Port of Entry creates a home for immigrant stories

Albany Park Theater Project’s latest immersive show is ambitious but intimate.

By KERRY REID

In 2016, Albany Park Theater Project took over the closed Saint Hyacinth Basilica School in Logan Square and transformed it into the fictional Ellen Gates Starr High School for their ambitious (and hugely successful) immersive ambulatory production, Learning Curve. That show took audiences throughout the school—from classrooms to bathrooms— and deep into the experience of being a teenager at a Chicago public high school, with standardized tests, discussions about The Great Gatsby and the American dream, trips to the guidance counselor’s o ce, and jitters about getting a prom date being just some of the possible scenarios for us to encounter along the way.

Learning Curve was structured so that not every audience member would see every scene. Some were just one-on-one interactions with APTP’s youth ensemble, who as always played all the roles, adults and teens alike. Others were group scenes, where we became part of the student body—right down to the laminated IDs we received at the start of the show.

For their latest immersive production, Port of Entry , the company has (with the help of the Logan Foundation) acquired a building on West Montrose and created a series of apartment settings, complete with a courtyard and back porches, within the 1929 former storage facility. The show takes us through these realistic rooms as we hear stories of immigrant families living within Albany Park.

Parts of the script are culled from the vast archive of community stories collected by APTP’s ensemble members over the decades, while some are new for this show. Given the buzz created by Learning Curve (which ran for around five months) and the fact that audiences for Port of Entry are limited to 28 per performance, it’s no surprise that the initial run of this new show (through August 12) is already sold out. (More tickets will be on sale for the fall shortly.)

But David Feiner, APTP’s cofounder and co-executive director, hopes that Port of Entry will stick around for a long time. Currently APTP plans to run it for at least a year. (The company will also continue to create and re-

Port Of Entry

Performances sold out through 8/ 12 , with additional performances for fall to be announced soon. 3547 W. Montrose, 773 - 866 -0875, portofentrychicago.com, pay what you choose hearse other pieces at their home base in the Eugene Field Park field house.)

Earlier this month, Feiner and co-executive director Miguel Angel Rodriguez took me on a tour of the still-under-construction environments for Port of Entry to get a sense of the scope of this project, which perhaps paradoxically promises to be bigger in its ambitions and more intimate in design and concept than Learning Curve. Like that earlier show, Port of Entry was developed in association with Jennine Willett, coartistic director of New York’s Third Rail Projects, which specializes in immersive experiential theater. (The Lewis Carroll-inspired hit, Then She Fell, is probably their best-known piece.)

Planning for Port of Entry began in 2018, “right in the middle of the Trump presidency,” Feiner notes. One of the apartments serves as the home for a Mexican family, where they receive a phone call letting them know that the father has been deported. “We were devising that and rehearsing it in the summer of 2019, when there were daily rumors moving around over social media that ICE agents were about to swarm Albany Park communities,” says Feiner.

Rodriguez notes that a big part of the planning for the show was making sure that audiences understand their role in the world of the play. “When you come in, you immediately realize you are supposed to be here. You are a guest who has been here before. You never have to guess who you are. The actors and the storytelling envelope you into the story right away.” So for example, in the home of the Mexican family, Rodriguez says, “You are immediately brought in and invited to sit down. There’s music, and they invite you to play loteria. If you know how to play it, great. If you don’t, you’ll be quickly taught.”

Later in the tour, Rodriguez shows me the fully functioning kitchen in an apartment for a Filipino family, where visitors are invited to help make turon, a traditional fried dessert. As in past APTP shows, including 2010’s Feast (revived in 2015), Rodriguez notes, “We really wanted to show how food is important to so many families and cultures.”

Port of Entry requires a large technical team to create environments that are believable simulacra of real Chicago apartments and are up to code as public performance spaces. There is an intense amount of attention paid to detail. For example, since there are no real windows in the units, the lighting designers and electricians came up with fake windows lit from behind by walls of LED lights that subtly simulate the changes from daylight to nightfall. The set dressing and props capture the cultural di erences in the various immigrant families, including a refugee family of Karen immigrants, an oppressed ethnic minority within Myanmar, representative of Albany Park’s diversity. Rodriguez notes that part of the research process involved home visits with some of the families whose stories are being transformed in the show to capture images of the environments.

Despite the bigger budget (Feiner puts the capitalization costs for Port of Entry at $2.5 million, the largest in APTP history by far), one thing that hasn’t changed is the focus on the youth ensemble as the drivers of the stories, whether they play characters their age, adults, or younger children.

Third Rail’s Willett notes that at the first workshops for Learning Curve , which happened around nine years ago, “We had a lot of questions back then just of like, ‘Can a teenager hold status in an immersive scene playing an adult with an audience member who is an adult? How would that even work?’ And it actually worked really, really well. And we completely had proof of concept that it was possible.”

As with Learning Curve, audiences will go through the stories in di erent orders, so one audience member’s experience of the show may be quite different from someone else’s. They may hear the same story but from another character’s point of view. Which seems completely in character with how family stories are passed around through generations.

Outside the building, Feiner and Rodriguez make sure I notice the installation City of Boxes by Albany Park resident and APTP alum Schantelle Alonzo in the front window. The artwork alludes to moments in the show, and also, as Alonzo puts it, honors the “resilience and adaptability that can be found in the personal stories of immigrants coming into this community and their success in building foundations here.”

Rodriguez also finds that it serves as an invitation to the immigrant community to explore the play. He notes that he was out front waiting for a delivery when a man walked by and began studying Alonzo’s installation. “All of a sudden, he said, ‘That’s my flag. That’s where I’m from,’” Rodriguez says. “Turns out he was from Ecuador. And then in Spanish he started to ask me, ‘What is this? And who are you?’ This is exactly why we’re here.”