Musical "Red Summer" Examines 1919 Race Riots

Olympia Fields, Ill. – (August 5, 2022) – Governors State University’s Center for Performing Arts announces the world premiere of the musical Red Summer, which will play at the Center for the Performing Arts stage on campus in University Park, IL September 16-25, 2022.

Red Summer takes place during the Chicago race riots of 1919. The protagonists are two World World I soldiers—one Black, one white—returning from the battlefields of Europe. Upon their return they find themselves caught in the violence of a Chicago that is struggling to accommodate the Great Migration, the return of WWI veterans, a downturn in the economy, and long-standing ethnic tensions. Having fought on the same side in The Great War, they are now pitted against each other as their friends, family, and neighbors wage block-by-block warfare, and the city’s ethnic enclaves rage and burn.

Red Summer earned its name due to the blood that ran freely in the streets of Chicago (and many other American cities) during the summer of 1919. Yet these events are largely forgotten and unknown to the general populace, even to those in the cities in which they took fierce hold. One of the reasons racial conflicts continue to erupt in America today is because it chooses to bury this history rather than look at it and understand it. This story sheds light on that chapter in the hope that an honest look at our past will make it possible to have a clearer vision of our future.

“GSU’s Center of Performing Arts continues to produce some of the most entertaining and educational plays in the country and everyone in the Chicago Southland should be as excited as I am to see Red Summer,” said Chicago Southland Convention & Visitors Bureau CEO/President Jim Garrett.

For more information or to buy tickets, visit https://www.govst.edu/RedSummer/ or call the box office at (708) 235-2222.