Albany Park Theater Project is kicking off the fourth and final season of its immersive play Port of Entry, a production staged inside a custom-built three-story apartment set tucked into a vacant Montrose Avenue warehouse. Tickets for the final run go on sale Thursday at 7 p.m., with a second block available Saturday at noon, and performances run from October 29 through February 27, 2027.
The show, which has been running since its July 2023 premiere, is entering its final season. According to Axios, Albany Park Theater Project has rented the space from the Logan Foundation for $1 a year, and the foundation has told the company it is ready to do something new with the building. The Reva & David Logan Foundation bought the property in March 2020 and leased it to the company, according to the Reva & David Logan Foundation.
A Warehouse Reborn as a Chicago Courtyard Building
The venue at 3547 W. Montrose Ave. has its own backstory. Built in 1929 as the Fernstrom Fireproof Storage warehouse, the 12,000-square-foot building was purchased by the Logan Foundation in March 2020 specifically to host the play, per the Albany Park Theater Project. The foundation bought the property so Albany Park Theater Project could build a custom multi-story set recreating an iconic Chicago courtyard apartment building inside it.
That transformation turned an empty storage shell into something audiences could physically walk through. Each performance invites 28 audience members into the apartment building, splitting them into small groups of eight to move through functional, fully decorated rooms and interact directly with performers, as the theater review site NoProscenium has reported. Details include animated airplanes on a bedroom wall, and the audience is led through the production for 2 hours and 10 minutes.
A Century of Albany Park Stories, Not a Response to Policy
Inside those rooms, actors share true stories collected from immigrants and refugees who called Albany Park home, drawn from a century of migration into the neighborhood. Miguel Angel Rodriguez, Albany Park Theater Project's executive artistic director, said the show tells 100 years of immigrant stories in Albany Park and that the stories were collected from residents who lived there before the theater project itself existed, Axios reports. He also said Port of Entry was not created in response to the Trump administration's immigration policies.
The production includes a story from a child of a Holocaust survivor, reflecting a time when Albany Park was a Jewish neighborhood, according to the earliest story featured in the show. That history tracks with the neighborhood's longer arc: roughly 40% of Albany Park's population is foreign-born today, according to Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning data cited on Wikipedia, making it one of Chicago's most ethnically and linguistically diverse community areas and a longtime gateway for immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe.
From a Teen Ensemble to National Recognition
Miguel Angel Rodriguez is Albany Park Theater Project's executive artistic director. Albany Park Theater Project was founded in 1997 and develops devised work.
Port of Entry itself was co-created with New York-based Third Rail Projects, the immersive theater company behind the acclaimed 2012 production Then She Fell, following an earlier collaboration on the 2016 immersive play Learning Curve, which placed audiences inside an abandoned school building to explore Chicago public education. The current production features 26 young performers from the youth ensemble, and interviews with local residents helped develop the script.
Since its 2023 premiere, Port of Entry has been seen by nearly 10,000 audience members and has drawn visitors from more than 30 states and 10 countries, per Axios. The show's reach even extended to Washington: on December 10, 2024, U.S. Representative Delia Ramirez formally commended Port of Entry on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, highlighting it as a showcase of immigrant stories in Illinois's 3rd Congressional District.
Tickets for the final season are priced pay-what-you-choose between $45 and $180. With the Logan Foundation set to reclaim the Montrose Avenue building after the run ends in February 2027, the first block of tickets goes on sale Thursday at 7 p.m., followed by a second release Saturday at noon.
