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Ten Thousand Things Theater Company goes to jail (and other places)
by Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio
November 21, 2003

Actors prepare for a performance at Hennepin County Men's Correctional Facility. (MPR Photo/Marianne Combs)

Many theaters complain their audiences are too soft. Some sleep through the shows, others give a standing ovation no matter what. One company says it has great audiences - you just need to know where to look for them. Ten Thousand Things theater company performs in Minnesota's prisons and homeless shelters. Critics regard it as some of the best theater in the region.

St. Paul, Minn. — At Hennepin Country Men's Correctional facility, inmates sit on mats in the gym. The floor is hard; some guys lie down to get comfortable. After all, they're here to watch two and a half hours of drama and social satire.

Ten Thousand Things Theater Company is presenting the Good Person of Szechuan by Bertolt Brecht. It's the story of a woman who's given a sack of gold by the gods for being a good person. She vows to use the money to help her friends, but finds it's harder to do good for others than she imagined - especially since she has to look out for her own good first. The cast includes some of the Twin Cities most talented actors, including Barbara Kingsley. She says if she couldn't work with Ten Thousand Things, she'd probably stop.

	Musician Peter Vitale

"You're on your toes," says Kingsley. "It's immediate, it's up close, it's personal. It's got to be honest. You can't pull any punches and what the audience gives back is so much richer than what I give to them."

In Ten Thousand Things productions Kingsley gets no dressing room, no elaborate set and no mood lighting to help set the scene for her performances. She must rely entirely on her acting skills to take audiences on a journey away from their often harsh lives. Kingsley says the audiences at prisons, homeless shelters and rehab centers often relate to the tragedies in which she performs better than she can. She says she learns from them when she sees how they react.

St. Paul Pioneer Press Theater Critic Dominic Papatola says this special intimacy between actors and audiences creates dynamic theater.

"I don't think it's overstating things to say that Ten Thousand Things has really changed the landscape of theater in the Twin Cities," says Papatola.

	Theater in an unusual setting

Papatola says local theaters large and small could learn a few lessons from Ten Thousand Things theater company, not the least of which is respecting an audience's intelligence.

"There's a trust that happens when a director and a company go before a group of people who have never seen theater before and say 'You know what? We're gonna give you Brecht. We're gonna give you Shakespeare. We're gonna give you Strindberg. And we trust that you're gonna understand it," says Papatola.

This unique approach to audiences has given Ten Thousand Things a leg up in hard economic times. It's funding remains relatively strong, and artistic director Michelle Hensley maintains a barebones production which keeps costs low.

"You really can do theater if you have just a big room and you have some chairs and you have some really good actors and a good script. That's really all you need," says Hensley. "So yeah, we don't have to spend money on lighting equipment or much on set or costumes and we can devote our resources to the human beings involved."

Hensley says she's taking plays directly to people who don't normally go to the theater. She says she's eliminating certain barriers - a fancy building or an unfamiliar neighborhood - that might intimidate some people. Ironically, one of Hensley's concerns is a problem that would make any other artistic director happy. Her audiences are growing.

"At the Dorothy Day Center as it gets toward dinner time that place gets more and more crowded. The prisons are filled up. We have a growing audience base sadly," says Hensley. "We don't want to encourage our audience to grow but they seem to."

Hensley says she'd like to see Ten Thousand Things used as a model for low-cost high quality theater which is accessible to audiences from all backgrounds. In pursuit of that goal each year she's inviting a different director from other theater companies across the country to guest direct one of her plays. She hopes the first hand experience will convince them it's a project worth repeating elsewhere.

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