Big changes are coming for new artworks in the Trump era, and Chicago actor and director Kevin Aoussou is keenly aware of the ripple effects around him. Like many other millennials, Aoussou, 31, is adept at using his voice and social media platforms for change.
That’s why all of the performances this weekend at the Social Change Theater Festival are staged readings, with actors working from scripts without the costumes and sets of a full production. The goal is to workshop brand-new plays that cover big themes, from criminal justice reform and climate change to gender ideology — the latter a focus of the Trump administration’s recent flurry of executive orders.
“We’ve grown up in a time and in a space where there’s constantly things happening and drawing us [in] and traumatizing us,” says Aoussou, associate director of the social justice–focused Still Point Theatre Collective. “There is a desire to create change through what we create physically, even if we’re not able to create change on a structural level.”
He’s been putting the finishing touches on the festival, running Saturday through Monday at the Athenaeum Theatre in Lake View. Aoussou has never produced a theater festival before. He’s been so busy, he hasn’t had time to be nervous. But he is excited.
“Our hope is to create a moment around social change through theater,” he says. “There is a community that is here, that cares about each other and cares about our neighbors. We want to create a space for those people to come together.”
That desire slots Aoussou right into a larger scene of local millennials shaping the next generation of stories for Chicago stages. As a group, they define a brand of theater that feels unique to their experiences as a generation, informed by how social issues affect them and a strong desire to foster relationships where they live.
“More than anything, it’s not just about going in and doing the show,” Aoussou says. “It’s about connecting first, and the show is the bonus. That creates stories that are so impactful and real.”
At a recent new works festival hosted by the Chicago Cultural Center, playwright Nikki Carpenter, another millennial, centered a script on a group of seniors pitted against land developers. Her play, “The Last Senior Home in Bronzeville,” discusses the gentrification currently affecting her real-life neighborhood.
“The play is reflective of Chicago right now, because we are in a unique place,” Carpenter says. “Clearly, gentrification is happening around us. So, the community has to ask: What elements are we willing to do away with, and when are we willing to say, ‘No, no amount of money can tear this property down. No amount of influence can erase this history’?”
Carpenter, a Chicago native and five-year resident of Bronzeville, says her writing is influenced by people who came before her, but her style and approach are deeply rooted in the experiences of her everyday life.
“Even though I’m influenced by August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry, I’m a millennial,” she says. “So, I try to hone in on that influence, but I also want to be an artist who reflects the time. And even though I can’t write from a 1964 perspective, I can write from a 2025 perspective of my neighborhood changing.”
Chicago playwright Krystal Ortiz, another up-and-coming millennial voice, is currently workshopping a punk-rock jukebox musical, “frikiNation.” The musical, which also was read during the Cultural Center’s new works festival, explores the real friki subculture of punk Cuban artists who, during the oppressive communist regime in the 1980s, infected themselves with HIV-positive blood. They wanted to spend their dying days creating art in a government-sanctioned hospital.
It was on a trip to Cuba that Ortiz learned about this history. “I’m Cuban American,” Ortiz says. “A friend of mine who was on the trip with me had a bunch of tattoos and piercings, and this Cuban guy came up to us on the street and asked her if she was a ‘friki.’ ”
Ortiz later learned the true meaning of the term and was amazed at the intense decision the artists made at the time, sacrificing their lives for an opportunity to die making art in improved living conditions. “It just screamed theatrical to me,” Ortiz says. “And I knew: This is a story that needs to be put out there and told. So, it just made sense to write about it.”
Like other millennial playwrights, Ortiz sees theater as a vehicle for larger conversations about issues affecting one’s own life.
There is “this notion that punk and alternative scenes can be seen as a spectacle, or done for shock value or just to be contrarian,” Ortiz says. “I’ve been super interested in focusing back into the root of that, and it’s protest — but not protest for the sake of protest. It’s protest for a means to an end, to live the life you want to live and achieve the things you want to achieve.”
Aoussou says he hopes his inaugural festival — backed by in-kind theater space from the Athenaeum and partnerships with fellow theater groups — helps build a community of like-minded creatives. He finds this crucial in a time when theater is still reeling from COVID losses while facing a new challenge: a presidential administration bent on threatening crucial federal funds.
“If we think that work that we’re doing is important, then we have to keep doing the work,” Aoussou says. “The scale that we’re able to do it at is going to shift. And how we go about doing the work might shift.”
For Aoussou, that shift looks like partnerships and finding ways to share resources — conversations that he foresees as a key component to the festival. The staged readings at the Social Change Theater Festival are produced by companies around Chicago, including a new play by Brian Beals, executive director of Mud Theatre Project, an organization founded in Lee County’s the Dixon Correction Center. The lineup also features a new play from About Face Theatre, with its mission to tell LGBTQ+ stories.
Some of these projects could fall under the umbrella of noncompliance for National Endowment for the Arts grants, according to new federal funding rules. But the Social Change Festival, as Aoussou envisions it, will serve as both an incubator for new works and a place where companies can share art, resources and ways to forge ahead.