“The Way Through”: Social Action and the Critical Embrace of Failure

When something is both large and small at the same time, when the impulse of a thing expands and contracts, when a goal is set though never fully reached—then I think we can say we are in the presence of underachievement, and that the residue of failure is about us. It is indexed by the distance between two things, that very distance [is] the evidence of something that hasn’t occurred but remains nevertheless full of wishes.

—Sara Jane Bailes, “Distracted”

In terms of racial equity, Chicago has failed. Perhaps no more than any other USAmerican city (or suburb or rural area), but Chicago’s problems play out visibly, and violently, in black and white. Highly segregated, racial disparities have barely budged since before the civil rights movement: most African Americans live in nearly all-black neighborhoods and attend underfunded, nearly all-black schools; 32 percent of African American residents live in poverty, the highest rate in the nation; unemployment for African Americans stands at 19 percent, the third highest in the nation and double that of the city’s whites; and, although the murder rate has dropped, Chicago leads the nation in annual homicides. In 2013, nearly 80 percent of murder victims were African American—357, compared to 83 Latinos and 8 whites. Nonfatal gun violence also disproportionately affects African Americans.¹

Against this backdrop of segregation, limited resources, and exposure to violence, the Truth N Trauma (TNT) youth-engagement program began its work in September 2012.² Funded by a grant from the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority, TNT aimed high, seeking to prevent and reduce violence by addressing the impact of trauma within communities. Approximately forty African American youth, ages 14–19, were selected from neighborhoods with high rates of violence to participate in the nine-month program. All participants received intensive psychological-trauma training conducted by Kimberly Mann, one of the state’s leading experts.³ To augment this training, participants practiced critical-consciousness and restorative-justice techniques; additionally, they participated in one of four program tracks—trauma training, research, documentary filmmaking, and theatre—receiving intensive instruction in their respective discipline.

As head of the theatre component, my charge was to train eleven high school youth and two undergraduate students in theatre fundamentals, and to lead the ensemble in devising a performance piece.⁴ This creative work reinforced the trauma training; using theatre to process their own experiences also gave the youth an artistic voice. Together, the ensemble created the movement-based piece The Only Way Out is the Way Through. During the final months of TNT, we performed several times, first on the Chicago State University campus.⁵ These on-campus stagings earned the TNT Theatre Ensemble prestigious invitations to perform elsewhere: at Activist/Professor Bill Ayers’s house as part of the Chicago Home Theater Festival; at the Jane Addams Hull House as the evening’s headliners in the Building Peace and Justice Series; and at the Illinois Childhood Trauma Coalition’s Symposium on Child Trauma in the Public Sector, the first performance ever featured at this conference.

By these markers, the TNT theatre piece and the overall work of the program was a success, an assertion that my colleagues and I have touted at conferences and in grant reports. Convinced that TNT positively impacted our participants, I am tremendously proud of our journey as an ensemble and the piece we created together. The Only Way Out is the Way Through seemed to deeply touch our audiences, evidenced anecdotally through the comments received at talk-back sessions, and more concretely through the invitations to perform the piece at different sites. Yet, as much as TNT achieved, in looking back on the program, there is for me a persistent sense of shortcoming. As with many such programs, the work of TNT resided in the insurmountable gap between aspiration and implementation. It is precisely this space between the hopes and the reality that I wish to evaluate.

In this essay, I treat TNT as a case study through which I can grapple with the concept of failure in...