Mud Theatre Project
Before toys wrapped in plastic, we had mud—wet earth shaped into our first worlds. For communities the economy overlooked, mud wasn’t a sign of scarcity but a place of invention and possibility. Mud Theatre carries that spirit forward, shaping vital stories from difficult soil and giving voice to what the world often tries to ignore.
Gather With Us
Resilience Arts Festival
OCT 24-26, 2025Seventy-two hours of creative defiance. It's loud. It's creative. It refuses to disappear.
Dr. Burroughs Showcase
NOV 2, 2025Building institutions that serve us. An evening of remembrance and continuation at Logan Center.
"Story of Violence"
NOV 6, 2025Reading & Panel at Navy Pier. We read violence's story to imagine different endings.
Reentry & Love
NOV & DEC 2025Workshops on the hardest homecoming. How do we belong to each other again?
The Artists
Brian Beals | Director
Thirty-five years for a crime he never committed. Exonerated in 2023, Brian emerged not bitter but focused. This Chicago-born activist, organizer, and award-winning playwright builds programs for communities fractured by injustice. His work creates containers strong enough to hold survival stories, platforms high enough to amplify testimony into transformation
King Moosa | Ensemble Member
King Moosa creates art that interrupts scrolling, music that stops conversations mid-sentence. His work confronts systems destroying youth, particularly within juvenile justice. At Mud Theatre, he directed a youth performance of Rhythm & Rizz in Rockford. His visual art has appeared in Chicago, New York, Miami with each piece asking viewers: Are you paying attention to what we're doing to children?
Darius Franklin | Ensemble Member
"FIX" earned his nickname through action. Darius channels relentless positive energy into co-creating programs that center marginalized voices. He led Mud Theatre performances of "The Zoo" at Access Living and "Three Stages of Incarceration" at Grow Greater Englewood Plaza. His approach: art isn't observation. It's intervention.
Banner Made in Captivity
The banner representing our values was stitched inside the Illinois Department of Corrections. Created by incarcerated hands, colored by confined imaginations, assembled with the focused patience of people who've learned to make meaning from restriction. It testifies to what we know absolutely: creativity survives every cage we build, art outlasts every system designed to contain it.
Larger Than Any Individual
Mud Theatre Project is built by system-impacted artists, guided by survivors of what shouldn't exist, sustained by communities refusing to abandon each other. We are playwrights and poets, organizers and educators, exonerated citizens and still-incarcerated visionaries. We get our stories out of the mud. We're not leaving anyone behind.