of physical need that we thought maybe we could better address.”

He adds, “Hyde Park is a wonderful community that we were part of from the beginning, but it is off the el line.” The South Loop location is more accessible by public transit, and for those in Hyde Park who got used to going to the Revival, Stoops points out, “We’re five minutes up the Drive.”

Like their original location, the new Revival space has some interesting connections to Chicago history. It was at one time the home for the Green Sheet, a horse-racing tip sheet. And Stoops notes that the 900 block of Wabash was also, in the early days of the film industry, a locus for production and distribution known as Film Row. Their new home at 906 S. Wabash was part of that as well.

But the building had been empty for decades before the Revival team rented it. “This was not an overnight effort,” says Stoops. “When we arrived, it was a long disused printing facility with offices at the front straight out of a Hill Street Blues set piece. Linoleum tile floors, corded phones, metal desks, and office chairs. And most of the mechanicals had seen better days. So we took this down to the studs.”

The company (which Stoops notes involves around ten to 20 regular ensemble members or associate artists) begins classes in the new facility in early April, with a schedule of shows to come soon. Stoops notes that the Revival is actually two entities in one.

“The Revival is a traditional LLC. But we also maintain a 501(c)(3) called the Due South Foundation, which we use for scholarships to our classes and summer camps. And we’ve used that vehicle to help bridge the gap into schools. We’ve worked with refugee communities and underserved populations, at-risk teens.”

And even though the company has moved north, Stoops says, “We’re a proudly south-side organization from day one and continue to be. Our audiences and folks onstage were absolutely pulled, by and large, from the south side. I think our new location is a heck of a lot more accessible to a wider breadth of folks.”