“You remember what you’re not supposed to talk about?” Heather Kinney asks a group of boys, 15 to 17. She and her friend Carolyn Minor are teaching improv to the residents of section 4A at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, and she’s preparing them to do two-person scenes.
“It takes your mind off home and court,” says Gregory, 16. “It makes you think, focus, pay attention.”
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Every Sunday at 4 PM, the boys meet Kinney and Minor in the detention center chapel, a spacious room with gray carpet and brown brick walls, where they play warm-up games with names like Bippety Bippety Bop and Big Booty that require them to listen to one another and make quick decisions. Then they practice long-form improv, where they work on scenes, developing characters and relationships.
Both Minor and Kinney, who are in their late 20s, had done improv in college and had recently moved to Chicago–Kinney from upstate New York, Minor from Williamsburg, Virginia. Both came from families that valued helping those in need: Minor’s mother was a social worker for a child-welfare agency, and Kinney’s family took in troubled teenagers.
The boys are often wary at first. In an early class, Minor instructed the group to stand in a circle and close their eyes. “I ain’t closing my eyes,” a boy said. “I’m in a roomful of criminals!”
“I spend a lot of time with Urban Dictionary,” Minor says.
