1919 Tickets

On July 27, 1919, Chicago erupted following the killing of 17-year-old Eugene Williams in treacherous waters off the segregated Lake Michigan shoreline. The days that followed made an indelible mark on the city—its sense of boundaries, of relationships between neighbors and of the underlying systems of inequity and racism that persist today. Adapted by J. Nicole Brooks from Eve L. Ewing’s collection of searing and luminous poems, this world premiere is a hopeful, lyrical exploration of Black Chicagoan’s resistance, fortitude and endurance: past, present and future.