Soul Theatre

Soul Theatre is on a mission to create radiant joy, infectious laughter, to scatter its seeds on fallen dreams and watch them rise again. Scatterbrain sweetness runs through our veins and we believe that every meeting should end with something delicious.

We got started in 2005 with Last of the Red Hot Lovers by Neil Simon at the Chopin Theatre, then in 2006 we came back with 365 days/plays and did our week at the Peace Museum and the Little Black Pearl Art GalleryŠwe also did a dance piece at the Full Circle Festival sponsored by Chicago DanztheatreŠand then in 2008 we returned to the Full Cicle Festival, and we also did The Bear by Anton Chekhov and Red.Stop. Green. Go. Mix. Memory + Desire (a multi-media show), both at Gorilla Tango.

Ravi Batista is an actor who has appeared in plays at the Lookingglass Theatre, Piven Theatre, at Donny's Skybox at Second City and other theatre companies in and around Chicago. She has appeared in award-winning short films and on commercials. She is a member of SAG and AFTRA. She is a graduate of the School at Steppenwolf.

Mac Jenkins is a producer & sound designer with diverse interests in music direction and acoustic design for film and stage, and field recordings. His work has been featured though venues ranging from Computer Music Magazine to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. He is the host of etc-radio, a program focusing on experimental and dance music on WNUR FM, and is a contributor to Timeout Magazine Chicago.

_{A poem by Rumi}

There is a glory that breathes life back
in a corpse and brings strangers together as friends.

Call that one back who fills
the held-out robe of a thornbush with
flowers, who clears muddied minds, who
gives a two-day-old infant wisdom beyond
anyone's learning.

"What baby?" you ask.

There is a fountain, a passion circulating.

I'm not saying this well because I'm too
much in the scatterbrain sweetness. Listen
anyway. It must be said. There are eyes
that see into eternity. A presence beyond
the power and magic of shamans. Let that
in. Sink to the floor, full prostration.

_{Sonnet #30
by William Shakespeare}

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.
Then can I drown an eye unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

_{The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats}

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919

_{The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins}

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

_{Sad Steps
by Philip Larkin}

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate -
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

John Patrick Shanley
Harold Pinter
William Shakespeare
Anton Chekhov
Donald Margulies
Edward Albee
Sam Shepard
Dario Fo
Moliere
Jean Paul Sartre
Tennessee Williams
Jean Genet
Jane Martin
George Bernard Shaw
William Shakespeare
Jose Rivera
Laura Eason