Role Call - Spring 2025

At ROLE CALL, we bravely dive into a play by reading it cold, and then we engage in and practice the complicated conversations that often follow challenging art. This series is not a performed reading. That’s the best part – no preparation is necessary! All participants take part reading through the script together for the first time before we jump into a variety of activations and discussions based on our reading. It’s a space for everyone: actors, non-actors, theater lovers, ex-theater lovers, and especially the theater-curious.

Just like last year, we'll be meeting across the city in various bookstores. We will have a special announcement at this first Role Call of the year about what else is to come!

We’ll also be featuring some special guests, experts, and educators based on our location and the play/subject matter we explore. Part of the fun of Role Call is that it depends on the people who show up!

The pigs are stressed, Liv won’t eat, and Ma wants everyone to follow the Constitutions. Set in a modern-day commune on the outskirts of the Chihuahuan desert in Texas, this new play about our need for community, asks why the line between delusion and what the rest of us believe, is getting blurrier than ever.

Emma Gibson is a playwright, director and actor. Her plays have won the Pittsburgh Public’s New Play Competition, she has been shortlisted for the 2023 Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship, she was a finalist for The Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2024, a runner up for The Ambassadors Theatre Group Playwriting award 2024, a finalist for The O’Neill New Play Conference and many more. Her plays have been presented and produced world-wide.

Her acting work has seen her performing in her native UK in the West End, touring across England, at The Edinburgh Festival and in Philadelphia where she now lives. Her directing work specializes in re-imagining classic texts from Shakespeare to Chekhov and in new writing. Emma was the founding producing artistic director of Tiny Dynamite. She also works as an acting coach, sound designer, voice over artist and audiobook narrator.

Refracted’s mission is to disrupt socially accepted narratives by telling the “other side of the story.” By upending audience expectations through innovation and adaptation, Refracted inspires meaningful discourse centered on empathy and humanity.

Refracted is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that was founded in 2019 in New York City by Graham Miller and Tova Wolff. As a four-year old company, Refracted is proud to have been one of the only theaters in the country that produced two full seasons of live theatre during the pandemic, harnessing its powers of creativity and innovation. Now in its fourth season in its new home of Chicago, Refracted invites you to get involved as it redefines what theatre can be in order to build a world fueled by curiosity and compassion. Please visit www.refractedco.com for more information and follow Refracted on social media @refractedco.

Also check out other Arts events in Chicago, Theatre events in Chicago, Nonprofit events in Chicago.