Re:working – Culture of Care, a Toolkit

Since Not in Our House and the Chicago Theatre Standards, our city has been considered an epicenter of caring innovation. It’s time, after We See You White American Theater and the pandemic’s gap in knowledge transmission, to reexamine our best practices and share a more common vocabulary. In this roundtable, a cultural consultant, an intimacy choreographer, an access specialist, and the founder of Anti-Racist Theatre walk into a coffee shop to collaborate on a non-exhaustive, step-by-step guide to their ideal process — built around intentionality and the speed of trust — from show selection, to harm prevention and repair, to possibilities for transcendent belonging, to the final bow.

Re:working Chicago Theatre is a new roundtable series to follow up on long-standing challenges faced by local creatives and forge ahead with renewed perspectives and solutions. This partnership between Pocket Theatre, The Understudy Coffee + Books, and American Theatre magazine aims to serve an ecosystem which finds itself at a crossroads and foster connections across specializations and companies. Each month, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho welcomes four theatre folks to The Understudy in Andersonville to confront distinct issues in a warm, community-driven setting. These guests are selected from a public nomination form, linked here.

Nicole Brewer

NICOLE BREWER is a passionate advocate for anti-racist theatre. She has spent the last sixteen years refining and practicing an inclusive method of theatre training and practices which she initially called Conscientious Theatre Training (CTT) and is now known as Anti-Racist Theatre. She has authored several articles about the need for the theatre industry to shift from racist and oppressive models to anti-racist and anti-oppressive.

Nicole has been invited all over the US to teach and speak about CTT and facilitate anti-racist theatre (ART) workshops. She’s also facilitated ART workshops in Canada and the UK providing workshops for The Globe and Cambridge University.

Nicole is a board member of Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL) where she works to shift how the industry can become more proactive to the needs of caregivers. She is a proud single mother of three, inclusive of her bonus (step) child.

Nicole was one of the four producers of the COVID19 freelance artist resource website, freelanceartistresource.com. The producing collective also partnered with HowlRound to produce six weekly webinars that centered the needs of freelance artists impacted by the pandemic.

Ms. Brewer is on faculty in the acting department at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She has worked at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a premier performing arts high school in Washington D.C. as visiting faculty (acting). Nicole was visiting faculty at the National Theater Institute (NTI) for several years. She was faculty in the theatre department of Howard University for seven and a half years and has also worked at Northern Virginia Community College and Montgomery College teaching acting and introduction to communications courses.

Nicole is frequently invited to share her work on CTT and ART at conferences such as ATHE, SETC, TCG, The Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and in the UK at Goldsmith’s University.

Nicole Brewer earned her M.F.A. in Acting from Northern Illinois University and her B.F.A. from Howard University. She’s worked professionally as director, facilitator, speaker, educator, and writer.

Sheryl Williams
Since 2017, Sheryl Williams has been providing Intimacy Choreography and Coordination support to the Chicagoland area, with her work being seen on the stages such as: The Regional Tony Awarding Court Theatre, The Goodman, Steppenwolf and The Lyric Opera of Chicago, as well as several festival submissions from Indie films she has worked on.

She has been Court Theatre’s Resident Intimacy and Fight Choreographer from 2023 to 2026, and as well as their Culture and Consent Coordinator. She was consulted on quality-of-life improvements to the institution and implementing workshop practices to support their “Culture of Care” process. She is also on IPEC’s Certification Board and an Assistant Faculty member with T.I.E. She also finds joy in supporting young artists, holding resident choreography and consulting connections with Roosevelt University CCPA, Depaul’s Theatre School, and North Central College.

Her B.A in Musical Theatre and Minor in Stage combat provided her a foundation for choreography and an enhanced awareness of audience visuals and spatial awareness. Through her workshops and consent-based practices, she actively tries to create space for the performer’s impulses to still be honored, while being boundary-informed and collaborative with the use of de-loaded language. She is thorough in her search for clarity when speaking to productions about what they wish to achieve and what may be needed to achieve it. She has participated in building casting calls, policy considerations, community agreements, and has been invited to institutions as a guest artist and speaker for Theater and Film.

She has been published as a contributor for staging violence and intimacy in Intimacy Directing for Theatre; interviewed for her work at Court Theatre and The Lyric Opera of Chicago in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Kiaran Hartnett
Kiaran has been a teaching artist with A.B.L.E (Artists Breaking Limits and Expectations) in Chicago since 2020.

She enjoys teaching Shakespeare, movement, and devising with the A.B.L.E. ensembles. Kiaran has an undergraduate degree in Psychology and Theater from the University of Minnesota and a Graduate degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from DePaul University.

In addition to working with A.B.L.E., she is a Licensed Professional Counselor and working as a pre-registered Dance Movement Therapist.

Chels Morgan

Chels Morgan (they/them) is a Queer, Black and Dominican Intimacy, Movement and Fight Director as well as a Cultural Sensitivity Specialist for stage and screen. Their work lives at the nexus of physical storytelling, mental health and cultural competency, as they recognize that authentic storytelling is only possible when the artists telling the story are cared for. They are also an AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator and the Director of Accessibility and Inclusion at the Intimacy Professionals Education Collective (IPEC).

Notable credits include Paranormal Activity (Broadway / North American Tour), How to Defend Yourself (New York Theater Workshop), ICEBOY! (Goodman Theatre), safronia (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Kowalski (Lookingglass) and THE CHI (Showtime). Their intimacy, violence and cultural competency work has also been seen at the Old Globe Theatre, The Lucile Lortel Theater, Milwaukee Rep, the American Conservatory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theater, Syracuse Stage, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater, among others.

Facilitated by:

Gabriela Furtado Coutinho

Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is a writer, actor, cultural strategist, and proud graduate of Northwestern University (Theatre/English Creative Writing BA). For the past three years, she has guest lectured at Northwestern in the theatre and English departments and served as an editor of TCG’s American Theatre magazine. Grateful for previous work with the Emmy’s/Television Academy, The Kennedy Center, and various Chicago collectives, she holds experience in developing both new work and tangible care practices.

Projects include Goodman Theatre’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (understudy actor); Blood Wedding (lead actor); The Bloody Bricks and Blows of American Dream High (playwright); Much Ado About Nothing: A Miami Party to Joy, featured in the Latinx Shakespeares archive (director); and Lookingglass’s Circus Quixote (dramaturg). Gabriela is a past fellow of the Fornés Playwriting Workshop and O’Neill National Critics Institute. She was also a 2026 semifinalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

AT bylines include creative nonfiction piece “How to Survive a Dictatorship, the Theatre Artist’s Way,” personal cover story “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias,” and poem “in your hands, american theatres” (the editor’s letter for AT‘s Immigrant Imaginations issue). She feels deeply honored that many of her stories have been featured in syllabi around the country, from high schools in Florida, to undergraduate programs in the Midwest and West Coast, to Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama.

Her latest endeavors include contributing to a new Routledge companion on Latine and Caribbean musical theatre and leading the new monthly series Re:working Chicago Theatre at The Understudy Coffee + Books.

She loves to reimagine classics, embody power roles, take lyrical creative risks, empower youth, and dream up kinder futurisms with friends whose language is laughter. She brings warm Brazilian sensibilities to her work, creating across three native languages.

Please feel free to contact her at gabriela.furtado.coutinho.us@gmail.com. As an actor, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is represented by Talent X Alexander (lsmith@talentxalexander.com).

Nominate someone for the next roundtable here.