The Loneliness Project (formerly Standing Underneath Night and Day) began in the summer of 2014 as an artistic response to the first comprehensive needs assessment of Chicago's LGBTQIA+ populations. That assessment revealed that LGBTQIA+ youth and seniors share many material needs and a profound sense of isolation from other LGBTQIA+ individuals and the resources that they need.

 

Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a collective of eight queer artists, led by Kelli Simpkins (About Face Theatre, Tectonic Theatre Project) conducted over seventy interviews and began the process of transforming those interviews into a script.  In January 2015, About Face Theatre produced a staged reading of the play at one of the city's LGBTIQA+ community centers, the Center on Halsted. 

 

Following that initial development period, the project's artistic team dispersed leaving a smaller group of four artists (Simpkins, Al Evangelista, Caitlin Kane, and Reed Motz) to continue its development. After several years of intermittent writing retreats and weekend-long workshops, we produced a month-long workshop at Cornell University with a cast of students and local actors. That version of the production used verbatim testimony and theatrical movement to document the rich history of Chicago’s LGBTQIA+ activist communities and to make sense of their fracturing over the past 20 years. A tale of fierce activism, profound loneliness, and remarkable resilience, The Loneliness Project employed the documentary method as not only a mode of artistic creation and preservation but also as a mode of collaborative problem-solving. 

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