A founding staff member of the About Face Youth Theatre, Megan Carney co-created the company's first four acclaimed productions First Breath, Raising Voices, In Real Life and Inside Out, as well as the new production Up Until Now. A longtime and accomplished playwright and director, Megan's enthusiasm for the Youth Theater is in abundance. I spoke with her after attending a preview of Up Until Now.
Gregg Shapiro: How would you describe your role as the About Face Youth Theater Artistic Director?
Megan Carney: It's always evolving. The project is such a layered collaboration, with so many different people, that a lot of my job is maintaining that collaboration and ensuring that all of the different people who are involved in getting the play made stay in the process and that ideas get funneled through this entire lengthy process that we have of making the play. There's probably over a hundred people involved in making the show, between the youth in the workshops and artists that come in and do workshops, the artists who do master classes, the artistic professional staff, the youth who share stories during the outreach tour. There are a lot of different layers of participation. My job is both coming up with a vision of what the year might look like, what might be the most fun way to go about making a play that year, and then managing all those different participants.
GS: Was theater a creative outlet for you in your youth?
MC: Yes, absolutely. The high school that I went to didn't have a big theater program, but I did act with a community theater in the neighborhood I grew up in, and I studied theater in college. I did a program in between, through an organization, with a bunch of teens. I was 18 at the time and it was a bunch of teenagers from around the world. We got together and made up a show as part of this program. It wasn't until last year that I made the connection that I did something kind of similar to this when I was a teenager. The kind of theater that I got interested in, when I went to college, was always community based in some aspect, and I didn't really know what that meant at the time. It's been a slow discovery of how theater and community interact in a meaningful, interesting, artistic way.
GS: Has the formula for the About Face Youth Theater productions varied or stayed the same over the course of five shows?
MC: It's varied to a degree. I think that we've worked really hard to fine tune the model and continue to experiment with it. When we first started, I think it was more isolated in the workshop room. In the second year, we did a lot of interviewing around the community. The third year we used the Internet to collect more stories. Last year we focused on incorporating spoken word and music, pooling from Chicago's rich spoken word artistic community. This year was a culmination of a lot of those methods. We did some interviewing and we did some collection over the internet. Mostly experimenting with styles and methods of storytelling through this year. Every year we've flipped the angle of it a little bit, working within the same range of tools.
GS: Up Until Now makes reference to previous About Face Youth Theater productions. Why was it important to make those kinds of acknowledgements?
MC: We wanted to acknowledge this five-year anniversary, not only as significant for us in the program—it's kind of amazing for me to think that I've been doing this for five years—but also as we started to think about the passage of the past five years, it was really striking me what a difference those five years have made, specifically for LGBT youth. Chicago's a really different city for queer kids than it was five years ago. We started to think through what that meant and what the best way was to represent that in a show. We didn't want to do a 'best of' show—a look back at the five years. But then, one of our youth came forward with the story of having come to see all of the plays and the kind of impact that storytelling had on her life as a young person. That seemed like a great vehicle for meeting those goals.
GS: One of the things that is especially memorable about her story is how progressive her father was, and that he brought her to the shows. That in itself was mind-boggling.
MC: Isn't that amazing? When she told me the story I thought that was a way for us to tell all of these other stories. Also, you're right, how remarkable that is. That someone at age nine would have the self-awareness to say 'I like girls.' But then also, that we live in a time when a parent would say, 'OK, let me introduce you to some things that might help you understand that better.'
GS: One of the messages in Up Until Now is the impact that the Youth Theater productions have on young people—whether they see a production on-site or through the outreach program. What is it like for you to see that first-hand?
MC: It's really incredible for me to watch that. Something about the preview performance (July 31), having those alumni in the house, was really satisfying. To have them come back and say, 'It's so great to be here. I think about you guys all the time. Here's what I'm doing now in my life.' We don't pay them or ask them to say it out loud (laughs), but they really say, 'This really made a difference for me. You gave me a place to go when I didn't have a place.' ... The other part of it is that it's not just our program, but artistic expression, at any point in your life, but particularly when you are a young person and you are developing your identity, to develop the tools of communication and self-expression and discipline and body awareness is so productive and so useful in just living a happy life.
GS: How many of the alumni have gone on to pursue careers in theater?
MC: I don't have a clear tally of that. I know some of them have gone on to study theater in college. I get postcards saying, 'I'm doing a show somewhere around town.' Probably more of them go on to different types of careers. But I don't know what the ratio is. That should be in our next survey.
GS: How soon will you begin to formulate plans for the next AFYT production?
MC: It has already started. We have planned for an April (2004) opening of the next play. Some of the ideas we are working with is to get a team of teen interviewers and send them out in the community to do more intensive interviews with different age groups and different people. What I'm really interested in now is training youth in the methods of building the play. We made a lot of progress with that this year, where we had a series of master classes that youth could come to and participate in the actual scripting of the show, more so than before. I'd like to take that to the next level of teaching them more interview skills, adaptation skills and writing; just working on the craft of it.
