A theater company is hoping to make Logan Square its new home, and neighbors excitedly supported the company’s benefit performance on Aug. 22.
Theatre Y (@Theatre_Y), currently moving into a space behind St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square (2649 N. Francisco Ave.), is the vision of actor Melissa Lorraine. The innovative theater company is set to premiere The Binding this fall.
Bringing a New Vision of Theater to Logan Square
While studying in Eastern Europe, Lorraine met Hungarian/Romanian playwright András Visky and fell in love with his work. Visky became her mentor and connected her to a theater experience she’s continually integrating into her work.
In 2006, she co-founded Theatre Y with the hopes of channeling the human experience and reminding audiences of their “universally shared meaning.”
“We’re trying to mine the tension between our spirit and the loftiest thoughts we’re capable of, and our flesh and the fact that we bleed and we sweat,” she says. “Never getting lost too far in either direction.”
The theater undertook Visky’s English premiere of Juliet—a dark one-woman performance about life in a Romanian prison camp. Without a permanent home, the company performed Juliet and other productions across the U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Along the way, they worked to incorporate new approaches and techniques from artists they’d met across the globe.
“Nothing excites me more than this cacophony of languages, experiences, world views and interpretations,” Lorraine says.
But now, Theatre Y is ready for a “point of convergence,” and the company hopes to make theater a powerful communal experience. The audiences she met in Eastern Europe viewed theater differently, almost sacredly, she says, adding thatthe memory of state-controlled theater made it revered in a way hard to explain to Western patrons.
She hopes to bring that sacred theater experience here and housing Theatre Y in a church building felt appropriate.
“The theater has become my holy space,” she says. “It’s where I feel I’m most capable of healing, and my mentor [Visky] always says, ‘the sacred is never something we can touch alone. It will always be experienced inside of community.’”
Finding a Home in Logan Square
St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square has worked with Partners for Sacred Spaces for years. The Rev. Erik Christensen says the program pairs artists with historic sacred places (like the original St. Luke’s building built in 1901).
“Logan Square doesn’t have a lot of theater space, so as a congregation that has community arts at the heart of our mission and one having a space that is perfectly situated for that, it felt like a natural step for us,” Christensen says of the collaboration with Theatre Y.
Although the congregation opened the space for various artists and performances, they hadn’t found the “right fit,” he says. Theatre Y moved in on Aug. 1. The congregation has not yet formalized an agreement.
Theatre Y’s The Binding opens on Oct. 3 and runs through Nov. 3 Thursday through Sunday at 7 pm. Tickets can be purchased online.
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