AFT’s Season 28 soared with an array of new LGBTQ+ stories
When you’ve put together a good look, we will always encourage you to flaunt it and own it. And that’s exactly the mood we’re in right now.
As Pride Month draws to a close, we’re feeling ourselves and so we’re going to take a look over our shoulder to appreciate the wonderfulness of this past season at About Face Theatre. We’ve just closed out our 28th season, which featured a diverse collection of queer stories and LGBTQ+ artists. Over this past year, we doubled down on our commitment to nurturing new LGBTQ+ talent by presenting a rich mix of brand-new, world-premiere stories as well as some plays that are still coming together. This season also showed us that y’all are eager to come together around stories and events that celebrate the unique voices in our queer community. And we’re here for that.
Cast your mind back to the hot, hot days at the end of the summer of 2022. Were you there with us for our second year in a row presented at the Chicago Live festival at Navy Pier? We kicked off season 28 in style with “Clearing Space,” a brand new musical and spoken word tribute to Black lesbians by Shanta Nurullah, Zahra Baker (ShaZah), and Vic Wynter. Flash forward and we closed out the year with Omer Abbas Salem’s Mosque4Mosque, a new play about a queer Muslim man and his complicated relationship with his immigrant mother. This hilarious and heart-rending play had gotten its start at Jackalope Theatre and Steppenwolf Theatre, and our world premiere of Mosque4Mosque attracted an amazing cross-cultural crowd and was the most well-attended AFT production since the pandemic!
Did we rest there? No. C’mon now. About Face broke into 2023 with Re/Generation Studio, a six-week new play workshop series fostering the future of LGBTQ+ theatre, headed by Artistic Producer AJ Schwartz and Stage Manager Rebecca Walker along with some of Chicago’s most daring playwrights and directors. Week after week, an engaged community of attendees gathered to hear readings from recently premiered or in-development plays and engage with the actors and each other to explore these stories in detail. These workshops energized us as we moved into the springtime when we presented the world premiere of Gender Play, or what you Will, an exploration of gender, trans, and queer identities through the life and works of William Shakespeare. Our workshop performance of Gender Play in November 2021 heralded our return to live performance post-pandemic, and we were positively radiant to be able to continue its development and bring it to full production. Finally, we closed out the season during Pride Month (because every party should end with another party), when we presented a concert reading of the new, in-development musical Leather Daddies, the true story of the 1950s gay leather scene in Chicago. This vital new work from AFT Artistic Associate Scott Bradley, musician Mercy Bell, and producer Jonny Stax spotlights a lesser-known time in LGBTQ+ history.
Oh, and speaking of parties, this season we also brought back AFT’s Leppen Leadership Awards! In May, we honored eight amazing activists in the Chicago LGBTQ+ community at an event that brought together some of the most inspirational people we know—Art Johnston and Pepe Peña of Sidetrack, Renauda Riddle and Angela Barnes of Nobody’s Darling, Victor Salvo of The Legacy Project receiving an award from publisher Tracy Baim, Willa J. Taylor receiving an award from E. Patrick Johnson, and the uplifting words of activist Don Bell honoring the late Gloria Allen.
Wow! What a season! None of this would have been possible without the enthusiastic support of you, our patrons. Audience attendance in our 2022-2023 season increased by 11% over the previous season. Nobody can say we don’t show up for each other! And we’re not done yet. We’ll be announcing plans for our next season very (very) soon. In the meantime, while you’re still feeling this amazing glow from what we’ve accomplished together over this past year, we’re going to direct you right over here where you can donate to our $25,000 summer fundraising campaign to help us continue this mood into next season.