Displaying items by tag: Trial in the Delta

Collaboraction Theatre Company announced today two major productions for its 2026-27 season: the world premiere of Chicago writer Willie Round’s Mud Life this fall, and the return of Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till in February.

“For our 31st season, at our House of Belonging, Collaboraction opens our chamber of change to Chicagoans to cultivate new knowledge, empathy, dialogue, and action with two plays by writing partners and Collaboraction Company Members, G. Riley Mills and Willie Round. One play is in the present. The other in the past. Both impact our future,” said Collaboraction Artistic Director Anthony Moseley. “Mud Life, set in a worn down recording studio on Chicago’s West side and based on Willie's actual life, is a raw, revealing look at the hopes and dreams of escaping poverty and scarcity through music. The other is based on the heartbreak of Mamie Till-Mobley's life, an excavation of the once-erased courtroom proceeding where a mother and others risked their lives to confront and dismantle white hatred, changing us all, forever.”

Both productions will have multiweek runs at Collaboraction’s new House of Belonging, now anchoring the Kimball Arts Center, 1757 N. Kimball Ave. in Chicago’s Humboldt Park community. Tickets to both productions are already on sale at collaboraction.org.

First is the debut of Mud Life, a raw, intimate drama by and based on Chicago writer, rapper, producer and Collaboraction Company Member Willie Round’s experiences growing up on Chicago’s west side making music.

The plot spins around Anthony and Devontae, two aspiring hip-hop artists from Chicago’s North Lawndale community who are struggling to climb beyond their circumstances while creating music under the control of a manipulative strip-club owner. When an enigmatic outsider offers them a rare shot at escape, their loyalty fractures, and their bond is tested in ways that alter the course of their lives. 

Mud Life first entered Collaboraction’s orbit in 2019 as the seven-minute short play Broke Down Drone in Collaboraction’s Peacebook Festival. That experience spawned an award-winning short film of the same name. More recently, Round returned to the script, which received workshops and readings earlier this summer at both Bramble Theatre and Definition Theatre. 

Collaboraction Artistic Director Anthony Moseley will direct Collaboraction’s world premiere of Mud Life. Martine Kei-Green Rogers, Dean, The Theatre School at DePaul University, is dramaturg.

Previews are Wednesday through Saturday, October 21-24 at 7:30 p.m. Performances run through November 15: Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 pm; Sunday at 3 p.m. Industry Night is Monday, November 2 at 7:30 p.m. No show Saturday, October 31. Tickets are $15-$50. 

Collaboraction’s season continues with the return of its critically acclaimed smash hit Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till, February 3-March 14, 2027. Back by popular demand, Trial in the Delta is an unforgettable theatrical event that invites audiences to confront the truth, honor a legacy, and experience one of the greatest injustices of all time as if it were happening today.

On September 20, 1955, the trial of the men who murdered 12-year-old Emmett Till began in Sumner, Mississippi, and the world would never be the same. In this immersive, 90-minute live docudrama, Collaboraction transforms the long-buried trial transcript into a gripping theatrical experience that places audiences face-to-face with the people whose testimony spurred the civil rights movement. Actors seated among the audience rise to take the stand as witnesses for the prosecution and defense—including Mamie Till-Bradley—bringing raw, unfiltered history to life. The Chicago Reader called last year’s staging, the first production in Collaboraction’s new home in Humboldt Park, “a sharp reminder of how close the events of 70 years ago are to our own time.” The Chicago Tribune gave it 3-½ stars, noting it “makes plain the injustice of that moment.”

Collaboraction’s fourth remount of the award-winning Trial in the Delta, co-adapted by Willie Round and G. Riley Mills, co-directed by Anthony Moseley and Dana Anderson, will feature a powerhouse cast of returning artists, including NK Gutiérrez as Mamie Till-Bradley, along with new faces. 

Previews are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, February 3-5 at 7:30 p.m. Opening Night is Saturday, February 6 at 7:30 p.m. Performances continue through March 15: Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Each show will be followed by a short Crucial Conversation. Tickets are $20-$60. Twelve premium seats inside the jury box are sold at every show. Groups of 10 or more receive a 10% discount. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call (312) 226-9633 for more information.

Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till is presented in partnership with The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute, as part of the Till Life Matters Initiative. Thanks to this relationship, Trial in the Delta was showcased at The Till Institute’s Emmett Till’s 85th Birthday Commemorative Dinner on July 31, the first public gala at the new Obama Presidential Center.

Also on stage this season at Collaboraction

Collaboration’s new You Belong Here series is keeping the company’s home in Humboldt Park activated year round. 

You Belong Here provides a new platform for independent artists and groups at any stage in their career, with an emphasis on those who live in proximity to the Kimball Arts Center in Humboldt Park. Curated by company member Sandra Delgado, the series is meant to take the barriers out of self-producing by providing free space and equipment, stage management, marketing and PR support and a generous door split model. 

To illustrate, You Belong Here shows this August at Collaboraction include:

Bilingual Improv School’s ¡El Showcase!, Wednesday, August 12 at 7 p.m.

A night of hard-core dance music with Silver October’s HEARTFELT HARDCORE, Friday, August 14 at 8 p.m.

Darshita Jain and Ghutarghoo Productions’ literary reading series Roomani, Tuesday, August 25 at 6:30 p.m.

The People’s Pot & Pantry, serving free, healthy meals to Chicago’s performing arts community, Monday, August 24 at 4 p.m.

The hilarious comedy variety show Max and Binkey: The Funktion, Wednesday, August 26 at 7 p.m.

Bilingual Improv School’s Cómo Se Dice?, Friday, August 28 at 7:30 p.m.

That’s not all. Collaboraction Executive Director Darlene Jackson, aka DJ Lady D, continues to present her new monthly gathering series, The Frequency. Collaboraction’s youth ensemble The Luminaries continues to take over the stage once a month with its open mic night, Radiate.

And Collaboraction looks forward to being a new host site for the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance’s Destinos Festival this fall.

For tickets and more information about any of these shows, visit collaboraction.org. To submit a You Belong Here performance proposal, visit collaboraction.org/you-belong-here.

Note: Free and nearby street parking is available near the Kimball Arts Center. For CTA riders, the 82 Kimball-Homan bus stops right in front of the building. The theater is also a short walk from the Kimball stop on the 72 North and 73 Armitage bus lines. For bikers and pedestrians, the Kimball trailhead on The 606 leads directly to the Kimball Arts Center. 

About Collaboraction

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2026, Collaboraction is an award-winning Chicago theater company that uses immersive, socially conscious performance to spark change and build equity. Across all platforms, Collaboraction uses its KEDA methodology - Knowledge, Empathy, Dialogue, and Action - to spark changes in behavior and attitudes that manifest social change.

Collaboraction’s past work includes NBC Chicago’s three-time Emmy Award-winning The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Trial in the Delta, the resulting live stage play film, Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till, live productions of Crime Scene, Moonset Sunrise, A Blue Island In the Red Sea, its annual Peacebook and Sketchbook festivals, and its youth ensembles, The Light and The Luminaries.

Collaboraction receives generous operating support and program funding from the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Marc and Jeanne Malnati Family Foundation, Gary Grube, the Lester and Hope Abelson Fund for the Performing Arts at the Chicago Community Trust, Naperville Rotary Club, Field Foundation, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Collaboraction is led by Darlene Jackson, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director; Anthony Moseley, Chief Programming Officer and Artistic Director; and a dedicated board, company members and staff.  For more information, visit collaboraction.org or follow Collaboraction on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok.

Collaboraction  Theatre Company could not have chosen a more resonant inaugural production for its new House of Belonging than Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. In this sleek, in-the-round studio in Humboldt Park, the company inaugurates its new home by opening an old wound—one that America has never fully allowed to heal. The result is not merely a staging of history, but an act of communal witnessing, one that insists the past is not past.

Co-adapted by G. Riley Mills and Willie Round and co-directed by Anthony Moseley and Dana N. Anderson, Trial in the Delta transforms the 1955 courtroom proceedings in Sumner, Mississippi, into a visceral live docudrama. Actors emerge, take the stand, and deliver testimony drawn from the long-buried trial transcript of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till. In this immersive setting, spectators are not allowed the comfort of distance. You are seated inside the machinery of injustice.

The production’s most devastating power lies in its restraint. This is not melodrama; it is documentation made theatrical. When NK Gutiérrez steps forward as Mamie Till-Bradley, the room seems to recalibrate its breathing. Her presence is not performative grief but moral force. Mamie’s insistence on truth—her refusal to look away, her demand that the world see what was done to her son—becomes the spiritual engine of the evening. Darren Jones’s Mose Wright, Mysun Aja Wade’s Willie Reed and Donald Fitzdarryl’s Chester Miller, embody the perilous bravery of Black witnesses testifying in a Jim Crow courtroom, where truth itself was an act of defiance.

The ensemble functions as a grim chorus of American roles: judges, clerks, journalists, sheriffs, defendants, and bystanders. Richard Alan Baiker’s Judge Curtis Swango carries the chilly authority of a system that pretends neutrality while protecting white supremacy. Tyler Burke and Matt Miles, as Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, avoid caricature; their ordinariness is the horror. Evil here is not monstrous but banal, upheld by procedure and custom. That banality is the production’s sharpest blade.

Prosecutor Gerald Chatham (John Henry Roberts, center) holds a photo of Emmett Till as he asks Till’s murderers Roy Bryant (Tyler Burke, left ) and J.W. Milam (Matt Miles, right) if they recognize their victim, as Till’s mother Mamie Bradley (NK Gutiérrez) looks on, in Collaboraction's Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. 

Emmy Weldon’s set and Levi Wilkins’s lighting make elegant use of Collaboraction’s new 99-seat flexible studio, shaping the room into a courtroom that feels both provisional and eternal—anywhere, anytime. Shawn Wallace’s original music hums beneath the proceedings like a low current of grief and warning, while Warren Levon’s sound design places the audience inside a sonic environment of testimony, tension, and aftermath. The design team’s work never distracts; it quietly conspires with the text to tighten the emotional vise.

What distinguishes this staging from earlier iterations is how fully the new space is activated as a moral arena. The reserved jury seating—occupied by audience members—does more than gesture at interactivity. It implicates. You are reminded, without theatrical gimmickry, that verdicts are rendered not only in courtrooms but in communities, institutions, and histories. The post-show “Crucial Conversation” deepens that charge, extending the production beyond performance into dialogue—an extension of Collaboraction’s KEDA methodology in action.
KEDA—Knowledge, Empathy, Dialogue, and Action—frames the company’s belief that theatre should not end with reflection, but move audiences toward change.

Opening the House of Belonging with Trial in the Delta is a statement of values. This is not a theater christened with spectacle or escapism, but with reckoning. In a cultural moment eager to repackage or blunt the edges of history, Collaboraction insists on confrontation. The question the production leaves behind is not simply what happened in 1955, but what we have allowed to keep happening since.

Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till does not offer catharsis. It offers clarity. It reminds us that justice delayed is not just justice denied—it is justice rehearsed in different forms, across different bodies, in different decades. In Collaboraction’s new home, the walls are fresh, the tech is state-of-the-art, and the future feels open. But the story told on opening night is a reminder that belonging, in America, has always been contested—and that the work of making it real is unfinished.Top of Form

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: Extended through March 29th!

Where: Kimball Arts Center, 1757 N. Kimball Ave

Running time: under two hours, including a short Crucial Conversation after every performance

Tickets: $25 - $55.00 (10% discount for groups of 10 or more)

Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

(312) 226-9633