ABSTRACT
I am in a room full of teenagers. We are on the third floor of a park fieldhouse in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago. It is a Saturday afternoon in January, and outside the sun is shining, a harsh, almost blinding brightness, but it is cold, maybe 20°, and windy. The wind whistles through the crack under the door that leads out to the fire escape and rattles the glass in the windows. Only one of the black-painted radiators works, and it is too hot to touch. The room is a stage with a heavily lacquered and polished wooden floor. The teenagers are lying on their backs on the floor, their eyes closed. They are part of a group called TeenStreet, which is the youth outreach arm of a larger community-based theater arts program called Free Street.
