Productions & Events featuring Janice Pytel

This powerful drama “changed American theater forever” (The New York Times) and resonates across generations — recently serving as inspiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park. An African-American family living in a crowded apartment on Chicago’s South Side during the 1950s believes that a better life is just around the corner. But they are challenged when their plan to buy a home in the Clybourne Park neighborhood is thwarted by racial intolerance. This award-winning play celebrates faith, courage and the human spirit, even as it spotlights divides that still plague Chicago more than 50 years after its premiere.

This sexy, multi-faceted puzzle of a play travels from East to West and across time, exploring provocative themes in both epic scope and human scale. In the 1880s, a Victorian woman visiting Japan is fascinated by a new invention — the camera — that allows people to own images of distant lands they never dreamed they would be able to see. In modern-day Tokyo, a collector navigates shifting relationships in search of physical memories of the past. Along the way we gaze as if through a lens at the mysterious intersection of art and authenticity, where very little is what it appears to be.