I used to live near Belmont, walking along the Boys Town commercial district several times a day, fully aware of the colorful variety of characters that hang around that street, and the reality that everyone has a story. But there are more stories than any of us can possibly imagine, and these stories transcend the stale data and stats in reaching our hearts and shaking us to action.

One young woman is proud that most of the men she sleeps with think she was born that way. Some of the street urchins have formed a self-defense gang on Belmont to fend of attacks by neo-nazi gangs. A young man in St. Louis has to escape his cruel home life and chronic homelessness, but won't forget to pack the ugly statue his little brother and sister got him. And a South Side youth bounces from shelter to shelter, well aware that people weren't meant to live in such places. These are some of the stories presented in the three-week run of About Face Youth Theatre's play the Home Project, a collection of true stories that was written and directed by Megan Carney in About Face's tenth season which have brought eight years of original plays to the stage.

Some of the stories are those of members of the seventeen-person ensemble cast, while others are of people that they have lost touch with. They spent two years collecting the stories and formatting them into a performance just over an hour long that flows remarkably well and gives the audience a better understanding of the six thousand LGBT youth in our city who are among the fifteen thousand homeless young people every year. Those statistics don't mean much, though, until you actually get a glimpse of their stories, which the Home Project does decidedly well. That it is performed by an ensemble which includes several performers who have lived these themes makes it a more genuine experience.

Some special mention must go out to Donorica Harris, who portrays the South Side lesbian youth whose story is told as an interview with a bureaucrat from the city, performing in her first play, and to DePaul student Randall Jenson who portrays a trans woman's telling of her story with grace and dignity. The bureaucrat later takes the center stage, revealing the earnest desire of many cogs in the government machinery to actually help the youth they encounter, and the helplessness they feel when confronted with the reality that, for some of these youth, forms can't be filled out thanks to a lack of I.D.

That monologue also incorporates one of the central themes of the performance- a call to the older LGBT crowd to refocus back on the very real problems poor LGBT youth. There the argument is laid out that a consumerist endeavor to obtain middle class legitimacy by some gay and lesbian communities leave class and abused youth issues in the darkness, in the alleyways, in the streets, and in the night. A view by some to join the mainstream through apathy or normalcy leaves the rest at the margins, and that monologue doesn’t spare LGBT activists either for what it sees as a similar lack of attention on Chicago’s homeless youth.

Often pushed out after they came out to their families, these youth learn that homelessness means "walking and walking and walking and walking," to paraphrase Lara Brooks of the Broadway Youth Center, one of several community organizations to collaborate on the play. Some of these paths have led to hope, with some of the storytellers going on to life as performers or students at prestigious universities, but the Home Project reminds us that it takes resources and hard work by a dedicated movement to make these opportunities possible. Well performed, beautifully woven together, the Home Project brings needed doses of compassion and urgency to the stories of young people in a city that is desperately trying to forget them.

Victory Gardens Theater
2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Through Jul. 30

Sundays : 2:30 p.m.
Wednesdays : 7:30 p.m.
Thursdays : 7:30 p.m.
Fridays : 7:30 p.m.
Saturdays : 7:30 p.m.

Price: $10-$40
Box office: 773-784-8565
Produced by: About Face Theatre