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Nick Fracaro began his writing journey after accolades from his elementary school teacher Miss Weidensee for a poem he wrote. He was seven years old, and he already knew two things: he would one day be old enough to marry her, and he would pursue the life of the writer she saw in him. A lengthy stint of juvenile delinquency interrupted that pursuit — but also crystalized and directed it. He dropped out of  high school at sixteen. On reaching the age of eighteen, his  juvenile escapades were now considered crimes, the latest of which would likely result in a six-month  jail sentence. Panicked, he visited the local Army recruiter.  It was the height of the Vietnam War. Delinquents, and newly promoted criminals, were all welcomed to enlist.

Nick got his GED in the Army and through the GI Bill  he was able to receive  his BA from Illinois Benedictine College and his MA in Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Illinois at Chicago. For his MA thesis in 1978, An Autobiography of Jesus Christ, he had to choose three professors as his readers. As the title suggests, there was no defined genre for such creative writing back then. The readers he chose, although they were considered “experimental” in their various published works of poetry and fiction, were not completely on board with his thesis proposal. All three objected to a statement in the outline asserting that the autobiography would be in perpetual process as he lived it, finished only when he died (not necessarily by crucifixion) or when  he turned 33 years old. To the dismay of some of the MA professors, and the encouragement of others, Nick submitted only “An Excerpt of An Autobiography of Jesus Christ” for his writing assignments. For the final credits toward his MA he chose a course study on William Butler Yeats. The professor, a prominent Yeats scholar, was confused when Nick submitted for his writing assignment “An Excerpt” that consisted of images of Tarot cards laid out in sections labeled ACTOR, DIRECTOR, PLAYWRIGHT. Coincidently, a small local Chicago theatre was mounting  a production of Yeats’ chamber play The Resurrection. To Nick’s metaphysical eye, the coincidence registered more as fate, and he auditioned for his first play. He was cast in a small walk-on part. The playbill listing of characters and cast, in one fell swoop,  justified his Yeats’ paper, his thesis, and his Master of Arts degree.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
  The Hebrew     –>     David Calhoun
  The Greek        –>     Richard Foster
The Syrian      –>      Robbi Davis 
                         Jesus Christ     –>     Nick Fracaro                           

Acting in this production ended a chapter in Nick’s writing life as it simultaneously began another. He walked out of his graduate literature department, across the U of I campus to the undergraduate theater department, and into a casting call for Jean Genet’s The Balcony. He was cast in the production as Roger, the rebel leader and Chantal’s lover. The actor cast as Chantal was Gabriele Schafer, who would become his wife and life-long theatre partner.

Gabriele and Nick, along with other teachers and students in that Balcony production, co-founded a theatre company and named it in honor of Jean Genet. In Thieves Theatre, Nick found an artistic home and the next chapter of his writing life, writing being necessarily intertwined with the role of artistic director of a theatre. His instinctual impulses from his earlier life of delinquency and crime had never really left him, but they had come full circle. In Genet’s writing and life, he found a role model that reflected his own journey. Genet summed it up perfectly:

“My ambition is to put my crime on stage.”

Through Thieves Theatre (later renamed International Culture Lab), Nick has been making trouble writing, performing, and producing theatre his whole adult life, with the arrest record to prove it. He has spent decades producing edgy, site-specific, and physically daring work — from Chicago prison yards to Lower East Side squats to international stages. When he’s not producing, he’s performing; when he’s not performing, he’s writing…

… most recently his serialized autofiction, Tipi on the Hill, a chronicle of his life in a NYC shantytown den of thieves from 1990-93.

For Thieves Theatre he directed Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, Heiner Mueller’s Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts and the world premiere of R.W. Fassbinder’s Trash, the City and Death in New York, among many other projects, including ICL’s Diva Divan in Philadelphia and Tbilisi, Georgia.

He was a founding member of RAT (1994-2004), an international coalition of theater workers dedicated to sharing resources and ways of working, for which he organized conferences in New York, Philadelphia and Rosario, Argentina.

As dramaturg at Dallas’s Undermain Theater in 1999, he created maybe the first theater blog which he later continued at RatSass.