The cast of “A Blue Island in the Red Sea” Anthony Moseley and co-devisers/Photo: Joel Maisonet

Part 1: The House of Belonging

Anthony Moseley, artistic director of Collaboraction, is giving me a tour of what will be the company’s theater and performance space and art center within the Kimball Arts Center, at the corner of Kimball and Bloomingdale, where Logan Square meets Humboldt Park, directly across the street from The 606 trail. The building is a renovated dark brick factory and warehouse, part of the exterior along the side facing Bloomingdale is painted dark gray, another is an abstract mural—white and orange and yellow and two shades of blue. Inside it is all steel and concrete and glass, hardwood floors and painted sheetrock.

It is late April and Collaboraction’s would-be performance space is still little more than a large empty box, bare walls, bare cement floors, a few folding chairs scattered around. But Moseley already sees the new space vividly in his imagination. “We’re gonna also do this whole entryway,” Moseley says as we enter, gesturing. “We’re calling it the House of Belonging. Everybody is welcome here. This is going to be a home for everyone.” We are standing in the hallway, about to step in.

“And we’re going to create the outer [area] to look like some form of a house. And we’re going to be putting out a call for people to contribute donated recycled materials from old homes, doors, kitchen floors, and as much information about who lived in that house as possible, and kind of sacred objects. We incorporate that into the design.”

Kimball Arts Center drone shot by Ryan Brandoff

They are still gathering permits, getting inspections, jumping through the hoops the City of Chicago sets up for anyone wanting to make something work in the city that works.

We step in. The space is nearly empty. Just the outer shell of a place that has yet to be created. “Here we go through the portal entry. To the left right here we have the box office.” He points to an empty space. “You will check in right here. And in here, boom, you turn, you’ll see a bar over there with a huge back bar shelving unit that has a combination of relics and family heirlooms and bottles of whiskey and flowers and maybe our Emmys will go there.”

Collaboraction won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy in 2022 for Outstanding Achievement for Human Interest, Long Form, for their television production, “The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Trial in the Delta” and in 2023 for Outstanding Documentary–Historical for its contribution to “The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Then and Now.” Both Collaboraction and the collaborators responsible for the productions (including Moseley) received Emmys independently.

“The company has two. And I have two. We’re actually also a finalist for a Silver Gable Award, which is the American Bar Association’s annual thing. The other finalist in our category of drama and literature is Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’”

He continues the tour. “So here there will be a twelve-foot by nine-foot bar. So a little cabaret stage right here. Lounge here, banquette seating there, and like five tables, four-tops in the middle. So this will seat, like, you know, sixty or so. Good for trios, open mic, stand-up comedy, and the wood that we’re going to be using throughout is going to be from different homes. And now we’re in the main studio. This is an eight-foot-wide by twenty-foot booth. And this part of the booth will be video mixing.”

The cast of “Spanx” by Erica Barnes and Dani Bryant in Sketchbook 15 at Chopin Theatre/Photo: Joel Maisonet

Collaboraction began in the late nineties as a tiny, itinerant, non-Equity theater company, performing low-budget productions of contemporary American plays. Over the years the company has gone through a fascinating transformation. First it experimented with the very notion of what constituted the show, and when it began and ended, and how you behaved during a show. Sketchbook shows were not just evenings of short, original plays. They also featured local DJs playing before and during the show. And curated gallery exhibitions of art, some of which were for sale. Audiences were invited to move around between plays.

Later, the folks at Collaboraction would experiment with different ways to create shows—combining shared stories, or using court transcripts as the foundation for nonfiction theater. Some plays were used as jumping-off points for long aftershow discussions about social issues. During the pandemic the company made forays into digital productions (still available on their website). They now do one-night-only extravaganzas (“The Sandra Delgado Experience”’). And they produce a weekly radio show on WCPT. The new space will accommodate all facets of Collaboraction’s creations.

Moseley narrates as we step through the open room. I feel like I am in an improv scene with a partner who is expertly conjuring up all sorts of mimed doorways and imaginary walls. “And here we have a six-foot entryway, dressing room, another dressing room, additional dressing room, changing room, prop table, ADA shower, bathroom,” says Moseley. “And now we’re kind of backstage. We’ve got to build all this out. The ramp, a little green room, closets, electric washer, dryer, props, yeah, some props and maintenance and ladders, as much as we can get away with.”

Another turn. “And now we’re back to that hallway that I pointed down. And then we’re going to get another space like an office, additional green room.”

To pay for all this, Collaboraction has a capital campaign running to raise $1.5 million to cover costs of construction, increased staffing and programming by January 2026. Moseley explains that the construction itself will cost around $500,000. “Tech gear and other finishing will cost around another $150,000- $200,000. We have raised just under $400,000 so far. We hope to be open by October 1 plus-or-minus thirty days. So really we’re aiming for September 1.”

Kimberly Senior/Photo: Joe Mazza /Brave Lux

Part 2: Kimberly Senior—“Looking for a team of mad scientists.”

From the beginning Collaboraction has been a company focused on its own self-transformation. It is fascinating to see, in hindsight, how they have evolved. All the more so because it began so quietly, as a one-person operation, the brainchild of a recent college graduate Kimberly Senior. Senior, now a nationally recognized director. Among other projects, she directed the American Theatre Company’s premier production of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning “Disgraced,” and many subsequent productions on Broadway and beyond. Senior moved to Chicago in 1995 to do what lots of recent college grads do every year—try to break into the scene. Senior grew up in Brooklyn, cut her theater teeth on Broadway, but fell in love with Chicago-style theater when her parents took her when she was seven to see the Steppenwolf production of “True West” on Broadway. The production, which pitted Gary Sinese and John Malkovich against each other as poisonously competitive brothers, rocked her world.

“I was like, prior to that, all theater for me was like ‘Annie’ and ‘South Pacific.’ And I learned there was something else, another way to tell stories. And so I was like, oh, Steppenwolf is a thing that I want to do. My mom would clip articles out of the New York Times for me anytime Steppenwolf was in the New York Times.“

When she graduated from Connecticut College, Senior came to Chicago, specifically to hook up with Steppenwolf. “This was in the mid-nineties, and Steppenwolf was still a very small theater. I mean, there was maybe a full-time staff of ten, and you know, everything was a little chaotic. Martha [Lavey] had just started as artistic director. Martha began in May, and I got there in June. I just sort of called, and the development director was like, sure, you can come and have an internship. And then I showed up, and she was away for the summer. And I ended up rolling up my sleeves and figuring out how to fix a photocopy machine, and sanded some baseboards, and answered some phones, and hung around with Curt Columbus and Mary Ann Thebus, who were teaching a high-school acting program at the time. And they were like, don’t go back to New York, stay here. You know, you’re terrific, there’s all this theater here, it’s going to be great. And then Martha, at some point, said to me, who are you? You seem very helpful. Do we pay you? I was like, no, you don’t pay me. Um, but I love it here. So I started getting minimum wage to do odd jobs around the theater.”

Being an intern at Steppenwolf, doing office work, was not enough for Senior. She wanted to make theater. For a while she tried to get work at one of the smaller theaters making a name for themselves: European Rep, Lookingglass, Shattered Globe, The Next Theatre, Plasticene. She would see one of their shows, and then write them a letter “which I would mail to the address that was in my paper program. My letter would be like, ‘I’ll sweep your floors, I’ll work in your box office, I’ll do whatever.’” No one ever contacted her.

Finally, Senior decided to do the DIY Chicago theater thing and start her own company.

“I put an ad in the Chicago Reader in section four that was something like you know, ‘Looking for a team of mad scientists to start a theater company come meet me at Urbus Orbis [a then-popular coffee shop in Wicker Park] like Wednesday at six o’clock.’ Did you know this piece was started from a personal ad? And it’s something like when I tell the story now to young people, they just don’t understand, you know, this is not the way you do things in the world.”

Sandra Delgado, Kimberly Senior and Anthony Moseley at Collaboraction’s Utopian Ball Gala in 2017

At the appointed time, Senior went to the coffee shop, found a table, and waited. As it happened, Urbus Orbis was just across the street from the Flat Iron Arts Building (at Damen, North and Milwaukee), the location of Steven Ivcich’s acting school. As it happened a couple of people from the Ivcich studio “stumbled in.”

Senior jokes that she didn’t know for sure if they were answering her ad or if “we all just happened to be in the same space at once and I’m extraordinarily friendly. I was like ‘hey this is my idea. I want to make plays for people.’”

One of the people who showed up for this meeting was Moseley. Moseley had almost no experience in professional theater. “[He] was like, ‘Well, I have a finance degree from Notre Dame and I’ve been acting for a year in these acting classes, you know?’” He showed up with his girlfriend, who had even less experience in Chicago theater than he did, though she had done some theater in high school. “He was like, ‘This is my girlfriend, Sandra [Delgado], and she’s still finishing her psychology degree at UIC, but she’s got a really good singing voice.” And there were others there, too, all of them outsiders—“It was such a random group”—all of them intrigued by Senior’s promise of a mad adventure.

The name of Senior’s new company was Collaboraction. “Collaborate + Action!” Senior explains, “It’s the worst name ever and we always wanted to change it and then it was too late…”

Collaboraction’s first show was in the basement performing space of the late, lamented Cafe Voltaire on Clark Street. They did a short play by A. R. Gurney, “The Problem.” The second show was “Beyond Therapy” by Christopher Durang. Moseley’s first acting job at Collaboraction was when he got cast as an understudy in that production.

“They were in the second week of rehearsal and halfway through the rehearsal, the actor had to leave. And they’re like, ‘Oh, Anthony, would you mind stepping in?’ That was an easy role for me.” Neither Moseley nor Senior can remember the actor’s name or why he could not stay in the show.

Anthony Moseley/ Joe Mazza | Brave Lux

Part 3: Anthony Moseley—“I started growing out my hair and I went raw vegan.”

Moseley took an indirect route into theater. Moseley began life as far from a life in the theater as you could get: he grew up in Deerfield and his father was a golf pro in Highland Park. Theater was not in his family’s blood: The business of Moseley’s family was business.

“My grandfather was a salesman for General Foods and he launched his career by selling instant decaf coffee on I-80 to truckers who had already drunk their pot of coffee.” Moseley tells me, “And then he went on to be the national sales manager for Tang and Country Time Lemonade. And so he could sell anything.” Moseley confesses he inherited many of his grandfather’s “innate producing and organizing skills.“

Moseley’s parents divorced when he was young. “My dad’s PTSD from ‘Nam kind of reared his head.” His mom moved the family to Stamford, Connecticut.

When it came time for college, Moseley went to Notre Dame, majoring in finance. “I was the third person in my family to go to a four-year university. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be successful.”

While at Notre Dame he started taking acting classes. “I took a class in Bertolt Brecht.” Why? “Because I just was drawn to the power of story, of storytelling, of people gathering to be enlightened and connected in a profound way. I was always taking the stage and the microphone, any chance I got. I’d make fun of my sister in line at Disney World just because I had an audience of 200 people in the queue.

“My first theater experiences were as an altar boy: getting my cues and ringing the bell and getting into places and the costume and the prep and the ritual, you know, but also sports. I was a five-sport athlete as a kid.

“I went to Notre Dame and I ended up taking all of these theater classes. And then I started auditioning for plays my senior year. And then my friends in the film department started writing me into their films. And then their teachers were like, who is this guy? He’s really good on camera. So I got out of Notre Dame in 1995. I moved back to Chicago.”

Fresh out of college Moseley worked for the Chicago Bulls selling urinal ads and sponsorships during the NBA lockout when Jordan was coming back from baseball and they signed Dennis Rodman. “I was miserable there and I had kind of an existential crisis at twenty-two. I really started saying, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ My plan of making ten million and then pursuing happiness, I realized, was just completely ignorant and backwards.”

During his crisis he read “too much Deepak Chopra and ‘The Celestine Prophecy.’” He wanted to act. His father said, “Hey bud, maybe you should go to L.A.”

“I decided to become an artist.” Moseley tells me, “I began reading and going to coffee houses and taking notes and writing and meeting. I then became a barista at the Artist’s Café on Michigan Avenue. I started growing out my hair and went raw vegan.

“Then I got into the Steven Ivcich Studio in Bucktown-Wicker Park, which was an amazing old-New York studio program.” Moseley credits Ivcich with opening him up as an actor. “He’s just a super-cool weirdo cat. And I do love him. And he was one of those guys where it was like everybody wanted, adored him so much, you know.

“I was in a special group, it was like you got the keys to the studio. There was a day class and the night class—the day class was all the waiters and bartenders and people who are a little more serious about trying to become an artist, an actor, and two people in my group I’m still very close with are the playwright Ellen Fairey and the actor John Sierros.”

It was while he was finding himself studying with Ivcich that Moseley met another person key to making him into the person he is today: Sandra Delgado.

Sandra Delgado/Photo: Joe Mazza | brave lux

Part 4: Sandra Delgado sings the Colombian folk song “Sindamanoy”

You cannot discuss the history of Collaboraction without discussing actor, singer, playwright Sandra Delgado. In the past decade her work, in particular her musical “La Havana Madrid,” about a now long-gone Caribbean club on Chicago’s North Side, has transcended Collaboraction. But she remains “very much the heart of the company,” according to Moseley, who credits her with his transformation from a wannabe artist to an actor, director and producer: “I wouldn’t be doing this work had I not had her as a mentor and her ability to teach me and invest in me as a, you know, a privileged white guy.” She is also his wife and the mother of their children.

Delgado was born of Colombian parents in Chicago in the seventies on the North Side near the intersection of Lincoln, Belmont and Ashland. “They came here in 1965,” Delgado tells me, “They first lived on Barry and Broadway and then they just made their way west. So by the time I was born, they were living a couple of miles west on Ashland and Belmont.”

When Delgado was growing up, the area was rough. “Our house had gotten broken into a couple times during my childhood,” Delgado recalls, “and we moved to Niles in like 1985 or eighty-six. So I did like a six-, seven-year stint in the ‘burbs and then came back to the city.”

Singing was central to Delgado and her family when she was growing up. “We lived on the first floor, and then my aunts lived on the second floor. And we had the piano, so one of my aunts would come down and play the piano, and everyone—I mean, singing was just happening all the time. And we were part of a Colombian folkloric choir and dance troupe. For me the arts have always been a family affair, you know, very community-based.” This is something that clearly influenced Delgado and her art. “I wasn’t interpreting it in those terms as a child, but looking back, it was like, oh, wow, that makes so much sense how I view my art-making now, because that was my early experience, that it was family and that it was in community.”

Delgado sang in school. “I started singing at Niles West High School, which has always had a really amazing theater department. I did all the musicals.” But, she adds, “I was always scared to audition for the spring drama because there was no singing in it.” The irony is that most of her work as a professional actor has been in straight dramas, not musicals.

Delgado was a top student in high school. She received a full ride under the President’s Award Program to study at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Or she could remain in Chicago and study at UIC. “I fell into this very familiar first-generation, first-to-go-to-college narrative where I was, like, I have to be a doctor or a lawyer. I’m such a city girl I decided to go to UIC; they have a great medical school. I got about two years in and was, like,’“I don’t like this at all.’”

Delgado dropped out for a year. Then she went back. She was originally in UIC’s Honors College, but when she returned she was not let back into the Honors College. They did give her back her scholarship. “I lasted about another year and a half and dropped out again.”

Delgado found a job as a hostess at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant in Lincoln Park, and drifted. “I just was so unhappy and felt very aimless.” Delgado recalls, “I didn’t know what I was doing.” This was Sandra Delgado’s dark night of the soul.

Moseley remembers meeting Delgado around this time: “I had made plans with my good friend from Notre Dame, Emily Linklater, and she worked at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. The plan was to meet back at our apartment that I shared in a duplex apartment above Tower Records at Clark and Belden with five other twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old dudes, most of them were accountants. And I got home from the Artist’s Café [where he was a barista] and I sauntered in. And there Sandra Delgado was on the couch.”

Delgado was a friend of Linklater’s from work and had come to hang out, and then go out with them after Moseley returned home. The evening progressed, the group ended up at The Note, a bar on Armitage that was famous for its great jukebox.

Moseley recalls that he and his roommates were all “very interested in this new friend we had: Sandra. And we kind of get in the door and I say to the one guy, here, take the coats. And I say to the other guy, hey, go get our drinks. And I say to Sandra, would you like to dance? And before they were back with the coats and the drinks, I was on the dance floor with her and spinning her around and around eventually I said, ‘You’re so amazing, what do you want to do with your life?’”

Delgado also recalls the evening vividly: “Anthony and I really hit it off. That night he asked me, ‘So what is it that you want to do?’ Not really thinking about it I just said, ‘I really miss singing. I want to sing again,’ and that kind of really surprised me, too.”

Moseley and Delgado ended up staying out until five in the morning. And they continued seeing each other. “About two weeks in,” Moseley recalls, “I’m like, hey, so whenever you want to sing for me, I’m ready. She’s like, ‘Don’t pressure me. Stop asking me. I’ll do it when I’m ready.’ So maybe a month later, one night we go to Shelter, the old nightclub, and we get back to our place—it’s like three in the morning—she’s like, ‘Come with me.’ And she takes me over to the lagoons in Lincoln Park, just north of Fullerton there, and sits me under a tree and sings this Colombian folk song called ‘Sindamanoy.’ And it was like, I could see my future floating in the tree behind her. As she sang this song. I swear I could see our daughter. I felt like this, I’m going to marry this woman and we’re going to build a beautiful life together and unfold magic and beauty and love will manifest.”

The two were inseparable. Delgado even started going to the Steven Ivcich Studio with Moseley. “Steven was awesome,” Delgado remembers, “He basically let me audit this yearlong program. I would just watch, I’d just come and observe and he’d have guest directors come in like Anna Shapiro. I’m trying to remember other people that came in, but I just, you know, and so all of a sudden I was hanging around with theater people.”

A short time later Kimberly Senior heard Delgado sing at Anthony’s birthday party. “Kimberly came up to me after that and was like, hey, the next show that Collaboraction is doing is called ‘The Most Massive Woman Wins’ by Madeleine George and it’s all women. It would be so cool if you sang some stuff before the show started as the audience was coming in. I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ We were at the Cafe Voltaire and so I’d set a little stool on stage as the audience came in and I did like, I don’t know, like a half hour set of really random songs, sung a capella. Portishead. DiFranco. It was a very eclectic medley.”

And that’s how Sandra Delgado became a performer.

Anthony Moseley backstage at Collaboraction Studios in the Flat Iron Arts Building/Photo: Abigail Zoe Martin as a part of her Chicago Lights project

Part 5: Two Kinds of Artistic Directors: The Consensus Freak and the Ringmaster

Senior was the artistic director for Collaboraction for its first two years and by her own admission she was “terrible at it. I’m so collaborative that nothing got done,” she laughs, “because I would be like, ‘Well, what does everyone think?’ And our meetings were usually four hours long because I wanted consensus. And that sort of populism is not useful.”

She did, however, have a good instinct for recognizing talent, and for drawing them into her circle. Senior recognized something in Moseley and Delgado, and wanted them in her theater.

Moseley recalls: “Kimberly’s like, ‘Hey, you know, if you want to come to a company meeting, we would love to have you. I went to the meeting with my finance degree from Notre Dame and my natural salesmanship.” Moseley became a key figure in the Collaboraction power structure.

“Anthony was really such a great frontman,” Senior remembers. “I mean, he’s such a ringmaster. Anthony was really—especially in the beginning when we were so scrappy and so broke—Anthony was so good about harnessing a wine donation. I don’t say that in a trivial way. That was honestly so essential. We were really a team. He brought this great business savvy that I just did not have at all.”

The three became fast friends. Senior and Delgado were so close Senior says she became “like my sister, just a lifelong best friend and we were all very, very close.” Senior approached Moseley and offered him the position of becoming the theater’s artistic director. Senior remembers he was hesitant at first.

“He was like, can I think about it?” she recalls, “And I was like, no, I think you have to decide. We have a company meeting tomorrow. I totally pushed him up against the wall. And he said yes.”

Twenty-five years later Moseley is still artistic director.

The Collaboraction team in the early years during Sketchbook 5 with Anthony, Sandra and Kimberly/courtesy Kimberly Senior

Part 6: Sketchbook: Looking for a Show like Pu Pu Platter

In October of 1999 Moseley became Collaboraction’s artistic director. From the beginning he set his stamp on the organization.

Moseley remembers that when he took the reins “the company was a democracy of twenty-five early-career company members. We would vote on the season based on the shows that had been proposed. The votes mostly went to whatever had the largest casts and the most company members in them, which I came to think of as backwards rather quickly.”

At the time, Collaboraction had an annual budget of $15,000. Nobody was getting paid. Moseley remembers telling the company he was going to change the focus of the theater: “I told the company that we were going to be focused on the audience and their experience and not the actors in their careers and egos. And, you know, of the twenty-five company members, about eighteen of them left.”

Collaboraction’s innovative annual Sketchbook Festival began soon after Moseley took over as artistic director. Senior remembers being the producer and curator of the first Sketchbook in 2000 (the Festival was produced annually from 2000 to 2016). The idea of Sketchbook was to create a show that played with expectations, that combined theater and music and the visual arts to give audiences a different kind of theatrical experience.

According to Moseley the roots of Sketchbook go back to a show featuring short plays by a number of playwrights he and John Cabrera curated for Collaboraction at Cafe Voltaire called “No MSG.” “It did really well. The work, some of it was way too long. But I just love the energy that it brought together.”

Senior remembers the ideas for Sketchbook coming together “very much in the way that many things did at Collaboraction. We were sitting around and I was like, no one makes theater for everybody. You know when you go to a Chinese restaurant and you get a pu pu platter? And you’re just like, oh, well, this person likes egg rolls and this person likes spare ribs and this one likes this and this one likes this, right?” Senior was looking for a show like pu pu platter.

Senior envisioned a show made up of shorter plays and “if this play is happening and I hate it, there’ll be a new one in a few minutes. So I don’t have to leave.” Theaters often produce ten-minute play festivals with this very idea in mind. The thought was that ten-minute plays—by 2000 a regular feature of the annual Humana Theatre Festival in Louisville—had become boring and formulaic. The focus would be on creating something different—shorter plays and a different environment.

“Let’s make eight-minute plays, because that means people have to write it specifically for us, you know?” Senior continues, adding “a number of us had various contacts, Beth Henley, David Mamet. And we were like, wouldn’t it be cool if an eight-minute world-premiere David Mamet play premiered next to a play by someone you’ve never heard of?”

Moseley was excited about the possibilities for collaboration in Sketchbook shows: “What if we created a community of directors and writers and actors that were all working side by side, watching each other, learning from each other, cross-pollinating. And what if it was something that was actually fun and cool to go to if you were a young person and you had autonomy and you weren’t stuck in a seat and it felt more like a concert or a rave.”

When Senior recalls the early brainstorming sessions about Sketchbook, she echoes Moseley’s ideas: “We also wanted to encourage the audience to really drive their own experience. So it’s like if you’re sitting over here, but you want to move over there, you can move in between sketches. You can get up, you can get a drink. And so there was this kind of dance-party environment.”

The first Sketchbook Festival took place in March 2000 and featured a rotating schedule of sixteen works of ten minutes or less. Seven sketches were performed each night and all sixteen pieces were done in “a closing-night marathon.”

The Sketchbook was very successful, and became part of the Collaboraction schedule for the next sixteen years. Moseley is proud of Sketchbook’s success. When he discusses his success, the Notre Dame finance major emerges: “We were off and running and we grew by 1200 percent in the first two years I was artistic director. Annual revenues jumped from about $20,000 annually to $238,000.”

Peacebook at Hamilton Park In Englewood/Photo: Joel Maisonet

Part 7: Existential Crisis/Crime Scene/Transformation

In 2010, Collaboraction moved into a new space, the Flat Iron Arts Building in Wicker Park. “We finally had our own little theater, and got control of the canvas,” Moseley observes. The space was on the third floor of the Flat Iron, “a sweet little studio” which happened to be the former studio of Moseley’s mentor and guru Steven Ivcich.

It was in this space that Collaboraction would achieve one of Senior’s initial goals for the theater to become a company of mad scientists creating startling work in a new way, catalyzed by Moseley and by his self-described existential crisis.

In Moseley’s words: “I was really starting to question the model of non-profit theater in Chicago. I was like, why is everybody doing Chekhov and Sam Shepard? All these nonprofit theater companies seemingly making choices that were commercial to sell tickets. The bigger the theater, the more commercial. The value proposition wasn’t there. It didn’t make sense. We were not laying out our value to the community, and having the community say, ‘we need you, we want you, we will do what it takes to keep you around.’”

Moseley calls this period his “second existential crisis,” the first being his decision in his early twenties to jettison his job and career plans in finance and embrace becoming an artist. “That was my first quarter-life crisis.” Moseley says, “It got me into theater and the arts.” Now he was being hit with the doubts and need for self-invention that came with his “second quarter-life crisis.”

Moseley believes the crisis was triggered by the responsibilities of parenthood and family—“My daughter was five years old”—and by his concern for his community. “And at this time in 2012,” Moseley reminds me, “homicides went over 500 for the first time in twenty years. And there were a number of violent events that were in close proximity to me at this time.”

Two events in particular moved Moseley: the stabbing of a woman in a flower shop in Wicker Park and the savage attack on Irish exchange student Natasha McShane under the viaduct on Damen Avenue, where The 606 is today. She was attacked by someone she did not know, Heriberto Viramontes, who saw her walking with her friend Stacy Jurich when he was driving around Wicker Park. He stopped his car, got out armed with a baseball bat, and hit McShane and Jurich with the bat before emptying out their purses. The attack made international news; Viramontes was later sentenced to ninety years in prison for robbery and attempted murder. McShane lived, but sustained brain damage, leaving her unable to speak or walk.

This incident, which took place only a couple blocks north of Collaboraction’s new home, profoundly shook Moseley. “I just was heartbroken that somebody would send us their twenty-year-old daughter to come to visit Chicago,” Moseley tells me, “And this is how she went back [home—in a coma].”

Moseley became obsessed. His feelings were strong, but as an artist he told himself, “I’m not gonna run away from this. This feels to me like something that is worthwhile of my life energy. I was really searching, and I just opened up my eyes and my ears and my heart.”

He threw himself into “researching, learning more about the root cause of violence.” And into finding a way to use theater to explore the subject.

“I started gathering a group of folks to create a think tank and to educate each other about the root cause of violence in Chicago,” Moseley recalls. He was working with “about twenty-five people.” They would do assigned research and then come together to engage in extended bull sessions on the topic of violence in the city. “It was a super-diverse group,” Moseley tells me, “all different ethnicities, ages, from different parts of the city. I had an Illinois State prosecutor; I had a senior from Simeon high school.”

This went on for about six months. The result was what Moseley describes as “Collaboraction’s first devised show.” “Crime Scene, A Chicago Anthology.”

The show is described on the Collaboraction website as “A world premiere theatrical experience examining Chicago’s history of violent crime and what it might take to create lasting change…The play couples nonfiction source material such as interviews, articles and online comments with three true Chicago crimes to raise critical questions surrounding segregation, poverty, the news media, popular culture, and our numbness to it all.”

“I had eleven co-devisors helping me to create this anthology, nonfiction piece,” Moseley explains, “that tried to paint a collage of some of the main sources and root causes of our current, what I now look at as, slow-dripping genocide.” The show included “an eighteen-minute scene called the ‘History of Violence in Chicago’” and covered topics around the theme of violence including the 1919 Race Riots, Japanese internment camps and the assassinations of Rudy Lozano, the legendary Latino organizer, and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

“It was amazing,” Moseley says with enthusiasm. “After every performance we had a town-hall conversation. And the conversation became THE thing.” The show opened in February 2013 and sold out for eight weeks. “The conversations were amazing,“ Moseley remembers.

This show was also a foray into what has been called the Theater of Social Justice. This excited Moseley, and showed him a path forward for the theater that was very different from the typical pattern for the nonprofit theaters in Chicago he had been rebelling against. Collaboraction’s goal was not merely commercial; selling tickets was not the main goal. Though it was not a bad way to measure interest in their work. Rather they were, in Moseley’s words, “getting into the super-powerful transformational power of theater—to look at the darkness and the thing that we can’t talk about.” It was theater that dared to say, “This is my life and this is my heart. Will you listen? Do you care?”

Scott Baity Jr. (on ground) and Shavac Prakash in the world premiere of “Crime Scene: A Chicago Anthology”/Photo: Anna Sodziak

Part 8: Developed and Devised: Creating a Theater for Social Justice

Much of what Collaboraction produces these days is developed and devised in-house and fits in the category of theater for social justice. Most of the shows listed on their website since the original 2013 production of “Crime Scene: A Chicago Anthology” have a social justice bent. The success of the first “Crime Scene” show spawned other “Crime Scene” shows: “Crime Scene: Let Hope Arise,” “Crime Scene: The Next Chapter,” and “Crime Scene: Breathe Life.” (Not unlike, ironically, the popular “Law & Order” TV series.) All of these versions of “Crime Scene” were performed in partnership with the Chicago Park District. Each performance concludes with a talkback town hall with the audience reacting to and commenting on the show.

The popular Sketchbook series, which did not focus on plays with a social justice theme, has been supplanted by other, more socially conscious, work.

“We started doing other devised works around intersectional forms of oppression,” Moseley says, “We did a play called ‘Forgotten Future,’ which was about inequity in Chicago Public Schools. We did another show called ‘The Mars Assignment,’ which was about destigmatizing mental health and mental illness. And we had conversations after every show. And then I did a piece called ‘This is Not a Cure for Cancer,’ which was about my experience with my father and his cancer.”

Darren Jones (L) and Andy Luther (R) from “Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till” by G. Riley Mills and Willie Round/Photo: Joel Maisonet

Part 9: Finding The Lost Story of Emmett Till

There is no better way to illustrate the full spectrum of shows Collaboraction creates under the rubric of a theater for social change than to consider two very different shows emerging from Collaboraction’s aesthetic: “The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Trial in the Delta” and “The Sandra Delgado Experience.”

The story of how a scrappy theater company wins four Emmys begins with an email. Jay Kelly, the company publicist, received an email from LeeAnn Trotter at NBC Chicago. Reporter Marion Brooks had found the missing transcript of the notorious trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Till. In the email Trotter asked if Collaboraction would be interested in bringing actors into the studio to have them read some of the testimonies for use in a documentary on Emmett Till.

“NBC was like, look, this is the deal. This is a PR opportunity for you guys.” Moseley recalls, “ You have to pay the actors. We can’t pay them. This is a news-media piece.” Moseley admits he found the offer intriguing. But then wondered why perform just a piece of the trial? Why not adapt the whole thing?

He was given the transcript. It was 400 pages long and “super-boring. It was hard to read,” Moseley remembers. “I could go about ten pages at a time, and need a break.” Moseley brought in the Chicago playwriting team of Willie Round and Gary Mills, who had written material for a previous Sketchbook show, and asked them to adapt it. They took the 400-page document and they transformed it into an eighty-seven-page script.

“Every word in the script was spoken in the courtroom,” Moseley says. “We did not add a word, except for an opening and a closing scene outside of the courtroom. But those two scenes were transcribed verbatim from interviews with Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother. It was powerful.

“We filmed it at NBC Chicago during the pandemic in the old Steve Harvey, Jerry Springer studio off of Michigan Avenue,” Moseley tells me. “Twenty-nine actors, eighty-seven pages, three cameras, in one day, which is crazy.”

Later, Collaboraction produced a live version of the play at the DuSable Museum in February of 2023. “Our goal now is to tour it throughout Illinois, as an educational piece. And then eventually to take that train ride that Emmett and Mamie took down past Memphis to Tallahatchie County and perform it in the courtroom itself where the trial took place.”

Sandra Delgado (L) and David Dasmalchian (R) from “Blink” by Anthony Moseley in collaboration with Liviu Pasare/Photo: Joel Maisonet

Part 10: Experiencing “The Sandra Delgado Experience”

When Sandra Delgado joined Collaboraction she did not think of herself as a singer, much less an actor or playwright. Today she is nationally recognized as all three. Even as she was part of the transformation of Collaboraction, Collaboraction transformed her.

Today she displays all three sides of herself in a quarterly extravaganza, “The Sandra Delgado Experience,” a solo show backed by a kick-ass band in which Delgado sings, dances, tells stories and communes with her audience.

Delgado’s skills as an actor emerged first. Over the years she has appeared in productions at Steppenwolf, Goodman, Northlight and The Public Theatre. Her skills as a writer emerged much later, in her mid-thirties.

“I had been thinking, oh, maybe I should write something,” Delgado tells me, “but I’m like, I don’t know how to write. And then I went to see this piece when the Goodman used to do the Latino Theatre Festival that Henry Godinez curated. He brought this Spanish dance theater company, the Marta Carrasco Company. It was her and her ensemble. And when I saw them for the first time, I was like, oh, my God, okay. I know how to do that because it was the dance and the music, but it was also theater.”

Anthony Moseley and Sandra Delgado surrounded by the cast of “Para Carmen” by Sandra Delgado at Collaboraction’s ninth annual Sketchbook/Photo: Saverio Truglia

She wrote her first piece for Sketchbook, a short dance theater piece called “Para Carmen,” inspired by her grandmother’s death and by Delgado’s memory of seeing her grandmother’s body a few moments after her death: “She had died making rice one morning, a ritual she had performed thousands of times in her lifetime. She looked so peaceful, that image stayed with me.”

“Para Carmen” was meant to be the first part of a triptych called “Para Mis Madres,” which means “For My Mothers.” The second piece in that triptych was another dance theater piece, “Para Graciela,” inspired by her maternal grandmother, “her relationship with her father, who owned a ceramics factory but loved to tinker at home, and loved making perfume.” The show was workshopped at the Goodman and then premiered there as part of a solo show festival.

The third part of the triptych was going to be “Para Maria,” about Delgado’s parents. While she was interviewing her father for the piece he told her about a club they used to go to. La Havana Madrid, a Latin club located at Belmont and Sheffield.

“My parents lived just east of there,” Delgado explains. “And when my dad told me about the club I was like, what? There was a what? Where? I was born in 1973. And by the time I really have memories, like the late seventies, there were no traces of Latinidad in that neighborhood. It had all been erased. It was like Boystown and then there was punk.”

Writer and actor Sandra Delgado in her hit production “La Havana Madrid” in a collaboration between Teatro Vista and Collaboraction/Photo: Joel Maisonet

La Havana Madrid was located in the space later occupied by the rock club The Quiet Knight and later still the punk club, Tuts. Delgado thought it would be “cool and fun” to create La Havana Madrid and stage it so “people aren’t just coming to the theater, they’re actually coming to the club.”

The show weaves together six stories, based on stories she gathered from interviews she conducted with people familiar with the club, including her parents. “I really thought I was going to have to interview a lot of people, I really didn’t,” Delgado recalls. “The stories just kind of naturally came together, very organically.”

The show was developed at the Goodman and Teatro Vista and later produced at Steppenwolf in their 1700 space. The show proved to be very popular, one of the best-selling shows in Teatro Vista’s history and named one of the best plays of 2017 by Time Out Chicago. The show is periodically revived, most recently in a free, staged concert version in August at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

“The Sandra Delgado Experience” is a fitting followup to “La Havana Madrid.” The show is an intense exploration of the changes in Delgado’s life as reflected in Colombian cumbias, boleros and English-language indie pop. The show has an intensely spiritual quality—very joyful, very hopeful, very transformative, very Collaboraction.

Luis Crespo, Annie Pritchard, Mary Mikva, Stella Moseley, Antonio Brunetti, Justin Dietzel, and Amber Montgomery (left to right) in “Connected” by Anthony Moseley/Photo: Joel Maisonet

Epilogue

When Collaboraction opens its new space, it will mark yet another transformational moment in a company that has reinvented itself continuously over the past twenty-nine years. Yet, through all the changes, they have adhered to a set of core values: an interest in social justice and in shows that, in the words of one Collaboraction artist, were “super audience-focused.”

“If you want to change the world,” Moseley says, “you have got to start with yourself. Activism and social change don’t always have to be gotten through revolution. You don’t always have to blow everything up and burn it down.

“A lot of folks in theater seem to separate themselves from the audience,” says Moseley. “We’re trying to create space for more dialogue around our connection to one another and the importance of moving past the history. We were all born into these roles. We’re all cast into these roles of life. We can’t really be responsible for what came before us, but we can and should be responsible with what we do while we’re here. In Chicago, we have a great divide. And so we hope to really harness the power of theater, storytelling, music, dance. Chicago is our storytellers, our poets.”