In a Northwest Side warehouse, you can visit the apartment of a Mexican family, anxious because the father has been deported. Or a multi-generation Filipino family, about to cook supper. Or immigrants from Poland or Cambodia, facing the challenges of the new world as well as tough memories from the old one.
The ninety-four-year-old warehouse at 3547 West Montrose is the site of an Albany Park Theater Project show, “Port of Entry,” that tells immigrant stories across one-hundred years. Opening July 26, APTP offers a three-story immersive performance created in collaboration with New York-based Third Rail Projects, which specializes in immersive shows.
Albany Park has done shows with Third Rail before—notably the highly acclaimed “Learning Curve,” in 2016, with the former St. Hyacinth Catholic grade school playing the role of a fictional high school. But the open-run “Port of Entry” is the most ambitious show APTP has undertaken in its twenty-six-year-history, says David Feiner, the project’s co-executive director.
David Feiner in 2017/ Photo: Joe Mazza/Brave Lux
“Over the past five years, more than 150 artists, storytellers and craftspeople have invested their creativity and spirit into bringing ‘Port of Entry’ to life,” Feiner says.
In immigrant neighborhoods around Chicago, people from all different parts of the world create “ecosystems together, across the hall from one another, next door to one another, people who, if not for globalization and global conflicts, would never have crossed paths, and now they’re neighbors.
“So the idea of ‘Port of Entry’ was to recreate one of those buildings,” Feiner says. “We wanted to create for the audience the experience of those different families living in proximity to one another and interacting with one another.”
To come up with the stories for the show, Albany Park Theater Project ensemble members, made up of local high-school and middle-school students, interviewed neighborhood residents and drew from their own family experiences. The Reva and David Logan Foundation provided a grant to buy the warehouse and help pay for its interior transformation into a Chicago courtyard apartment building—the kind that’s common in Albany Park and is often a first home for immigrants.
“Port of Entry” set under construction
The result is astonishing. The apartments have the same moldings, windows, tiny bedrooms and non-working, white-painted fireplaces of a typical courtyard building—plus that faded, homely wallpaper always found in the outer hallways. There’s even a mail room and a back porch—with floorboards covered with worn gray paint. Cracks in the boards overhead send down shafts of light. The light’s artificial (there’s a ceiling behind the boards), but it looks like the sun.
The details in the apartments reflect the immigrant experience—the Mexican family’s apartment, for example, has many votive candles with pictures of the saints, a Nativity scene or “nacimiento” in the fireplace, and a plastic cloth on the dining room table. Ensemble member Ari Salgado suggested the multiple rosaries hanging on doorknobs—Ari’s real-life grandmother likes to give them as gifts. The pretend apartments feel like real homes.
“Port of Entry” rehearsal
Stories will be performed simultaneously in thirty separate scenes, under eight directors. Only twenty-eight audience members will be allowed for each performance—with small groups observing different scenes before moving onto the next. Musical cues piped over speakers act as a metronome to give ensemble members their cues in this multi-layered dance. If you go to the play with a friend, you’ll have different experiences.
Audience members also can partake of the action, such as helping a family make dinner. But this will be a different kind of audience interaction than would be found in an improv show, where a reluctant viewer is recruited to play a role, explains Feiner.
“We try to avoid the term ‘audience participation’ because I think that makes people feel put upon,” Feiner says. “Third Rail has this carefully thought-out way to work with the audience, without having them role-play. You can be a part of the play, but be yourself. It feels very comfortable and natural and creates this sense of belonging.”
Edward Rice, associate managing director of Third Rail
During dinner at the Filipino family’s apartment, for example, audience members are invited to sit down at the dining-room table. Audience members help create the world they’re experiencing, explains Edward Rice, associate managing director of Third Rail.
“That happens through a series of invitations, as opposed to something that’s forced upon a person,” Rice says.
Ari Salgado says that one thing they learned from doing rehearsals with audience members is how to honor people’s choices, even when they’re unexpected.
“There’s a scene where the kids are cooking mac and cheese,” Salgado says. “An audience member said ‘I want to show you how to make popcorn,’ and the entire place smelled like burned popcorn.” The players thus learned a life lesson on how to work through something that wasn’t in the script.
Miguel Angel Rodriguez, co-executive director at APTP
Miguel Angel Rodriguez, co-executive director at APTP and a former schoolteacher, says that the “Port of Entry” stories were built out of collaborations between the young ensemble members and adult creators. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and gone over with a pen and a highlighter.
“We ask, ‘What are the themes, what are the images?’” Rodriguez says. “We ask, ‘What would this look like on stage?’ From there, we draw out the script and the choreography. It’s not our direct story, but it becomes so familiar to us, it becomes our story. When a story is given to us, we cradle it like a small infant, and we protect it, because it is now our story.”
Rodriguez notes that while the company isn’t afraid to tell a story about heartache and tragedy, it’s not going for shock value. “We’re a theater company whose vision is to create a more empathetic and beautiful world,” Rodriguez says. “We make the ordinary extraordinary.”
Though immigrants have been key to building both the city and the United States, they continue to experience hardship and political attacks. The theater company hopes that audiences who come to “Port of Entry” will leave with a new sense of empathy and understanding about the immigrant experience.
“We want people in this community to continue to engage in the dialogue that will come from a transformative experience like ‘Port of Entry,’” says Rodriguez. Making mac and cheese with kids may not sound like a thrilling theater experience. But Rodriguez believes that after you do it in this show, you “walk out a completely different person.”
“Port of Entry” is a collaboration between Albany Park Theater Project and Third Rail Projects, 3547 West Montrose, portofentrychicago.com.
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