Theater students from Chicago-area colleges including Northwestern University, DePaul University, Roosevelt University and North Central College will combine forces this weekend to create a performance in 24 hours, as part of mobile ticketing app TodayTix’s Next Generation Series.
“We're going to bring together an ensemble of students from various Chicago colleges to create a piece of theater,” says TodayTix co-founder and chairman Brian Fenty in a phone conversation. “They're going to be multidisciplinary in terms of their interests and expertise, and over a 24-hour period, they're going to be visited by a bevy of Chicago theater professionals” who will offer guidance and mentorship.
At the end of the process, on Sunday, April 9 at 7pm, the 10-member ensemble will present a public performance of their creation at the Greenhouse Theater Center. Tickets are $10 and go on sale today via TodayTix, with all proceeds going to the Center on Halsted (the beneficiary chosen by the students).
The 24-hour project is a continuation of TodayTix’s Next Generation Series, which began last April as a weekend of workshops for theater students from several local colleges and culminated in a panel discussion featuring 14 theater professionals. It’s a program the company hopes to replicate in the nine other markets in which it operates.
“Chicago's sort of going to be the anchor city for this program,” Fenty says, crediting TodayTix marketing manager Rachel Birnbaum, an Evanston native and Northwestern alum, as instrumental in leading the charge. “I think Rachel really understood on a firsthand level how rich the student artistic community is there, with the density of schools, with the storefront theater there, all the great adjacent theatrical offerings that exist, and how important that young lifeblood is.”
Since entering the Chicago market at the end of 2015, TodayTix has forged partnerships with 50 local theaters—including special arrangements like a mobile lottery for $12 tickets to Kokandy Productions’ current The Wiz and $20 “Rush+Ride” tickets to Skokie’s Northlight Theatre that include free Lyft rides to and from the show. “It's all really part of our mission of making theater and culture more accessible to everyone, but especially millennials,” says Fenty.
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