What's Inside?
Full Catalogue
Explore our selection of over 40 uniquely Black stories, vividly performed and expertly crafted.
Backstage
Get a deeper dive into the history and making of some of your favorite stories.
Interviews with Icons
Hear directly from some of the most influential talents in Black culture.
Listen Magazine
Enjoy a monthly magazine that contains sneak peeks, insightful information, and other tidbits.
First Monday Releases
Yvonne Huff Lee is a dynamo of a creative talent. Her fingerprints are all over decades of outstanding work from theater to Oscar winning film. Together with her husband Jason Delane, Yvonne heads Lower Depth Theater in Los Angeles in addition to their numerous credits producing film. In this interview Yvonne shares her journey from Arizona through Chicago and on to LA. Along the way she started a family and launched cultural institutions that amplify the voices of generations of women of color.
Third Day delicately maneuvers around a relationship between a minister and his gay son.
Full of self-righteousness the Rev. Archer refuses to accept his son’s evolving identity and ascendant agency. When the Rev. Archer dies, Robert is plunged into a world of self-doubt and self-examination as he struggles with whether he will attend his own father’s funeral.
Six months after the passing of Larry Nance, his MPAACT family gathered to celebrate his life and his sole surviving manuscript – THIRD DAY. This segment, captured on the same evening as the recording of Larry’s one act play, was a strange and intoxicating mix of joy, sorrow and community. This is as honest a conversation as there is on Larry as a creative, and as a complex human being navigating questions of purpose, acceptance, and identity. It’s a bitter-sweet moment, where our relationships and commitment to the art and to our artists were affirmed.
Speaking in Tongues offers an incredibly vivid feel of what life was like in Chicago’s sixteen-story housing projects, from the promise of move-in day in the 1960s to the degrading, caged reality, inside city mandated steel mesh that eventually encapsulated the buildings. A collage of memories resonate with truths both humorous and poignant, violent and disturbing, Speaking in Tongues is a rare theatrical experience – first hand insights from an often obscured and dismissed sector of Black American reality.
Returning to Our Roots
From the time of our ancestors, our story and our history has been told orally. The Griot in our villages kept and told the oral history of our people, and passed it down to the next generations. More recently, our transplanted elders gathered the family around the victrola radio in the living room and listened to the news and stories of the world, as well as weekend episodes of the family’s favorite radio serials.
Birthed during the global pandemic which shuttered our theatre doors for a year, we took heart in the ability to return to our elders’ tradition. MPAACT invites you to stream our Podcast Play Series- radio plays presented for your enjoyment. Gather around with family and enjoy dynamically Black stories presented comfortably in your home.
Who We Are
MPAACT exists to develop, nurture, and sustain Afrikan Centered Theatre [ACT], an artistic expression grounded in the many cultures and traditions of the Afrikan continent and its Diaspora. With a vision focused on creating new work and collaborative art, MPAACT produces and educates with the goal of increasing understanding and appreciation of [ACT] and its interrelated disciplines.
MPAACT has grown from a collective of like-minded individuals who shared an artistic vision, to an organization that has produced a formidable body of work. This work includes: main stage productions, a playwright’s laboratory, standing productions, original music, a publishing company [Sakhu Publications], an arts education program, and many workshops and master classes.
It is important to us as a company that we, in everything we do, pull from the disparate cultural elements which unite artists in the Afrikan Diaspora. Drawing from the well that nourished artists such as Wole Soyinka, Charles Mingus, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka and Bob Marley among others, we create and perform work, which examines and celebrates the many facets of Afrikan theatre.
Want to learn more? Visit our official website mpaact.org!
Contact
Greenhouse Theatre Center
2257 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60614
information@mpaact.org
661.373.3089
Mail: P.O. Box 10039
Chicago IL, 60610