At Refracted Theatre Company, we make work that disrupts our socially accepted narratives by illuminating another side of the story.
We’re complicating the story around:
The relationships you’ve had.
The history you’ve read about (and continue to write.)
The characters you’ve met, both fictional and otherwise.
We refract black and white thinking through the prism of theatrical storytelling to reveal a spectrum of colorful complexity. Come to our theatre with your preconceived notions of who you are, what the story is, and how theatre feels and works. We humbly ask to upend your expectations.
Our history
Refracted Theatre Company was started by Co-Founders and Co-Artistic Directors Graham Miller and Tova Wolff in 2019. At the time of Refracted’s conception, Graham and Tova observed a fractured nation, polarized and insular in its political/social motivations, a world inhabited by people deeply distrustful of those with whom they did not share ideological overlap. They saw a pattern of audience members going to the theatre not to be challenged, but rather to have their preconceived biases confirmed. It seemed like theatre was being made so audiences could pat themselves on the back for having empathy for the right people and judgement for the wrong ones.
Graham and Tova ventured to create a theatre company that would challenge their audience’s biases, a space to become a mental and emotional fitness center where audiences could use theatre to grapple with the issues/feelings/forces in their lives. They wanted to inspire healthy discourse and empathic discussions, to encourage people to seek nuance and understanding again.
In their first season ever, they were able to produce a Refracted Reading...before everything came to a screeching halt. The pandemic changed the landscape of theatrical engagement in a way Tova and Graham could never have predicted. But they stuck true to their mission, which seeks not only to provide Refracted content, but also Refracted form.
In 2021, Refracted moved from New York to Chicago, where it continues to invite audiences to engage with new forms of storytelling, forms that are sure to upend their expectations. Tova and Graham relied on adaptivity and innovation to continue to produce safety driven, live theatrical events, that combine audio, immersive, and movement theatre (check out our past seasons to see how this works!)
Refracted in its first year carved out its place as the company that will always keep creating, even during an international crisis. We hope to always be a home for people seeking to understand the world through a more nuanced, empathic lens. The truth, like a prism, has many sides, and in order to see the light, we ask to show you the spectrum of colors that comprise it.
Seven Commitments: A Step Toward Racial Equity
In light of the racial reckoning in June 2020, Refracted Theatre co took a hard look in the ways in which we’ve failed to advocate for the BIPOC community in and out of our org. We hope these seven commitments are a step in the right direction to rectify that.
All Refracted team members were reading plays exclusively by Black playwrights for our second season.
We will tell stories of the oppression of Black people.
We will hold an annual day of raising funds for the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
We will elevate the voices of Black and Brown artists by never again having a season that features only the work of white playwrights.
We will ask people of color to be leaders in our post-show forums.
Whenever we tell “both sides of the story” and one of those sides is founded in racism, we will not create false equivalency in our discussion or presentation of the show. We will address it as racism, because that is what it is.
We will be held accountable by the Black community and the Refracted community to DO BETTER, and we will listen, and we will act.