"Everything is - yes imagined, yes somehow created, somehow made up,
yes - yes, even if it actually happens."
Theatre Y Presents
I Am the Wind
By Jon Fosse
Translated by May-Brit Akerholt
Directed by Evan Hill
Starring Melissa Lorraine and Hank Hilbert
September 24 - November 1, 2026
Thu-Sat @ 7pm, Sun @ 5pm
FREE and open to the public. PLEASE RSVP
Location: Theatre Y - 3611 W Cermak Rd, Chicago, IL 60623
TICKETS
Two lifelong friends sail into open water: one edging closer to the pull of oblivion, the other with a question neither can escape. Nobel laureate Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind is a poetic, aching meditation on companionship, loss, and the fragility of life. Staged with physical risk - actors suspended on narrow swinging planks with nothing to catch them - the delicate reality of the body hangs in the balance.
We are proud to present the Chicago premiere of I Am the Wind from September 24-November 1, 2026 at Theatre Y, located at 3611 W Cermak Rd. The production is directed by Evan Hill and stars Melissa Lorraine and Hank Hilbert, in a translation into English by May-Brit Akerholt.
We are pleased to announce the return of artistic director and critically acclaimed actor Melissa Lorraine back to the stage after a six-year acting hiatus. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley referred to her as “an almost elemental presence.” She is joined by Hank Hilbert, who is also once again gracing Chicago with his magnetic, volcanic stage presence after several years away as a stand-up comedian - a form of performance that demands the kind of individual charisma and appeal that serves this two-hander well.
Fosse’s open-ended dialogue finds resonant metaphors and philosophical depth in verbal simplicity and concreteness, as his musical, rhythmic language is surrounded by the theatrical electricity of silence and the unspeakable. The play could be understood as a memory play, a ghost story, a philosophical dialogue, or a piece of psychotherapeutic introspection. This production challenges audiences to suspend their normal habits of perceiving and thinking and to rediscover the desire to participate in the mystery of living.
About Jon Fosse
Born in 1959 on Norway's west coast, Jon Fosse spent nearly three decades as one of Europe's most widely produced living playwrights, writing roughly thirty full-length plays that have been translated into more than forty languages and staged from Paris to Tokyo. Le Monde famously dubbed him "the Beckett of the 21st Century," a comparison that has followed him ever since — though scholars increasingly describe his work on its own terms: a theater built from silence, repetition, and the space between people rather than from plot or incident. His characters are frequently unnamed, defined less by biography than by their relationships, and Fosse has described the pauses that structure his plays as a kind of speech carrying "unknown meaning."
That style met a slower reception in the English-speaking world than on the continent, where Fosse became a fixture of German and French stages; he was named a Chevalier of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002. Some early English-language productions struck critics as difficult or opaque, which made the acclaim for Chéreau's I Am the Wind — one of the few Fosse productions in the UK to be embraced almost universally by critics — a turning point in the playwright's Anglo-American recognition.
In 2023, Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy citing his innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unsayable.
About Theatre Y:
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 20th year of experimental productions, challenging international content, and a member-based FREE theater model, occupies a unique place in Chicago's theater community.
More about our history and mission.
About the Artists
Quinn Chisenhall (Lighting Designer) is thrilled to be back at Theatre Y after Charges. Selected credits include: Confederates (Redtwist); House of the Exquisite Corpse V (co-design) (Rough House); Puppet Lab 2023-26 (Chicago Int'l Puppet Festival); Heaven, Lady Di, and Best Actress (Grelley Duvall); and A Picasso (Elsinore). BA Theatre Design & Technology from Columbia College Chicago. QuinnChisenhall.Com
Hank Hilbert (Actor - The One) is a Chicago-based actor and comedian whose work spans theater and stand-up comedy. He is a Jeff Award recipient for his performance in Idomeneus, a recognition that highlights his commitment to powerful, ensemble-driven storytelling. For the past ten years, Hank has also been performing stand-up comedy, bringing a sharp comedic sensibility and a decades of live-performance experience to everything he does onstage. His work across both theater and comedy reflects his versatility, curiosity, and passion for connecting with audiences. Hank is thrilled to return to Chicago and join Theater Y’s production of I Am the Wind. He is excited to be back on the Chicago stage and to share this remarkable work with audiences.
Evan Hill (Director) is a dramaturg, researcher, educator, and theater-maker. He is the resident dramaturg of Chicago’s Theatre Y, with whom he has conceived and created several new works, such as The Camino Project and Laughing Song. He has served as associate editor of Yale’s journal Theater. Evan holds an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama, where he is completing his DFA. His research brings theories of social innovation and creative cognition to examine experimental comic practices and avant-garde humor from the late 19th century to the present. He currently teaches theater at Rollins College.
Melissa Lorraine (Actor - The Other / Theatre Y Co-Founding Artistic Director) was born in France and graduated from Northern Illinois University with a B.F.A. in acting, after which she joined Studio K in Budapest, Hungary. She premiered the English version of András Visky’s Juliet in 2006 (with over 300 performances worldwide). András then told her he could write her six more plays, and that she should start a company, and so, together with Director Christopher Markle (who died in 2008), she co-founded Theatre Y in Chicago to import Visky's Barrack Dramaturgy (which frames the ritual of theater as one in which we willfully incarcerate ourselves with a group of strangers around a problem, and no one is allowed to leave until we arrive at a new place together.) Theatre Y has produced exactly six more Visky plays, including I KILLED MY MOTHER (for which Lorraine received a Best Actress Award in Chicago and a rave from Ben Brantley in the New York Times). Collaborating with Georges Bigot at Theatre Y for one year (2015-16), Lorraine developed an Ensemble of actors, according to the traditions of the Theatre du Soleil, and leading “from behind”, creating a common language and a way to pursue excellence without torture.
In 2017 Lorraine survived a violent crime and needed movement therapy for trauma rehabilitation. In 2018 she brought this practice into Illinois prisons. Lorraine became a prison abolitionist almost immediately and works with an ‘Inside Ensemble’ of men serving life sentences across the State who have rehabilitated themselves, obtained multiple degrees inside, and who work tirelessly to re-humanize our punitive justice system. She has produced and performed or directed over 50 works of theater at Theatre Y over the last 20 years. Her production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros earned two Jeff Awards in 2024.
Kimberly A. Sutton - Sound Designer is a sound artist, cellist, and sound designer living in Chicago, Illinois. Her installations and sound design work explore the connections between the physical properties of sound and the cultural signifiers of its content. As a cellist her practice is improvisatory and explores the possibilities of expression and reflection through sound and the immediacy of a meditational connection to her instrument. Recent installations have been shown at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Chicago Home Theater Festival. She has performed at Experimental Sound Studio, the Hideout and the Empty Bottle in Chicago, Yoshi’s in Oakland, Detroit Contemporary, and the Technosonics Festival at the University of Virginia. She has a BA in Political Science and Music from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Electronic Music and Recorded Media from Mills College.
Production Stage Manager: Christian Mitchell
Assistant Stage Manager and General Manager: Charles Hill
Assistant Director: Toussaint Daniels
Set Design: Evan Hill and Melissa Lorraine
Sound Design: Evan Hill and Kimberly Sutton
Facilities Manager and Carpenter: Miguel Pereda
Sound Technicians: James Clayton Bowman and Tommy Grant
Managing Director: Dan Christmann
Social Media Coordinator/Events Programmer: Darien Williams
For press inquiries, interviews, or more information, please contact:
Managing Director Dan Christman: 616-947-4455 / danchristman@theatre-y.com
Artistic Director Melissa Lorraine: 773-908-2248 / melissalorraine@theatre-y.com
info@theatre-y.com / www.theatre-y.com
Full Press Release / Director’s Notes
I Am the Wind is a poetic meditation on companionship, loss, and the fragility of existence. Two lifelong friends — known only as The One and The Other — sail together into the open ocean to confront what it means for life to live, why some choose to depart from the living, and how we process death's severing of our most intimate bonds. Told in Fosse's signature register - minimalistic ambiguity that attempts to “give voice to the unsayable” - the play unfolds as a collective contemplation on our tenuous attachments to earthly reality and the involuntary pull toward oblivion, as one man's restlessness draws them further from shore and from safety.
Fosse’s open-ended dialogue finds resonant metaphors and philosophical depth in verbal simplicity and concreteness, as his musical, rhythmic language is surrounded by the theatrical electricity of silence and the unspeakable. Throughout the play, Fosse self-reflexively wrestles with the simultaneous necessity and failure of words and images to capture things, events, thoughts, feelings, and even the self. According to Fosse’s stage directions, “I Am the Wind is set in an imagined boat, only barely represented, and the action is also imagined, and should not be executed, but represented.” Fosse’s resistance to realistic representation is strategic: the play collapses time and place into a psychological, dreamlike plane where physical and mental space, past and present, memory and presence commingle in unpredictable and often unsettling ways.
In our production, this liminal state is staged by suspending the actors on two narrow, swinging planks of wood several feet off the ground with no safety apparatus – a staging of actual risk inspired by a line in the show: “yes without the boat / a couple of sideway steps / and we don’t exist any longer.” Our production seizes on sound as a medium that conjures the presence of the invisible or absent within the imagination. An allusive soundscape by Evan Hill and Kimberly Sutton awakens the audience’s sensitivity to the act of close listening, in which uncanny sounds evoke phenomena they are not: distant city traffic may be confused for the roar of the ocean, the strokes of a typewriter for rain, a rewinding tape recorder slowed down for the creaking of a sailboat.
The play could be understood as a memory play, a ghost story, a philosophical dialogue, or a piece of psychotherapeutic introspection. But, while embracing the text’s interpretive ambiguity, director Evan Hill treats the play as a liturgical form more than a drama. He views its contemplative dramaturgy as inseparable from Fosse’s childhood spent in Quaker worship meetings. Fosse, according to Hill, seems to theatricalize the communal, introspective stillness of Quaker practice, reframing the theater as a ritual space where stage and audience are united in simple yet transformative acts of presence, silence, attention, and active listening. Following Fosse, Hill embraces this play as a tonic for the noise and speed of contemporary life and a challenge to theatrical logics of entertainment, spectacle, and conflict. This production challenges audiences to suspend their normal habits of perceiving and thinking and to rediscover the desire to participate in the mystery of living. "Everything is - yes imagined, yes somehow created, somehow made up, yes - yes, even if it actually happens."
We are pleased to announce that this production features the return of artistic director and critically acclaimed actor Melissa Lorraine back to the stage after a six-year acting hiatus. Known for her commitment to psychological nuance, unflinching vulnerability, and guileless candor onstage, as well as her verbal dexterity and expressive physicality, Lorraine is no stranger to the task of animating challenging texts with emotional depth. Her performances have been universally praised by critics. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley referred to her as “an almost elemental presence,” writing that "[Lorraine] plies her character's grim magic with such angry conviction that you may well pinch your arm to make sure it's still made of flesh. But your emotions, at least, are likely to remain raw and human.” The Chicago Tribune praised her performance in Andras Visky’s Juliet for "shouldering some terrifically complicated demands in this one-woman show, [giving] a performance that will lodge itself in your memory long after you've left the theater." Time-Out Chicago writes: “the material seems practically seared into her flesh. Not a word that comes out of her mouth is false or forced, and she brings a feral, untamed physicality to her arguments with God." Tony Adler of the Chicago Reader was an extremely vocal proponent of her talents across many performances – in a review he titled “The Most Unassuming Diva on the Planet Shines in The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez,” Adler calls her “vivid […] playful, steely, self-absorbed, unencumbered,” and declares “I’d choose to sit through anything she chose to perform.” She was awarded Chicago's Best Actress Orgie Award in 2010 and named one of the "6 Stars of 2012" by the Chicago Reader.
She is joined by Hank Hilbert, who is also once again gracing Chicago with his magnetic, volcanic stage presence after several years away as a stand-up comedian - a form of performance that demands the kind of individual charisma and appeal that serves this two-hander well. He is a Jeff Award recipient for his performance in Idomeneus (Sideshow Theatre) and has performed in Chicago theaters including Steppenwolf, The Artistic Home, International Voices Project, Premiere Theatre Company, UrbanTheater Company, Bruised Orange, and Theatre Y.
What makes this casting unique is that Lorraine and Hilbert have known each other for over 25 years. They met when both were training in the same Meisner program under Kathryn Gately at NIU, whom Meisner selected as his protégé in the teaching of his method. These two actors share a performance language rooted in emotional availability and authentic responsiveness, as well as a history of personal friendship, that will make this production one of the most gripping acting collaborations this year.
