Displaying items by tag: Jean Marie Koon

Sanctuary Stories plumbs the line between theater and journalism, and the powerful human dramas both can depict. Funded by a Northwestern Medill School of Journalism grant to create a verbatim-based theatrical documentary, it is produced, directed and narrated by Craig Duff, a professor there. Duff’s background as a video journalist includes CNN, The New York Times, and Time magazine. Sanctuary Stories premiered for a limited run at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center in November 2025, reappeared for a limited run at Windy City Playhouse in Chicago in January 2026, was presented at John F. Kennedy High School in April, during the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in June, and now has a return run at The Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture through October 18.

Conventional journalism has its limits, as intensely emotional events are reduced to a factual presentation. In the stories surrounding current immigration crackdowns in Chicago, there is a risk that individuals will have no voice. And that the constraints of style, word counts and approach can leave out the story-behind-the-story, the real lives of the immigrants and their supporters. 

Caonguyen Vu plays Rohingya immigrant, The Citizen. Photo ©Amy Boyle Photography

How are journalists affected by hearing these stories and witnessing the news they cover? 

“It’s a question we grapple with at Medill and in our careers,” Duff told Buzz Center Stage. “I think it’s similar to the last line of the Pastor Beth Brown piece (she is played by Amber Dow), where she says, ‘And part of the stress is you become a holder of the stories. You know, you are a container for the stories in some ways. And I'm fortunate in that I've been a pastor for long enough that I've developed some tools for how to be that container." 

Sanctuary Stories tries to break the boundaries of standard journalism, going beyond the words to include a wealth of graphics, framing videos, and live musical interludes. It is also drawn from verbatim stories as told to Borderless Magazine writer Stephen Franklin, who conducted some 70 interviews for the effort. These were distilled into a set of verbatim monologues for individual characters, including three immigrants—The Businesswoman (Gabriela Barrios), The Dreamer (Lori Navarrate), and Rohingya immigrant The Citizen (Caonguyen Vu)—composite characters.

Other real-life characters include Rev. Dr. Beth Brown, lead pastor at the Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church (Dow), Father Brendan Curran (George Dougherty), 91-year-old Sister JoAnn Persch (Jean Marie Koon), and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss (Matt Specht). Specht also plays a composite immigration judge who resigns in the throes of Trump administration changes to the roles of judges, and Federal actions at the Broadview, IL ICE holding facility. 

George Doughtery performs a monologue made from a verbatim interview with Father Brendan Curran, a Dominican friar and Catholic priest. Photo ©Amy Boyle Photography

“My reporting partner Steve Franklin has covered a lot of traumatic events as a foreign correspondent,” Duff says. “And I’ve seen my fair share in places like Iraq and Lebanon.” Franklin and Duff did a series together for MSNBC about gun violence in Chicago. 

“We have developed similar tools to Pastor Beth's. You have to have empathy as a reporter, but you also need to compartmentalize the emotion and trauma that you witness. Often, under deadline pressure, you don’t live with the material very long because you move on to the next story the next day. On a longer form piece like a documentary, you are spending months with the material, and you sit with it more. For Sanctuary Stories, I am feeling it more deeply because we’re working with the words and rehearsing and then watching the stories unfold each night. And allowing myself to be an artist as well as a journalist allows me to bring more of my full self to the storytelling, and be more affected by it.”

Chicago has a hallowed history of welcoming immigrants. The city began codifying legal sanctuary protection in 1985, as Reagan-era Federal crackdowns increased on undocumented immigrants seeking asylum after feeling violence in Central America.

Duff says Sanctuary Stories is his way of experimenting with new ways of presenting journalism. The project was inspired by a number of things. 

“First and foremost, it was a desire to connect in person and not via screens/TV/phones,” Duff says. He plays The Narrator in the show, a continuous presence through the performance, and singing and playing in the opening song.

“A few years back I re-emerged as a performing artist after 35 years away from theater,” Duff says. “My first role was as the Duke in a raucous production of Measure for Measure, and the audience was on fire—roaring with laughter and then gasping at the cruelest moments—and I knew then that I wanted to bring  my visual journalism work into that kind of room. There is great power in hearing these stories presented live and in person. It’s not that the stories weren’t getting out. Father Brendan appears on TV regularly, and Sisters JoAnn and Pat were once interviewed on Samantha Bee’s TBS show. But combining the actor’s performance with real footage of events (I tried to show the real people with my camera when we could name and reveal them) and letting the actors present the ‘truth’ of the emotion, allows for a more connected — and affecting — experience.‘’

The script for Sanctuary Stories is dynamic, changing with each set of performances. Though the eight verbatim stories remain the same, different casts of actors have performed them. “I rewrite the narration so that it remains current,” Duff says. “I was rewriting up until our preview last Thursday." A new bit was added to the middle of the script for this run— interviews Duff did with photojournalists who’ve been covering the immigration beat. This placeholder section of the script was designed to be updated, with different journalists performing live interviews in that space. 

As a reviewer, the show was certainly compelling, though I came to it with expectations of the more familiar dramatic arc. The actors were uniformly good, while the journalistic-styled script let the facts stand in for ordinary drama. The multi-media aspects of the show (Peter Wahlbäck is sound designer; Riley Bulson is stage manager) includes original songs by Flo Estes—“They Don’t Even Know it” written especially for the show—the whole really bringing home experiences such as the melee around the Broadview, IL ICE facility a vivid, emotional encounter, nothing like we see in the news. The story of the Rohingya immigrant, The Citizen, delivered in a restrained monologue by Caonguyen Vu, was incredibly striking. We are reminded of this displaced people—unwanted by the Myanmar and driven from their homes, taken advantage of by immigrant traffickers and sold into and endless loop of immigration.

Since Northwestern also has a rather notable Theatre Department, it would be interesting to see them incorporated in future development of this journalism foray on stage. Recomended and running through October 18, 2026, get tickets here to Sanctuary Stories at Chicago's Athenaeum Center. 

The parallels between "The Good Fight's” retelling of the British Suffrage Movement -  and the Women's March going on in all countries around the globe now are truly uncanny and a little bit frightening. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).British women's suffrage movement coined the powerful phrase “Deeds, not words" in response to the 50-year-long refusal by Parliament to allow women to vote in the UK. 

Babes with Blades latest production, “The Good Fight” is a stark reminder of today’s issues at hand. History is doomed to repeat itself, and in Babes with Blades latest production, “The Good Fight” at City Lit Theatre the already revved up Chicago audience finds a thought provoking reminder of yesterday's issues which are still being fought for today. 

There are many interesting, and also tragic, scenes that are presented well in this production. WSPU members were regularly subjected to police brutality like being beaten and arrested while demonstrating peacefully or simply selling their Women's Press newspaper, "Votes for Women".  The aging leader of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst (Jean Marie Koons), and other members were arrested repeatedly under an actual law with the degrading and disgusting title “The Cat and Mouse Act".

"The Cat and Mouse Act" allowed police to not only repeatedly arrest and imprison members like Pankhurst but also to brutally force feed them while in prison when they chose to go on hunger strikes. As one character in the play mentions, "You are never the same after the force feeding." 

Force feeding was done by restraining the female prisoner on a medical table by her arms and legs then applying metal clamps to her mouth and teeth to open them so that a feeding tube, which often tore open their vocal cords in the process, could be forcibly shoved down their throats in an effort to punish them. This created a hollow appeasement to the public that they were being "fed by prison guards" in order to save their lives. 

Another fascinating and little known story is told about the group of fighting Suffragette’s called "The Bodyguard", a group of specially trained women who learned the martial art of Jiu Jitsu in order to protect their leader from the police brutality and repeated arrests at each WSPU demonstration. 

The fact that these early suffragettes NEEDED to learn to fight using hand to hand combat just shows clearly how violently they were abused by the police and lawmakers at the time. It's too bad this production didn't get a mention in about the South Asian British suffragettes without whom this battle would not have been won. 

Some scenes were real reminders of how male autocrats use physical force to rule over their subjects. Playwright Anne Bertram includes scenes about Parliament arguments over whether to allow women the vote, which included arguments that the women's hats would be too large to see over if women were voted into government. Another argued the stressing of women's physical weakness as an indicator that they must be ruled over because men are born capable of physically subduing women, etc.  

Although this quote is not in the play it was one of these infuriating responses that served to agitate the movement completely when in June of 1908 the WSPU held a 300,000-strong "Women's Sunday" rally in Hyde Park. The suffragettes argued for women's suffrage with the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The Prime Minister agreed with their argument but "was obliged to do nothing at all about it" and so urged the women to "go on pestering" and to exercise "the virtue of patience".

Some of the women present had been virtuously patiently fighting for their rights for FIFTY years and so the advice to "go on pestering” was felt as an unbelievably patronizing and disgustingly inhumane response from the Prime Minister, which spawned the more militant actions to come. 

One of the most interesting things I did not know about the WSPU and the formation of " The Bodyguard" is that the WSPU members debated  among themselves whether or not to return violence with violence or continue to resist peacefully, doing only damage to abandoned buildings and closed stores in order to avoid using violence to defend their aging leader and other young members from  the  physical destruction of lives through the "Cat and Mouse" torture and release legislation.This production mentions the interesting and bitterly ironic fact that Parliament also passed another legislation protecting it's armed forces that forbade women attending WSPU peaceful marches or protests to wear "hat pins" to fasten their hats because so many police were "poked with hat pins while attempting to arrest protesters that the hat pins were now considered by baton and gun wielding policemen as weapons! 

Hence, the brilliant and necessary formation of " The Bodyguard" which utilized the peaceful art of jujitsu; one of the only martial arts in the world which uses ONLY the energy of an attacker’s momentum to respond to and end the attackers violent actions. 

The essential scenes for this production directed with passion by Elizabeth Lovelady and fight choreographer Gaby Labotka made great use of the relatively small space for so much physical action and complex action scenes. I loved the use of the sumptuous period costumes and official colors of the WSPU. As is stated, “In 1908 the WSPU adopted purple, white, and green as its official colours. These colours were chosen because Purple...stands for the royal blood that flows in the veins of every suffragette...white stands for purity in private and public life...green is the colour of hope and the emblem of spring."

Some of the British accents could use some work because it was a little bit distracting to hear them come and go within a couple cast members. Each member of this ensemble did a great job expressing the fever, excitement and anguish of meeting each day’s challenges and humiliations. 

Emmeline Pankhurst was played beautifully with great wisdom and pride by Jean Marie Koon. Grace Roe, a jailed WSPU member and one of the founders of the movement, was played with wonderful sensitivity and forceful energy by Arielle Leverett. 

I enjoyed watching this play surrounded by Chicagoan's who are right now marching 300,000 strong downtown to protest all GOP of the human rights being eroded by the current Trump administration. 

The fact that in 2018, it has been less than 100 years since women have been given the right to vote and the fact that not only are women still fighting for equal pay, they are also still fighting to keep their rights to abortion, healthcare and protection from career ending sexual harassment while an accused sexual harasser of the worst kind  has been " voted" somehow into the highest office in the land, makes this production a must see for all who are struggling daily to keep up their own energy physically and emotionally to fight "the good fight".  

I highly recommend taking your sons and daughter to see this informative and sadly, still VERY relevant, production to show them how long it takes to win this type of good fight and also that the good fight has not yet been entirely won. 

“The Good Fight” is being performed through February 17th at City Lit Theatre - http://babeswithblades.org/winter-2018-good-fight/.