Time to Include Everybody

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Taking a moment to help a worthy cause. Local Chicago actress Emjoy Gavino has launched The Chicago Inclusion Project, an effort to encourage greater diversity in theater, including different people of different ethnicities, physical abilities and gender identities. On the horizon is a staged reading of William Saroyan's play The Time of Your Life at Victory Gardens Theater, which will hopefully be the first of many such performances. 

If you would like to contribute to this effort, The Chicago Inclusion Project currently has an indiegogo campaign to raise funds for its activities. 

Getting Ripped!

In-between weekends kung-fuing my way through The Big, The Trouble and The Little China with New Millennium Theatre Company and balanced against being a husband, dad and keeping up with Chicago Aikido Club, I'll be joining some of the good folks at American Blues Theater onstage or their annual Ripped: the Living Newspaper Festival. 

The one-night event is based on a 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) era program that brought actor/director Orson Welles, and playwrights Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets into public attention. A series of short 10-minute performances inspired and ripped from today’s headlines will be presented to raise American Blues Theater's arts education program The Lincoln Project in Chicago Public Schools. 

Ripped: the Living Newspaper Festival takes places from 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm on Tuesday, May 12 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue on the downstairs mainstage. Tickets (which also include food and drink) are $5 and available at www.AmericanBluesTheater.com/tickets.