Albany Park Theater Project makes its home in the Albany Park neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. All of our youth artists, most of the stories we tell on our stage, and many of our audience members come from Albany Park.
Albany Park is a neighborhood of 57,000 people on Chicago's northwest side and one of the city and country's most diverse communities, with more than 50% of residents born outside the United States. The diversity of the APTP ensemble is indicative of the neighborhood: APTP's teen artists have traced their roots to Belize, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, India, Ireland, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Mexico, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Sweden, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, several U.S. states, and more. Despite gentrification that has eaten away at affordable housing over the past ten years, Albany Park remains predominantly working-class. Read more about the history of Albany Park.
APTP's art enhances the vitality of Albany Park; builds relationships among people across ethnic, religious, and economic lines; and models for audiences a multi-ethnic, multi-religious ensemble working together as a community with respect, skill, and love.
Telling the stories of Albany Park to people from outside our neighborhood has always been central to our mission. Too often, the stories and contributions and challenges of people living on society's margins go untold, or get told in a manner controlled and shaped by people and organizations with greater access to power. Many people in our neighborhood live outside the mainstream of American society: we are immigrants, refugees, people of color, working class, working poor. Through the theater APTP creates based on real-life stories, we add these voices, these experiences, these challenges, and these perspectives to the cultural landscape and the civic dialogue of Albany Park, of Chicago, of the United States. When audience members attend an APTP performance, they are taken on a journey-with APTP's youth artists as their guides-deep into the lived experience of people different than them. Audience members emerge from this journey with greater understanding and respect for the values, struggles, and dreams of others.
APTP is also dedicated to engaging audience members in ways that go beyond watching a performance and that transform our artistic home into a community gathering place. We follow every performance with a conversation, facilitated by youth ensemble members. We also host events that explore the themes in our performances. These events have ranged from a community forum on undocumented immigrants in Chicago, to a forum about ways to increase access to college for Chicago public school students; to a Persian cooking class.
