Wirtz Center at Northwestern University

Grace is an interactive performance and a deeply personal look at artificial intelligence, games, technology, and the people who make them. It is an investigation of how we interact with natural language processing programs everyday–and how they will never love us back. It is about identity and how it is constructed in person and online. And it’s about what happens when your voice travels around the world in ways you never imagined.

Violet and Bruce Wong just don’t fit in with the other Earth kids. Sure, they have superpowers; they’re just not very good ones. But when an evil beast called the Space Chupacabra appears, intent on universal destruction, the Wong kids must travel to far reaches of outer space to stop it …if they can only stop bickering. Violet and Bruce ultimately realize that being different isn’t just okay; it might just be the most important thing ever. Using a mix of action-driven storytelling, puppetry, and visual magic, The Wong Kids transports its audience into the galaxy’s far reaches.

Suggested Ages 7+
Approximate Run Time 70 minutes, no intermission

Alone in solitary confinement, a teenager called out to the men in the hole with him: “Somebody, send me a book!” Moments later, Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets slid under his cell door. Those pages, in that funky and desperate place, were the start of the teen’s transformation into a poet, lawyer, and promoter of the rights of prisoners. Now, 23 years after his release from prison, Reginald Dwayne Betts explores the experience and lingering consequences of having a criminal record in a solo theater show based on his poetry collection, Felon. Betts, who recently received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, advocates for literacy in prisons and is the founding director nonprofit organization Freedom Reads, which delivers books to inmates and brings contemporary writers and artists together with incarcerated audiences.

Sophocles’ Antigone, translated by poet and MacArthur Fellow Anne Carson, remains unequaled in its ability to combine all the fundamental contradictions of the human condition into a single, universally relevant drama. Following the bloody power struggle between her brothers, Antigone attempts to secure a respectable burial for her brother Polynices, thus defying the edict of her uncle, King Creon. Antigone is accused of treachery and must answer to Creon himself. Her fraternal love is unwavering, as is her rejection of her uncle’s political views. She stands firm, and her obstinacy threatens to bring the entire state to its knees.

Suggested Ages 13+
Approximate Run Time 75 minutes, no intermission

By Sophocles
A new version by Anne Carson
Directed by Tae-Heum Yeon