5 minute read
FACT OR FICTION
Evanston residents Juliet Hart and PJ Powers started Chicago’s Timeline Theatre nearly three decades ago with a mission that goes beyond putting on plays. The duo reflect on the company’s Living History Education Program and its new play, The Lifespan of a Fact, which opens November 1.
BY MITCH HURST THE NORTH SHORE WEEKEND
Though he gets asked every now and then if he’s married to Juliet Hart (this writer did), PJ Powers and Juliet Hart are most definitely married to other people.
But you can see how some might make the mistake.
Hart and Powers met three decades ago at The Theatre School at DePaul University. After graduating, they became two of three founders of Timeline Theatre in Chicago. Both now live in Evanston and they’ve been joined at the hip ever since.
Next up for Powers and Hart are their starring roles in The Lifespan of a Fact, a comedic look at the sometimes-shady area between fact and fiction.
Powers plays the writer John D’Agata, the author of an essay about Las Vegas that stretches the truth. Hart plays Emily Penrose, the Editor-in-Chief of a luxury magazine due to publish the essay, and Alex Benito Rodriquez plays Jim Fingal, an intern assigned to fact check the essay.
“It’s both a really fun and funny play and also a conversation starter. Jim Fingal came back with a laundry list of facts that he found questionable,” Powers says. “D’Agata’s stance was, ‘Hey, I’m not a journalist, I’m an essayist and I take some creative license and some creative liberties’.”
Powers says he empathizes with D’Agata because theater makers are not documentarians, and often take creative license to tell the story in the best way. That’s different than just making stories up and passing them off to journalism outlets that people trust.
“It’s challenging because in this day and age, the source for obtaining news for many people has become varied,” he says. “It isn’t like the old days when there were true journalistic publications and three television networks. People are getting information from social media through any number of sources and it’s hard to determine where truth and opinion and alternative facts might live.”
Given all the noise, exploring these issues seems as relevant as ever, even more so if you can reach children. In addition to being a member of the Timeline ensemble and taking roles in its plays, Hart runs Timeline’s History Education Program, a partnership with Chicago Public Schools that gives students exposure to the theater and also some of the themes that Timeline is tackling on stage.
The education program aligns with the mission when the theater company was founded 27 years ago.
Powers says they wanted to explore history and make connections between past and present, and that touch on the social and political issues of the day. They also wanted Timeline to be driven by the ethos of ensemble and for its 15 ensemble members to collaborate on programming.
“As Artistic Director, it’s my job to lead the group in discussion and decision making. My vote on what we should produce counts no more than the other 14 members,” he explains. “That was baked into our organization from the outset, to focus on our mission rather than thinking, ‘Let’s do this project for this artist or that project for that artist’.”
Hart’s interest in art education began during a pre-college gap year that she spent working with kids in the children’s theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The Timeline History Education Program was born out of her love for education, teachers, and learning (her father is a lifelong English teacher).
The program not only exposes school children to a play, but it does also so in a way that aligns the content of the play with whatever they may be studying in class at the time, be it history, social studies, or geography. The Timeline cast spends time in the classroom with students and students attend a special matinee where the audience is entirely made up of schoolchildren. The kids are also offered the opportunity to act out a scene or two of the play if they’re comfortable.
“We introduce students to whatever the play is onstage through the social and historical context and encourage students to find their own personal connection, whatever it may be in that point in history or to that social or political issue,” Hart says. “The most important thing to us is that students’ own identity and experience has an opportunity to express itself.”
Timeline works with 10 different schools at any given time and about 1,000 students participate every year. It would love to work with more, Hart says, but there are logistical challenges with a smaller theater space to do much more.
“When the actual live experience happens with all the other context around it,” she says, “it’s so rich and just a really important part of the process and of developing a whole new generation of theater makers and theater lovers.”
The Lifespan of a Fact runs November 1 through December 23. For more information about the theatre or to purchase tickets, visit timelinetheatre.com.
