ALLENTOWN PUBLIC THEATRE

Among the theater’s most important offerings is our Coming Clean Program, a hands-on, educational approach to the opioid crisis in our city and state. In this, we have the unique ability of addressing the real-life circumstances of drug use in the city through the power of the theater. Working with professional consultants and performers, the theater can reproduce on stage the experiences and trials of children and parents who live with those who are swept up in the epidemic. Our goal is to create realistic theatrical moments that can yield powerful conversations; real insights into how to understand and how to deal with drug related problems.

The Coming Clean theater workshop program is now being offered to schools, churches, and social service agencies in the Lehigh Valley. After a period of development in which we enlisted the aid and advice of social service agencies including The Center for Humanistic Change and Treatment Trends, we have developed our current program with agencies such as the Girls and Boys Club of Allentown.

Centered at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in the heart of inner-city Allentown, APT has been active in producing children’s shows and workshops there for the past eight years. And now, as we develop a deep and engaging partnership with the Promise Neighborhood program of Allentown, we have taken our theater programs ever deeper in the fabric of our diverse Allentown neighborhoods. A perfect complement to Promise Neighborhood’s social mission, Allentown Public Theatre is bringing theater and the arts to some of the most important issues in the lives of the people living in the center city.

Our efforts to bring the arts to the inner city began in 2016 with our Voice of Conscience program. Reaching out to local churches such as Lehigh Valley Friends and Christ Lutheran Church, we have brought poetry and song to their congregations followed by rich discussion sessions on racism and social justice. Working from this model, we have since carried on this work in partnership with the Promise Neighborhood Program.

Allentown Public Theatre has partnered and presented with some of Allentown’s most important arts institutions. The theatre’s collaboration with Muhlenberg College took us from inner city performances at home to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. More recently, the theater partnered with the Allentown Art Museum to offer a stage for local artists in our Theater Café Series. In addition, partnerships between APT artists and community artists have yielded a rich set of plays addressing racial and gender issues such as our productions of The Island and The Ugly Duckling.