Displaying items by tag: G Riley Mills

Mud Life, a world premiere drama by Chicago writing duo G. Riley Mills and Willie Round, drawn from Round’s life experiences as an emerging writer, rapper and producer, opens Collaboraction Theatre’s 2026-27 season, October 21 - November 15.

Round and Mills are the Emmy Award-winning writing team behind Collaboraction’s acclaimed immersive docudrama, Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. Set in North Lawndale, Mud Life is a powerful new play exploring  the bonds that hold us together, the forces that keep us stuck, and what we’re willing to risk for the chance at a better life.

Mud Life follows Roc and his cousin Tae, two aspiring hip-hop artists from Chicago’s West Side, struggling to build a future while under the thumb of a manipulative strip-club owner named Littles. When a mysterious outsider offers Roc and Tae a rare opportunity to break free, loyalties fracture, ambitions collide, and they are forced to make choices that will alter the course of their lives forever. 

“For our 31st season, Collaboraction is eager to open our new House of Belonging to Chicagoans to cultivate new knowledge, empathy, dialogue, and action by writing partners and Collaboraction Company Members, G. Riley Mills and Willie Round,” said Collaboraction Artistic Director Anthony Moseley. “Set in a worn down recording studio on Chicago’s West side and drawn from  Willie's actual life, audiences can expect a raw, revealing look at the hopes and dreams of escaping poverty and scarcity through music.” 

In addition to co-writing the play, Willie Round leads the cast as Anthony “Roc” Harris, and Round’s new hip-hop single “Bottom to the Top” is featured in Mud Life (listen to an excerpt on Tidal.) The cast also features DeMorris Burrows as Devontae “Tae” Shields, Simeon Henderson as Malcolm “Littles” Gardner and Carina Lastimosa as Casey Reyes. 

The full production team includes G. Riley Mills and Willie Round, playwrights; Anthony Moseley, director; Martine Kei-Green Rogers, Dean, The Theatre School at DePaul University, dramaturg; Isabella Bradley, assistant director; John Wilson, set design; Crystal Bryant, costume design; Destiny Garner, lighting design; Harper Justus, sound design; Liviu Pasare, projection design; Sam Lancaster, props design; Alivia Arizaga, associate producer and production manager; and, Sam Burkett, stage manager. 

Mud Life runs October 21-November 15 at Collaboraction’s new House of Belonging in the Kimball Arts Center, 1757 N. Kimball Ave. in Humboldt Park. Previews are Wednesday through Saturday, October 21-24 at 7:30 p.m. Performances run through November 15: Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm; Sunday at
3 p.m. No show Saturday, October 31. Industry Night is Monday, November 2 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15-$50 and on sale at collaboraction.org. Each show includes a pre-show lounge, performances and an open mic. Mud Life is recommended for ages 13 and up.

Note: The Luminaries, featuring alums of Collaboraction’s The Light youth ensemble, invites young audiences to a special version of their Radiate open mic series every Friday during the run starting at 6 p.m. Participants will be given comp tickets to attend the show, if available. This special Friday night Radiate open mic series is led by Linda Sol, Earl Hester and Bigg Ceno.

Free and nearby street parking is available near the Kimball Arts Center. For CTA riders, the 82 Kimball-Homan bus stops right in front of the building. The theater is also a short walk from the Kimball stop on the 72 North and 73 Armitage bus lines. For bikers and pedestrians, the Kimball trailhead on The 606 leads directly to the Kimball Arts Center. 

Mud Life first entered Collaboraction’s orbit in 2019 as the seven-minute short play Broke Down Drone in Collaboraction’s Peacebook Festival. That experience spawned an award-winning short film in 2022 of the same name. Round and Riley continued developing the script, which received workshops earlier this year at both Bramble Theatre and Definition Theatre in Chicago.

Playwright biographies

G. Riley Mills is an Emmy Award-winning producer and writer based in Chicago. His musical, The Hundred Dresses, (co- written with Grammy-nominee Ralph Covert), premiered Off-Broadway at The Atlantic Theatre Company, starring Academy Award-nominee Stephanie Hsu. He and his frequent writing partner, Willie Round, co-adapted Collaboraction’s award-winning hit docudrama Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. Their play, Lift Every Voice, also co-written with Round, was published by Dramatic Publishing and won the 2022 “Distinguished Play Award” from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. He has twice won the Jeff Citation for Best New Work (Sawdust and Spangles in 1997 and Streeterville in 2001). His plays have been produced at such theatres as TimeLine, Mixed Blood, The Children’s Theatre Company, Prop Thtr, Orlando Rep, Birmingham Children’s Theatre, Royal George Theatre, Apollo Theatre, and many more. His new book, “Synergy and Sparks” was published by John Wiley & Sons and won a 2026 International Impact Book Award. grileymills.com

Willie Round is a Chicago-born playwright, actor, filmmaker, songwriter, and community- centered storyteller from North Lawndale. A graduate of Central State University with a B.A. in Mass Communication, Round creates work rooted in the history, culture, resilience, and lived experiences of Chicago’s West Side. His works include Mud Life, a stage play inspired by his life and experiences growing up in North Lawndale; Lawndale King, which explores Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 campaign in Chicago; and the published work Lift Every Voice. Round is also a co-writer of Trial in the Delta, a three-time regional Emmy Award-winning production centered on the Emmett Till murder trial. His artistry extends across theater, film, music, acting, and videography. As hip-hop artist MudLife Roc, he has opened for artists including Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne. He is also the founder of Mud Life Entertainment LLC. Round’s mission is to authentically represent Chicago’s West Side, preserve its stories and history, and inspire the next generation through art. Round’s music is available on all platforms under MudLife Roc.

In December 2022, Round and Mills won an Emmy for co-creating and co-producing The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Trial in the Delta for Collaboraction and NBC5 Chicago. The subsequent immersive live stage adaptation, Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till, has since gone on to two critically acclaimed runs at The DuSable Museum, was the inaugural production at Collaboraction’s new House of Belonging in February, 2026, and will be remounted by Collaboraction February 3-March 14, 2027. Tickets are already on sale at collaboraction.org.

About Collaboraction

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2026, Collaboraction is an award-winning Chicago theater company that uses immersive, socially conscious performance to spark change and build equity. Across all platforms, Collaboraction uses its KEDA methodology - Knowledge, Empathy, Dialogue, and Action - to spark changes in behavior and attitudes that manifest social change.

Collaboraction’s past work includes NBC Chicago’s three-time Emmy Award-winning The Lost Story of Emmett Till: Trial in the Delta, the resulting live stage play film, Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till, live productions of Crime Scene, Moonset Sunrise, A Blue Island In the Red Sea, its annual Peacebook and Sketchbook festivals, and its youth ensembles, The Light and The Luminaries.

Collaboraction receives generous operating support and program funding from the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Marc and Jeanne Malnati Family Foundation, Gary Grube, the Lester and Hope Abelson Fund for the Performing Arts at the Chicago Community Trust, Naperville Rotary Club, Field Foundation, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Collaboraction is led by Darlene Jackson, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director; Anthony Moseley, Chief Programming Officer and Artistic Director; and a dedicated board, company members and staff.  For more information, visit collaboraction.org or follow Collaboraction on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok.

Collaboraction  Theatre Company could not have chosen a more resonant inaugural production for its new House of Belonging than Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. In this sleek, in-the-round studio in Humboldt Park, the company inaugurates its new home by opening an old wound—one that America has never fully allowed to heal. The result is not merely a staging of history, but an act of communal witnessing, one that insists the past is not past.

Co-adapted by G. Riley Mills and Willie Round and co-directed by Anthony Moseley and Dana N. Anderson, Trial in the Delta transforms the 1955 courtroom proceedings in Sumner, Mississippi, into a visceral live docudrama. Actors emerge, take the stand, and deliver testimony drawn from the long-buried trial transcript of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till. In this immersive setting, spectators are not allowed the comfort of distance. You are seated inside the machinery of injustice.

The production’s most devastating power lies in its restraint. This is not melodrama; it is documentation made theatrical. When NK Gutiérrez steps forward as Mamie Till-Bradley, the room seems to recalibrate its breathing. Her presence is not performative grief but moral force. Mamie’s insistence on truth—her refusal to look away, her demand that the world see what was done to her son—becomes the spiritual engine of the evening. Darren Jones’s Mose Wright, Mysun Aja Wade’s Willie Reed and Donald Fitzdarryl’s Chester Miller, embody the perilous bravery of Black witnesses testifying in a Jim Crow courtroom, where truth itself was an act of defiance.

The ensemble functions as a grim chorus of American roles: judges, clerks, journalists, sheriffs, defendants, and bystanders. Richard Alan Baiker’s Judge Curtis Swango carries the chilly authority of a system that pretends neutrality while protecting white supremacy. Tyler Burke and Matt Miles, as Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, avoid caricature; their ordinariness is the horror. Evil here is not monstrous but banal, upheld by procedure and custom. That banality is the production’s sharpest blade.

Prosecutor Gerald Chatham (John Henry Roberts, center) holds a photo of Emmett Till as he asks Till’s murderers Roy Bryant (Tyler Burke, left ) and J.W. Milam (Matt Miles, right) if they recognize their victim, as Till’s mother Mamie Bradley (NK Gutiérrez) looks on, in Collaboraction's Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till. 

Emmy Weldon’s set and Levi Wilkins’s lighting make elegant use of Collaboraction’s new 99-seat flexible studio, shaping the room into a courtroom that feels both provisional and eternal—anywhere, anytime. Shawn Wallace’s original music hums beneath the proceedings like a low current of grief and warning, while Warren Levon’s sound design places the audience inside a sonic environment of testimony, tension, and aftermath. The design team’s work never distracts; it quietly conspires with the text to tighten the emotional vise.

What distinguishes this staging from earlier iterations is how fully the new space is activated as a moral arena. The reserved jury seating—occupied by audience members—does more than gesture at interactivity. It implicates. You are reminded, without theatrical gimmickry, that verdicts are rendered not only in courtrooms but in communities, institutions, and histories. The post-show “Crucial Conversation” deepens that charge, extending the production beyond performance into dialogue—an extension of Collaboraction’s KEDA methodology in action.
KEDA—Knowledge, Empathy, Dialogue, and Action—frames the company’s belief that theatre should not end with reflection, but move audiences toward change.

Opening the House of Belonging with Trial in the Delta is a statement of values. This is not a theater christened with spectacle or escapism, but with reckoning. In a cultural moment eager to repackage or blunt the edges of history, Collaboraction insists on confrontation. The question the production leaves behind is not simply what happened in 1955, but what we have allowed to keep happening since.

Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till does not offer catharsis. It offers clarity. It reminds us that justice delayed is not just justice denied—it is justice rehearsed in different forms, across different bodies, in different decades. In Collaboraction’s new home, the walls are fresh, the tech is state-of-the-art, and the future feels open. But the story told on opening night is a reminder that belonging, in America, has always been contested—and that the work of making it real is unfinished.Top of Form

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

When: Extended through March 29th!

Where: Kimball Arts Center, 1757 N. Kimball Ave

Running time: under two hours, including a short Crucial Conversation after every performance

Tickets: $25 - $55.00 (10% discount for groups of 10 or more)

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