The Light Rail Plays

This unique public art experience has become a signature event for Rising Youth Theatre over the years. Youth and adult artists across artistic disciplines come together to create original performance experiences on, around, and about our public transit system.

This project was originally produced in 2014, receiving the top award from the Arizona Commission on the Arts’s Art Tank Program. The original concept was to get transit passengers to put down their phones and engage with each other in a shared performance experience. Since that time it has continued to grow and evolve, bringing in new art forms, new artists, and new audience members each year.

The Light Rail Plays pairs one youth actor with one professional adult actor. These two become equal partners in the creation of a new, five minute play that takes place either on the Light Rail or in the surrounding transit station. Adults partner with young people to activate and engage their ideas and adults and youth work within a model of shared learning and equal partnership. Bringing together youth and professional adult artists from across performance disciplines results in theatre that reflects different points of view, areas of expertise, and intergenerational collaboration. Placing this theatre in an unusual public space like the Light Rail platform means that a large group of audience members will see the performances who would not typically attend theatre.

Every year of the project has seen growth and evolution. The first year of the plays was magical in many ways - it was also very hot outside (it was June!) and very dialogue driven. By year two we realized that nonverbal or limited dialogue pieces work much better on the trains and we added live music. By 2020 this music had grown to a 5-piece orchestra of youth and adults, working with us in partnership from Harmony Project. We’ve traveled different parts of the train, from central Phoenix to Mesa, finally landing in the city of Tempe for our home base. We’ve created and learned alongside hundreds of artists and performed for thousands of audience members.

The Light Rail Plays is not invisible theatre. The theatricality of our plays is intentionally extremely visible! What we are hoping to create is a moment where artists and audience members and passer bys find themselves looking up together, sharing in a moment of invitation, welcome, and magic. Rising Youth Theatre takes pride in the fact that many of the people in our audiences are not traditional theatre-goers, and works to build a theatre environment that feels inviting, inclusive, and welcoming to everyone. When we first starting the company, we were still performing in theatres. When we performed our plays in formal theatres, our process for MAKING work might have been inclusive and community driven, but our audiences were almost exclusively people who are comfortable attending theatre regularly. When we performed The Light Rail Plays for the first time, we understood that something huge had been missing. Theatres weren’t the right space for our work. When we moved outside, into spaces like the Light Rail, we suddenly found ourselves with a diverse and engaged audience. We found ourselves becoming the organization we meant to be.