UNDESIRABLE SECRETS to Play Solo Sunday Series in Chicago Ahead of Off-Broadway Premiere
The acclaimed solo play will be performed October 5, 2025, at Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro.
Following sold-out performances at Theatre for the New City’s Dream Up Festival in New York, Undesirable Secrets will come to Chicago for one night only on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. as part of the Solo Sunday series at Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro. The production arrives ahead of its Off-Broadway premiere at Theatre Row on November 1, 2025.
Written and performed by Rodolfo Alvarado and directed by William Doll, Undesirable Secrets tells the remarkable true story of Anthony C. Acevedo, a Mexican American WWII medic and the first Mexican American to sign the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Benjamin & Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors.
Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, Acevedo and hundreds of fellow American soldiers—many of them Jewish—were sent to the Nazi slave labor camp at Berga, where they endured forced labor, starvation, and disease. Ordered into silence by the U.S. Army after liberation, Acevedo kept his trauma hidden for more than six decades, confiding only in a secret diary and his prisoner armband, both now preserved at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The play intertwines his wartime ordeal with the scars of childhood abuse, exploring how unspoken pain reverberates across generations and how breaking silence can bring healing.
In New York, critics praised the play as “worthy of Broadway” (Bob Wicke, Theatre Critic & Emeritus Professor of English), “fascinating, moving and painful…a symphony” (Bill Koch, Performing Arts Legacy Project NYC), and “brilliant, mesmerizing” (Patricia Herrera, Latino Media NYC).
The Chicago performance, co-produced by Scott Whitehair, the Anthony Acevedo Educational Foundation, and New York’s Danisarte, will also feature pre-show live music, including an original composition by Chicago musician Spencer Ball written specifically for the play.
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