By Colin Schoenberger
For the past eight years, Megan Carney and other members of the About Face Youth Theatre group have been asking gay teens to tell them what their lives have been like when being on the streets was better than the harassment at church shelters or when their parents kicked them out of their homes at Christmas for coming out. Carney, the founding director of About Face Youth Theatre, hopes that her and her colleagues' years of asking questions can not only entertain, but put a face on the youth homelessness crisis in LGBT community of Chicago. Along with the youth community in Chicago, they have produced The Home Project, the play based entirely on actual stories from gay teens in Chicago, which will be opening July 6, running until July 30, 2006 at Victory Garden Theatre.
'I really loved one story in the play called The Traveler,' Carney said. 'It's about this one person who just can't settle down. He was kicked out of his home by his parents, and this teen has been moving around the city. He's still searching, and it raised a lot of questions for me. I really want to find a solution for this.'
The Traveler is just one of many stories in The Home Project based on more than hundreds of interviews conducted by Carney and About Face Youth Theatre members, and then adapted for the stage. The resonance these stories have for members of the LGBT youth community is undeniable, as gay teens are not only performing these stories, the stories themselves come from their own lives. Different interviews may be combined into one character and some details altered, but all the stories in the production are completely true to life, revealing a kind of life many people never knew existed.
'I think youth homelessness is really a crisis in our city, and everywhere,' Carney said. 'I think we just have a really active LGBT community here so we're able to see it. And everyone at About Face Theatre got on board right away with the idea and we've really been focusing on it.'
When Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998, the About Face Theatre was still just getting started, and it was then that Carney began acting on her desire to create not just a youth theater program that taught teens how to act, but one that really interacted with them, created a community for them and allowed them to act out material from their own experiences.
'Around then, the queer youth community was really banding together,' she said. 'And I think the understanding of homophobia and violence was really changing in our country. In Chicago, the LGBT youth community was developing this network, and it's really expanded.'
Along with bringing members of the LGBT Chicago community together, members of About Face Youth Theatre hope that the progressive message The Home Project provides will speak to the straight communities as well, drawing attention to what they often ignore.
'To me it's clear that society's ignorance around this issue is so pervasive that this project could actually shift the cultural debate,' said Sharon Greene, the Teaching Artist for About Face Youth Theatre. 'People might actually stop seeing homophobia as a harmless personal choice and start seeing it as the seed of a national crime against young people.'
About Face Youth Theatre definitely had an audience once it got going. Carney and her team received a huge response from the community when they began their youth theater program. They put out a call for anyone, gay or straight, ages 14 to 20, to come, and more than 50 kids showed up immediately to work on the program.
'We started talking and sharing stories,' she said. 'And we really treated it like an oral history project.'
About Face Youth Theatre also conducted a lot of work at Broadway Youth Center, a drop in center for transgender youths, listening to countless teens' stories. Greene led two months of workshops at the center, where she and others acted as counselors, mediators and mentors for the teens, as well as writing coaches and interviewers.
'The goal was to give young people a chance to visit The Home Project,' Greene said. 'To see what we were about and decide if they wanted to be more involved. We did workshops in writing, staging and performing, learned about youth homelessness and wrote about gender identity, sexuality in a way that maybe they couldn't at other places where they could learn to write.'
'One girl at Broadway Youth wrote about her grandmother's tree in her back yard,' Carney said. 'She would run to that tree to get away from her family, to escape. And I really loved that story because it had a fairy tale quality, but at the same time, everyone could relate to it.'
Despite its often heavy themes and tragic stories, The Home Project's ensemble engages in many lively dance and musical numbers which, the About Face Theatre hopes, will convey that through this hardships and abandonment, these people have found each other and have formed their own family, that truly meaningful happiness can come from any kind of community, and can come out of even the worst times in someone's life.
'There's lots of dancing and music,' Carney said. 'Which I think would be surprising to anyone who's coming to see the show.'
Paula Gilovich, the Education Programs Director of About Face and the teaching artist for The Home Project, conducted some of the interviews for the script, and assisted Megan in her direction. 'The youth dictate to us what subjects we will be tackling, and they will always go where adults are afraid to tread,' she said. 'They have been willing to look at gender in a way that only now our community is starting to see. And here, with our subject being homelessness, why young people are forced to live on the streets, they are willing to cross the class divide and face one of the most difficult set of barriers we have in our culture.'
Gilovich believes that the power of the production lies in its truth: 'What is so powerful about this play is in hearing these true stories about what it is like to sleep outside, what it is like to be disowned by your family, we see into a world we never hear about. I don't believe we know enough about why the young are on the streets. We need to teach ourselves. And our teachers right now are the participants in this play.'
With so much of LGBT culture and history going undocumented, organizations such as About Face Youth Theatre are able to help see where the LGBT community in Chicago has come from, and hopefully, help steer where it is going. Such programs undoubtedly help those who may have felt alone feel like part of a greater community as well. For the youth group, oral history and one-on-one interviews, as simple as they may seem, have helped create the most accurate and vivid understanding of LGBT culture in Chicago. And at the same time, they help create a culture itself, as the efforts involved in The Home Project encourage the most diverse groups of people to meet, talk and, eventually, rely on each other.
'I've been doing oral-based work for a while' Carney said. 'And I think all of us are really hungry to tell our stories, and it's also such a gift to sit and listen to someone and hear their stories, especially from people who are often forgotten. You build a really deep community when you do that. You realize you have more in common than you thought.'
The Home Project will be performed at the Victory Garden Upstairs Mainstage at 2257 N. Lincoln. Performance times are Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets range from $25 to $40 ( $10 for youth 21 and younger ) . Call 773-871-3000 to pre-order or online at the Web site www.aboutfacetheatre.com .
