Laughing Song
The third iteration of Theatre Y’s annual “camino” project, ”Laughing Song: A Walking Dream,” told the story of George W. Johnson (played by renowned Chicago performance poet Marvin Tate), an all-but-forgotten Black recording artist from the late nineteenth century. Roberts portrayed a fictional composite of early recording industry archetypes named Lucius Emerson. Kerry Reid of the Chicago Reader called it “a one-of-a-kind experience. … ‘Laughing Song’ asks us to spend time in a sometimes overlooked community, learning about a lost figure in Black cultural history, in the presence of a contemporary Chicago Renaissance man and an ensemble working hard to help us to appreciate everything around us in light and shadow—from sunny open parks to grimy underpasses. It doesn’t get more real than that.”
