Hensley - All the lights on: reimagining theater with Ten Thousand Things

The publication of this book was supported through a generous grant from the Atherton and Winifred (Wollaeger) Bean Fund for Business History

Text 2014 by Michelle Hensley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 551021906.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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International Standard Book Number

ISBN: 978-0-87351-983-0 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-87351-984-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hensley, Michelle. All the lights on : reimagining theater with Ten Thousand Things /Michelle Hensley.

pages cm

Summary: A history of the Twin Cities theater company Ten Thousand Things, which for more than twenty years has been bringing intelligent, lively theater to nontraditional audiences as well as the general publicProvided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-87351-983-0 (paperback)ISBN 978-0-87351-984-7 (ebook)

1. Ten Thousand Things (Theater company)History. I. Title.

PN2297.T46H46 2015

792.09776579dc23

2014043270

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Cover : Sally Wingert and Isabell Monk OConnor in Twelfth Night , Dorothy Day Center, St. Paul. Insets: Barbara Kingsley in The Good Person of Szechwan , womens correctional facility; audience at mens correctional facility; Peter Vitale plays music for Twelfth Night , Dorothy Day Center. All photos by Paula Keller.

Interior : Photos pages 20, 120, 156, 194 by Tom Wallace. Photos pages 40, 98, 154, 196 by Keri Pickett. All other photos by Paula Keller.

To the audiences and artists of TEN THOUSAND THINGS

MY FAVORITE PLAY is The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht. In it, a poor woman named Shen Te gets a gifta bag of silver from the gods. She has to figure out how to spend it wisely. Its all she has.

When I was in my early twenties, I knew I loved theater and thought it might be what I wanted to spend my life on. But I also knew I had only one life. I wanted to be sure I could use it to give something back to the world. I wrestled with this almost every day throughout my twenties, through college and grad school and in between. With so many overwhelming problems on the planetmost humans living in desperate poverty, struggling each day with violence and hunger, pollution threatening our very existenceI didnt see how theater could help very much.

Also, I honestly couldnt imagine myself going down the recommended path for aspiring young directors, climbing the ladder at a regional theater. I sensed I would need to act a part and squeeze myself into some kind of mold of authority and confidence in order to prove that I had the stuff to be a director. If I worked hard to ingratiate myself with those in charge, I might eventually be allowed to direct a reading of a script I probably wouldnt even like, then after more time, perhaps a staged reading of another script I didnt really care aboutall for very little if any pay. I knew that if I couldnt find the space to truly be myself and work on things I loved, my art wouldnt be very good.

Most important, some things about theater itself made me uncomfortable. Looking around at the audience before the lights went down, I saw mostly well-off, educated white people. Lots of other people seemed left out. I thought of my grandfather, an Iowa farmer who lost his land in the Depression. He usually wore striped engineer overalls and a seed corn cap. He was very intelligent but never went to college. I imagined he would feel out of place walking into most of the theaters Id been to, both the scruffy little black boxes and the big theaters with their fancy lobbies. And he probably wouldnt be interested in much of what was happening up on the stage, certainly not most nonlinear experimental theater and performance art (much of which I personally enjoyed) but also not even many of the classic plays done on big regional stages, where the audience had to sit so far away. I imagined much of it would feel pretentious to him, or at least very puzzling, and certainly remote. I really didnt want to spend my life on an art form that seemed set up to leave so many people out.

I grew up in the very white, very middle-class world of Des Moines, Iowa, in the sixties and early seventies, in a period of American history that now is starting to look like an aberrant bubble of relative income equality. The wealth then was distributed in such a way that taxes supported a very good public school system and other social safety nets, and employers generally shared more generously with their employees, through salaries, good health care, and pension plans. My late childhood was affected by the protests against the Vietnam War and the general 1960s expansion of consciousness, all of which I could observe from a certain distance. Not old enough to personally experience the painfulness of the draft or drugs or discrimination, I instead absorbed the eras more positive messages. It all gave me a sense of hopefulness about the possibilities for change in the world. (In sixth grade, I wore pants to school for several days, joining a protest against the girls dress code in public schoolsand felt the success of getting those rules changed!) My parents were both very liberal, and our family talked about politics a lot at the dinner table, giving me a keen sensitivity to unfairness and injustice. The notion that it was our job to try to make the world at least a little less unfair took deep root. This gave a kind of ferocity, I think, to my searching for how to best spend the little bag of silver of my own life, and how, if I were to make theater my profession, I really wanted to do it.

Both my parents grew up during the Depression, and through their storytelling I was very aware that the material comforts I enjoyed were not part of their childhoods, although they also conveyed that they had been happy enough without having so much. My father always liked to remind me that before World War II, America was pretty much a third-world country, with most of its population living in rural poverty. But he also stressed that because most people were in the same boat, it didnt seem to matter all that much, especially as a child. These stories, along with the anti-materialism that sprung up in the sixties, gave me a strong sense that there was happiness beyond material things and, indeed, that too many things could actually get in the way of happiness. My father in those times was able to save up enough by working as a lawyer at an insurance company to send me to an Ivy League school without taking on any debt (tuition at the time was around five thousand dollars). It was still a time when college was not only affordable for the middle class but seen as a place to learn and explore, rather than to acquire specific training for specific employment.