Derrick Sanders and Reginald Nelson arrived in Chicago in 1999 with a singular goal: to start a theater company that could fuse the ensemble aesthetic of a Steppenwolf with a focus on work that expressed and arose from the African Diaspora experience. The pair had met at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where they received bachelor’s degrees in theater; Nelson then attended the University of Illinois in Urbana for his master’s degree, while Sanders headed to the University of Pittsburgh. Keeping in touch long-distance, they talked about creating, in Sanders’s words, “a space where artists of color could come and create work that was nationally impactful and important. At that time in the nation there was only one city we thought could support that”: Chicago, which already had five Black-identified professional theaters producing year-round—ETA Creative Arts Association, the Black Ensemble Theater, MPAACT, and two companies no longer in existence, the Chicago Theatre Company and Onyx Theatre Ensemble.

Douglas Turner Ward—who turns 90 on May 5, 2020—was an original cast member of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking drama about an African-American family on Chicago’s south side. Following a tryout at Chicago’s Blackstone Theatre (now the Merle Reskin Theatre of DePaul University) in February 1959, Raisin opened on Broadway in March of that year, becoming the first play by a Black woman to run on “the great white way.” Ward played a minor role in the show while also understudying its star, Sidney Poitier. In 1965, Poitier’s then-wife, Juanita Poitier, and actor Robert Hooks produced Ward’s Day of Absence at the Off-Broadway St. Mark’s Playhouse in New York’s East Village.

For Sanders—who stepped down as Congo Square’s artistic director in 2009 but remains an ensemble member—Day of Absence conveys a serious and even hopeful theme beneath the satiric irony. “I think Ward was trying to uplift his black audience,” he says. “He was saying: look at what would happen without us. Where would they be without us?”