David Schein was sitting in a sidewalk cafe on Western Avenue near Belden, sipping a margarita and enjoying a warm July night in 1996, when a young man stepped out from behind a red truck. Schein remembers he was Latino, about 14 or 15 years old, with a shaved head.
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The two boys took off and Schein bolted from his seat, running back into the restaurant to call 911, then crossing Western with a posse of other diners to see if they could help. The young man lay howling in pain, his head dented above the temple. His girlfriend had to be restrained to keep her from hugging him too tightly or shaking him while she pleaded, “Stay strong, Manuel, hang in there, Manuel. Don’t die.”
Schein had moved to Chicago from New York five years before. He’d started to resent the confinement of his office job, handling classified ads for the New York Review of Books. Broke and frustrated, he says, “I decided I wanted a job in theater.”
Schein was one of the finalists for a position running Siamsa Tire, Ireland’s national folk theater, when he witnessed the assault on Western. But instead of providing him with further reason to leave the city, Schein says it made him all the more aware of what he had here–his wife, his two-year-old daughter, his house, his job–and of how much he loved his life. The assault and subsequent police investigation inspired Schein to write a long prose poem that would later become a solo show, My Murder. (The young man eventually died of his injuries in the hospital.) Schein has performed the show twice in the past year and has written two companion pieces for it, one about his father’s bypass operation, the other about his daughter.
