"Intelligent, unruly [...] there is much beauty in this abundance,
and something deeply unsettling, too."
- The New York Times
FRONTIERES SANS FRONTIERES
Written by Phillip Howze
Directed by Kezia Waters
Jul 17, 2025 - Aug 24, 2025
Thursdays at 7pm, Saturdays at 3pm and 7pm, and Sundays at 3pm
3611 W. Cermak, Chicago, IL 60623
SUMMARY
Here, at the corner of a country that feels both foreign and familiar, three orphaned, stateless youth have built a simple life out of recreation and mischief-making. Their world is rocked as a parade of immodest strangers slowly invade, offering gifts of language, medicine, art, and commerce. As the lure of development blurs their beliefs, life and landscape mutate, threatening their long-held values, community, and humanity. In a comic spectacle to challenge the pretense of altruism and civilization, Frontieres Sans Frontieres asks what happens when generosity looks a lot like self-interest? How to comprehend when the promise of language matures to the tyranny of words? Who wins and who loses in a war to hold on to the people and places we love?
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
Phillip Howze’s play Frontieres Sans Frontieres is about three orphans navigating the abstract yet familiar world called, “here”—a place shaped by the imperial systems of education, healthcare, media, and even theater itself. Through the lens of absurdism and dark comedy, Frontieres Sans Frontieres asks the audience to confront how these systems shape our values, our relationships, and even our bodies. This play reflects on how soft power has built the worlds that we assume have been around forever, but what happens when we begin to pull the loose ends of these fragile structures of reality? Ok, now take all of that but make it funny!!!
There’s resistance in how we remember things, there’s imagination, there’s a spark of something ancient and wise—embodied knowledge, art, presence—that reminds us we weren’t always THIS way. Humans are not wired THIS way, and therefore there is also resistance in how we forget things.
The questions at the heart of this play are both simple and profound: What becomes possible when we unlearn? And another strikingly timely question posed by Toni Cade Bambara, “What are you pretending not to Know?”
-Kezia Waters (Director/ Theatre Doula/o)
Theatre Y is a Chicago-based international incubator that creates connections between diverse artists seeking mutual growth through collaboration. Since 2006, Theatre Y has been a point of convergence for diverse activisms, and all of the uncomfortable conversations that happen as a result. Artistic director Melissa Lorraine and the Theatre Y ensemble are committed to continuously re-thinking the practice of theater as a tool of liberation and a revolutionary practice, bringing Theatre Y to venues ranging from La MaMa’s historical theater to Illinois prisons. Newly and permanently relocated to the West Side (on the border of North Lawndale and Little Village), Theatre Y, now in its 19th year of award winning experimental productions, challenging international content, and a member-based FREE theater model, occupies a unique place in Chicago's theater community.
