Tekki Lomnicki

I never set out to form a theater company; I had been interested in becoming a star. It all started when I made my brothers act out my original plays in the backyard, starring ten-year-old me! And once I caught the theater bug in high school, there was no stopping me! But in the eighties and early nineties directors weren’t casting people with disabilities, let alone little people with disabilities who walk on crutches. So I took classes to keep the theater spark in me alive. I met Donna Blue Lachman, who was doing a lot of improvised work at a little storefront in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen called The Blue Rider Theater.

I was soon in a production created by seven of us through six months of improvisation. Then Michael, my colleague in advertising, told me about an older lady he met on the bus. Her name was Anna Mercier, a southern folk artist who he told me had the best stories. Michael had this idea that we should write a play based on her stories. We took her to dinner several times and taped her telling her tales on a cassette tape recorder (this was before cell phones!). The cool part for me was that she told us that a lot of the work of folk artists is about overcoming disability or loss.

We wrote the play, When Heck Was a Puppy, along with another friend, Nancy, and produced it at the Blue Rider Theater. The main character was named Edna Mae Brice, played by me, and her demons came to life in my friend Larry. On the advice of a grantor, we incorporated my disability into the stories, and it became a hit. Personal storytelling was just beginning to become a thing. We remounted it a year later at the American Blues Theater.

Michael, Nancy, and I decided right there and then to form a theater company whose mission was to build community through storytelling. We formed a board, got our nonprofit status and incorporated Tellin’ Tales Theatre in 1996.

That’s when Michael met former First Lady of Chicago Maggie Daley at an event at the Cultural Center. He told her about the show, and her face lit up! She was launching a summer theater program mixing kids with and without disabilities and asked if we would teach it. Well Michael, knew full well he couldn’t do it because he worked full time. He volunteered me because I was freelancing at the time. You didn’t say no to Maggie Daley—and I’m glad I didn’t.

That summer was unbelievably hot, and we were in a non-air-conditioned Park District building on the west side. I got other theater friends to teach with me so the kids would have dance, music, and mask-making along with playwriting, and I don’t know how we did it. I had never taught before, let alone thirty kids—some from the neighborhood and some with disabilities who were bused in. We rewrote The Prince and The Pauper using their personal stories and performed it at the Chicago Children’s Museum.

I was mainstreamed in white bread Elmhurst, an upper middle-class suburb about twenty miles straight west of Chicago, so I had never met other kids with disabilities. I always had the attitude of “I’m not like them!” Was I wrong! These kids were just like me—brimming with energy, wanting to be seen and heard. They didn’t want anyone to treat them differently, and we didn’t at the Magic City Theater Camp! The neighborhood kids soon embraced them as peers and fiercely advocated for them—they picked them up when they fell and fought to dance with them.

After that Maggie Daley formed Gallery 37, and Tellin’ Tales was hired to go into schools that served kids with and without disabilities to teach after school programs. We noticed that when kids had a one-on-one mentor they really thrived. This is when the idea for a mentoring program kept me awake at night.

Michael left for California, Nancy stepped down to have kids, and I was on my own, but the fire had been lit under me to continue. I hit up six theater friends, some with disabilities, to each mentor a middle school kid with or without disabilities. Teams would write a story on a decided theme, and then we’d put them together and produce a full play, performed by all twelve participants. That’s when Six Stories Up, which became the signature program of Tellin’ Tales, was born. Twenty-three years later we just completed Six Stories Up in the Roaring 20s.

So many miracles have happened through this program. Kids who were never given a chance on stage became stars. Writing her piece helped a girl heal from her mother’s death. Kids who didn’t fit into the sports crowd found their calling.

Now at our twenty-fifth anniversary, we have grown to include adult storytelling classes and shows, as well as a storytelling program for kids in the hospital. We even partnered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago to create a musical that was performed in front of 1,500 people at the Harris Theater. And we are now in the midst of producing a full-length musical featuring mostly actors, singers, and dancers with disabilities. We are determined to change the face of professional theater, come hell or high water! This year during the pandemic, we pivoted to produce all of our shows and classes online—because no pandemic can stop the stories.