One of the most exciting things about coming to Channel 11 in June 2000 to produce Artbeat Chicago was having a reason to spend time exploring, in depth, the arts in Chicago. I was now being paid to see plays, know about dances, keep up on music in all its forms, talk to writers, visit painter and sculptor’s studios, visit galleries and museums. And I was also required to watch some section of hours of tape shot every week by our cameramen for staff and freelance producers that covered that scene. There were our years of completed Artbeat segments on hundreds of artists and groups in the area to catch up on. It was like swimming in a great pool of local joy.

One of the best pieces I saw when I arrived was about a theater company a few blocks from the station that did emotionally riveting, highly theatrical pieces written and performed by teenagers. The company, Albany Park Theater Project, is run by a husband and wife team, David Feiner and Laura Wiley. It was startling. These kids were grabbing the roughest and most vulnerable experiences of their lives – from alcoholic parents to gang shootings to extreme poverty – and making art out of it. And this art was not posturing, or defensive, or fake macho or sappily sincere. It was direct and real and willing to show pain, regret, hope, fear. The Artbeat piece about the company, produced by Kristie Koehler, had one of the most live moments of video I’d seen in the footage captured by the show at that time. A teen at the edge of the stage, overwhelmed with goofy anxiety, coached out into the performing space by her directors and peers. It was the right place and the right time for the camera.

Eventually I went over to their performing space – the second floor of Chicago Park District field house – and saw one of their shows. To be in the tiny room with the teens, to see a flawless hour plus presentation, complete with sets, costumes, lighting cues, music (some performed by the teens), was one of the greatest experiences I’d ever had in the theatre (and I’d seen Steppenwolf in their church basement days and seen Bergman direct Strindberg in Swedish in Stockholm). I came to know the directing team and some of the teens and eventually produced some pieces of my own about the company.

This is all to say I go back a ways with Laura Wiley.

But going back a ways as a audience member, a supporter, an occasional journalist telling the story is not the same as being with her through the process of directing a play, from first rehearsal to opening night, to being with her during one of her many visits to the Kellogg Cancer Care Center at Evanston Hospital, to meeting her rabbi, her mom and many of her close friends. Gracious is a word rooted in grace and grace is a word I’ve always found more than a little magical (and I’m equally intrigued with its doppelganger – disgraced). The Middle English root of the word means divine love, says my Webster. What an appropriate word this is for Ms. Wiley. To see her in action with the teens, to see her generosity, to see her elegant way (which you can see as well) of introducing her mother to a friend in her congregation, to hear her eloquent refutation of self pity when discussing her ovarian cancer – it’s like getting a marvelous reflection of divinity. Divine. Well, another amazing word.

After my first interview with her, done very late in the shooting process (I think I was holding off much like you might wait to open a particularly special bottle of wine), I wrote in off again on again diary “I’m learning so much.” I don’t believe I was simply referring to how much Laura was sharing. I think I was referring to discovering new things about what could come from an interview, new things about what our work as documentarians (for in a certain way Laura sees herself as a non-fiction co-playwright/director) can do, new things about the possible roles of an artist in society. She is so singularly at ease with her job, with the fullness of it, so sure that she is exactly where she needs to be that the feeling of striving to make it, or striving to find a place, or striving to conquer another mountain doesn’t even seem apropos to the discussion. This is not to say I feel she doesn’t believe the company isn’t growing and changing – it certainly has and is. It’s more that the remarkable uniqueness of this job – co-director with her spouse of a teen ensemble that does community based and personally based work – would perplex a lesser soul. I get the feeling that for Laura, there really isn’t a next job and this is as great as being the artistic director of something like the Old Vic. Maybe better.

The show they rehearsed and premiered during the four months we taped the company was “God’s Work.” Based on the story of a company member, it told the tale of a girl who grew up in two households – one, her biological household, abusive. The other –her adoptive parents (actually her aunt and uncle), unconditionally loving. It was a first for the company – an entire evening devoted to one story and the story of a company member at that. Even though I was at a number of rehearsals, saw the script as it developed, understood the story from meetings prior to first rehearsal, seeing the play for the first time was a shock. I wasn’t prepared for its relentless seesaw rhythm between abuse and respite. The set emphasized the two-tier world the heroine and her nearly one dozen siblings lived in. Their parents lived upstairs in a rigid and emotionally strangled world; the siblings occupied the often unheated, poorly ventilated basement. The main playing area was the basement, with a staircase leading upstairs to the kitchen where the mother peeled potatoes and the father prepared elaborate tortures for his children. Left alone as much as they were drawn into the abuse handed out by their pentecostal zealot of a father, the real pleasure and joy in the play came in these private times, when the siblings would gather into invented games and understandings. These were staged almost as dances, reducing dialogue and words to ritualistic and repetitive exchanges.

One of the things I regretted not coming to early in the shooting was how much like Laura’s life this back and forth structure of the play was. She was undergoing very debilitating chemotherapy, with some treatment leaving her in need a recovery of a day or more. She expressed to me that she felt less like herself, less quick and facile. She was, of course, beaten up by the treatment that she welcomed as live saving. In between bouts of treatment she played with this glorious ensemble, creating a new piece of theatre, inventing an understanding of someone’s horrific but ultimately life affirming experience.

This is what I mean when I say a work of art tells us things about ourselves we often can’t see in the very moment of their creation. I can’t speak for Laura on this point and I haven’t shared my theory with her, but it seems a powerful parallel, and I don’t believe any artwork is created in a vacuum of aesthetic perfection.

It makes me wonder what I’ll realize about this documentary, “Beauty Rises” in the coming months and years, no doubt at some moment I’ll least expect a surprise from a finished work.