By Ben Joravsky
For almost 15 years Palidofsky, a playwright, has made a specialty of getting teenagers to write plays. In the last few years MTW, a not-for-profit north-side group, has produced plays written and performed by inmates at the juvenile detention center as well as by kids from public and private high schools all over the city.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The collaboration with the Field Museum enabled MTW to raise enough money to pay students for their writing, rehearsing, and performing. “The Field Museum was interested in appealing to teenagers because teens don’t come to the museum very much,” says Palidofsky. “It was our job to get teenagers together from across the city and look at the issue of living together.”
In contrast, Luke Kummer, a 17-year-old junior at Whitney Young, comes across as quiet and reserved. “When I first meet people I sort of hang back,” says Kummer. “But I’ve done some writing and I’ve taught myself to play the harmonica–never had a lesson–and I love music.”
Many of Lahoz’s poems express the heartbreak of being uprooted from the Philippines and separated from her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in ten years. “My father was a political prisoner in the Philippines–Marcos didn’t like him so he put him in prison,” she says. “He was able to take me here, but my mother stayed back at home.”
I tried to scream out
and see the part of me
