Carlos Murillo

In some rooms he’s Martin. In others he’s Martín. Hired by a well-funded arts institution on Chicago’s Northside to create a show with Chicago youth about violence on the Southside, Marteen finds himself torn not only by the pronunciation of his name, but by the conflicting needs of the institution and the young people they believe they're “serving,” and by a city in a death struggle with its own divided self. Does Martin/Martín make an exploitative confessional docudrama? Or does he try to find a metaphor? Reaching into his own history, he unearths, with his young ensemble, the story of the 1994 murder of soccer star Andres Escobar in Medellín, Colombia, hoping a past-tense allegory of violence in a deeply divided, faraway city will illuminate violence in the deeply divided Chicago of now. When a very real act of violence hits home, what story will Martin and his youth ensemble tell?

The young, reclusive novelist Danny Santiago came out of nowhere and took the literary world by storm. His novel, FAMOUS ALL OVER TOWN, was a gritty, authentic depiction of Chicano life in East LA told through the eyes of a troubled teenager. But is it authentic? And who is the real Danny Santiago? Your Name Will Follow You Home takes us on a wild, only-in-America odyssey to the darkest heart of these questions. Charlie Chaplin. Communists in Hollywood. HUAC. The Blacklist. 50 B-Monster Movies. Architectural Fantasias. Fake Latinos. Jesse James.

AUGUSTA AND NOBLE tells the story of Gabi, a girl who has lived her whole life amid a vibrant Latino community in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago. But Gabi is starting high school across the city at Northside College Prep, where she is quickly exposed to new people and possibilities. As Gabi begins asking questions about her heritage, including the truth about her parents' journey across the border to the United States, she struggles to discover exactly where in this world she belongs. Told in English peppered with Spanish, this play for young audiences celebrates the rich history and resilience of the many immigrants who call Chicago city home.

When Shawney's mother dies, he is taken by his mysterious uncle, who longs to recapture his past pop stardom. Across the city, a pregnant novelist seeks to uncover a mystery: is there a ghost in her new fixer-upper home, or is her husband having an affair? Next door, a wealthy couple struggles to keep up appearances while raising their troubled adopted child. Hiding out in a foreclosed condo, a sexy musicology student searches for a forgotten musician lost somewhere in America. When a long forgotten record album resurfaces in Chicago, these disparate lives will collide with devastating consequences.

A THICK DESCRIPTION OF HARRY SMITH, a proto-psychedelic medicine show, takes a wild ride through the life, work and times of filmmaker, musicologist, painter, anthropologist, collector, occultist and fabulist, Harry Everett Smith. Best known for editing the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith's peculiar life is an emblem of American bohemian life in the 20th Century. Conceived as a Prairie Home Companion style variety show, Thick Description uses reworked folk songs, radio vignettes of real, speculative and imagined episodes of Harry Smith's life, Foley work, and a wide variety of storytelling styles to reveal an alternative conception of American identity.

The tragic death of playwright Javier C. and his mysterious final play forces a group of his estranged friends and followers to reunite after twenty years. Will they uncover the deep mystery that both brought them together and made them mortal enemies?

A teenage boy's fictional Internet identity begins as a harmless game. But the game takes on a frightening reality when it's overwhelmed by real emotion. When the virtual world and the real one collide, Nick's fantasies of love, intimacy, obsession and betrayal spiral out of control, leading him to the brink of death.

Eight lone travelers journey the back roads and Interstates through the American night, grappling with their most secret thoughts in the dark as they escape their pasts and drive towards the terrifying uncertainty at the end of the road. Mysterious connections, dangerous dislocations and life-altering encounters shape this meditation on the myth of individualism on the American road.

They seemed like the perfect couple. Affluent. Attractive. Well-educated. Why did the husband brutally murder his wife and then take his own life? A desperate screenwriting duo struggles with severe writer's block to unearth the answer. The murder victim's sister reconstructs from the ashes a diary that may or may not contain the secrets. And a deranged academic, haunted by her own possible involvement, meditates on the American obsession with violence. In the face of inexplicable violence, whose myth will most closely resemble the truth of what happened?

Somewhere in America, a man fantasizes about his best friend's wife. In another city, a young housewife momentarily loses sight of her children. Elsewhere, a politician relives a tragic second that forever changed his life, and a mother wonders where her teenage son got the gun. And in one town, a man watches all this unfold on his TV screen. A Human Interest Story is an unflinching portrait of an American obsessed with voyeurism that asks the question: Is the imagination more cruel and unforgiving than reality?

Marcus' mysterious new neighbor Miranda storms into his apartment one morning, demanding to know why he spies on her. Fascinated by Marcus' reclusive existence and his collection of antique oddities, she discovers a magic portal in a wardrobe. The two embark on a journey through the 20th Century in which they relive the tragicomic fates of a century's worth of star-crossed lovers. When they arrive in the present again, they're forced to confront their origins and the meaning of their love in uncertain times.

Elisabeth Nietzsche, caught between the two great loves of her life -- her brother Friedrich and her anti-Semitic husband Berhard Forster -- sets out on a wild journey to the jungles of Paraguary to found the colony of Neva Germania, a proto-Nazi experiment. Facing the choice between her ailing husband and her insane brother, Elisabeth fuses their two irreconcilable world-views, becoming an indomitable force in earth 20th Century Germany.

Farafra Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt. A local restaurateur at war with an eccentric local sculptor -- an age-old bolo feud between Bedouin families. When Claire, a Frenchwoman with a tortured history of her own, arrives from the West with her own ideas about the future of the oasis, the balance of power in town goes off kilter. The characters, torn between history and desire, find themselves on the perilous tightrope between prosperity and destruction.

A young man returns to the United States after several months abroad. Detained at customs for a suspicious text he has in his backpack, he finds himself thrust into a Kafka-esque landscape where his immigrant father is accused of crimes he never committed. A tragic-comic tale of the American Dream gone awry.