Feasting in Chicago

By: Katherine Montalto | May 05 2010
Posted in Find It - Chicago

Feast is a play served up in courses instead of acts. Each of the six savory courses tells a different tale of a diverse group of Albany Park residents through the food they grow, produce, and cook. The play opens with monologues from three kids who each come from families on food stamps, and how this shapes their lives.

Photo courtesy of Albany Park Theater Project

The Big Idea

The rest of the courses follow charters through dance, music, costume, and song to tell the tale of a third-generation halal butcher from Lebanon, a tamale maker from Mexico, a boy from the Phillipines tasked with raising a cow, a girl from Peru learning to make ceviche and aji, a young wife from India trying to please her husband with biryani, and a sugar cane worker from who makes moonshine to support his family in Puerto Rico.

The youth performers of the Albany Park Theater Project interviewed their own family members and each other to create acts and songs based on the food culture that shapes their lives directly and the micro-cultures that exist in their Albany park neighborhood.

Necessary Info

"Feast," by the Albany Park Theater Project plays at the Laura Wiley Theater at Eugene Field Park field house 5100 North Ridgeway in Chicago, Fridays and Saturdays through May 8. Tickets are $18 full price, $6 for students (7th-12th grades), $6 for Albany Park residents, and $12 for college students.

Check out the play and let The Local Dish know what you think.

What are your favorite intersections of art and food -- in songs, movies, books, plays? Julie and Julia, anyone?