Feature Story | Making the Scene | TwinCities Business

Making the Scene
How did professional theater get so big in the Twin Cities?

by Camille LeFevre for TwinCities Business

September 2008

Flash bulbs were popping. Actors, directors, even fans were darting—kiss-kiss—from cheek to cheek. Sequins and silk flashed alongside vintage wear and tuxedos, but the décolletage was discrete—this is Minnesota, after all. The third annual Ivey Awards, which celebrate the Twin Cities’ burgeoning theater scene, got underway last September with the usual panache. Jumbotrons captured every enthusiastic song-and-dance routine, dramatic monologue, and award winner’s heartfelt thanks given from the stage of the State Theatre in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, in the audience, after each winner’s name was announced, two theater mavens tilted their well-coiffed heads together and whispered in unison, “ ... and Peter Rothstein.”

In 2007 alone, the prodigious former actor had directed more than 10 productions for an astounding variety of theater companies. While Rothstein himself didn’t get any awards this night (in 2005, his production of La bohème with his musical-theater company Theatre Latte Da did receive an Ivey, and it was restaged at the Southern Theater last year), others involved in his productions did.

Michael Matthew Ferrell won for choreography for the Disney juggernaut High School Musical, which Rothstein directed for the Children’s Theatre Company. Sally Wingert was awarded for her portrayal of Peggy Guggenheim in Woman Before a Glass, which Rothstein directed for the Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company. And Rothstein stood in for John Arnone, accepting Arnone’s award for scenic design for Private Lives, which Rothstein directed at the Guthrie Theater.

Originally from Grand Rapids, Rothstein came to Minneapolis in 1992 as a recent MFA graduate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, hired as an unpaid assistant to the Guthrie’s Garland Wright in directing A Woman of No Importance. He hasn’t been without an acting or directing gig since. And his success can be attributed, in part, to the remarkably extensive theater scene in the Twin Cities.

Forty-five years ago, there were virtually no professional theater companies here. Now, there are something like 69—a development at least as unlikely as Minnesotans exchanging air kisses.

ENTER BOASTING

Civic and cultural boosters say variously that the Twin Cities have “more theater seats per capita than any city besides New York,” “more live theater than any city outside of New York,” “more theater companies per capita than any metro area in the country.”

Hard numbers are hard to pin down because, as Dominic Papatola, theater critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, points out, “You have to define what a theater seat is, define what a theater is, define your population.” How do you account for the theater company with no building of its own that moves from outdoor venue to vacant factory to college auditorium?

Scott Mayer, founder and director of the Ivey Awards, states that the Twin Cities are currently home to 69 professional theater companies (most of them nonprofits) that he calls “Ivey eligible,” meaning they’ve existed for at least one year and they pay their actors and administrative staff. “I would guess that New York City has more theater seats,” Mayer says, “but I believe we have the most professional theater companies in the country.”

In a 2001 article, Star Tribune theater critic Graydon Royce attempted to quantify the local theater scene. “About 2.3 million seats were sold by theaters in the Twin Cities during the fiscal year ended in 2000—nearly equal to the combined regular-season 1999 attendance for the Minnesota Twins, Vikings, and Timberwolves,” he wrote. “That figures to a ratio of 0.82 tickets per capita—based on the 2000 census population of 2.8 million for the metro area. The comparable figure in Seattle—a city often compared to the Twin Cities—is 0.56. It’s 0.45 in Chicago.”

Forty-five years ago, there were virtually no professional theater companies here. Now, there are something like 69—a development at least as unlikely as Minnesotans exchanging air kisses.

Royce also wrote, based on research conducted by the Star Tribune, that “the combined annual budgets of the theater companies that operate in the Twin Cities area is about $90 million, com-pared with $55 million in Seattle, an estimated $30 million in Philadelphia, $28 million in Boston,” and for Chicago, a metropolitan area about three times the size of Minneapolis–St. Paul, the number was $180 million. Needless to say, such findings got many people inside and adjacent to the theater community excited: At last, there were some actual numbers, based on research, to substantiate the anecdotal claims.

Ann Markusen, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs whose research focuses on the economic impacts of the arts in this region, also has well-researched numbers. Markusen has looked at the number of performing artists (actors, directors, dancers, choreographers) in the metropolitan area and at the money they bring in from elsewhere through touring and commissions and spend locally—thus contributing to the local economy.

“Performing artists are 30 percent ‘overrepresented’ in the Twin Cities, which is just below writers and authors, and more than musicians and more than visual artists,” she says. “Overrepresented” means that as a share of the local work force, they figure more prominently than they do in the national work force.

“The number of people saying they’re self-employed or employed in performing arts as their major occupation was 2,500 in the year 2000. That’s pretty powerful,” Markusen says. “In Chicago, it was 4,600, but then Chicago is a larger place. And their performing artists, as a share of the work force, are slightly below the national average.” In the Twin Cities, “performing artists are 50 percent more likely to be self-employed compared to the rest of the country,” she adds.

That’s an indicator that artists like Rothstein—who is artistic director of his own highly successful decade-old company but freelances widely—can find plenty of work in a theater community that is well known for its size, vitality, diversity, and community and philanthropic support.

While in New York City this summer, participating in Lincoln Center’s prestigious Directors’ Lab, Rothstein reported that “there are 60 directors here from all over the world ... Africa, England, Finland, Australia.” Talking breathlessly into his cell phone as he walked down Manhattan’s Great White Way, he said, “Everyone knows of the Twin Cities theater community. The Guthrie Theater, with its new building on the international map, and Theatre de la Jeune Lune are the first companies people think of.” (But see the sidebar on Jeune Lune’s recent closing.) “And they know about the funding structures and the foundations that have been critical to the development of theater in the Twin Cities, and that the community has a reputation for supporting the arts.” Teresa Eyring was managing director of Children’s Theatre Company for almost eight years before becoming executive director in March 2007 of an industry service organization, the nonprofit Theatre Communications Group, in New York City. The Twin Cities is “a highly respected theater community across the country,” she says, and not only the Guthrie and Jeune Lune are signature companies.

“Children’s Theatre Company is the theater for young audiences in the country,” Eyring says. “Penumbra Theatre is one of the leading African-American theaters in the country and has functioned at a high artistic level for many years.” In the Twin Cities, “you don’t find two or three companies doing similar kinds of work. There’s a fascinating differentiation among theaters at all levels.”

Theatergoers can opt for professional musical-dinner theater (Chanhassen Dinner Theatre), Broadway touring productions (the State, Orpheum, and Ordway), the literary canon (the Guthrie’s mainstage and proscenium theaters) or new work from emerging playwrights (the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio). Then there are culturally specific companies: the Penumbra, but also Interact Center (artists with disabilities), Teatro del Pueblo (Latino), Pangea World Theater (international and multidisciplinary), and Theater Mu (Asian American).

Theater companies have their own distinctive aesthetics. The Jungle Theater is committed to the classical canon and new works. The multiracial Mixed Blood Theatre promotes social change and cultural pluralism. Others stage experimental works in prisons (the Ten Thousand Things company); cars, warehouses, and a casket factory (Skewed Visions); and a Minneapolis public-works yard (Frank Theatre).

“Suffice it to say, for a middle-sized city in the middle of the country, there’s a tremendous amount of theater here,” Papatola says. “And that’s happened for lots and lots of different reasons.”

It started, in large part, with the University of Minnesota.

THE BACK STORY

“For many years, the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota was the theater community,” says Charles Nolte, professor emeritus, who taught there from 1965 to 1990. “With the exception,” he adds, “of the Old Log Theater,” a for-profit on Lake Minnetonka in Excelsior that opened in 1940.

The vaudeville theaters that thrived on Hennepin Avenue in the late 1800s through the early 20th century had been converted to movie theaters by mid-century. Theatre in the Round Players opened in downtown Minneapolis in 1953 and moved to its current West Bank location in 1969. In the mid-1950s, Dudley Riggs started the Instant Theatre Company, which changed its name to Brave New Workshop in 1961. Today, it’s one of the longest-running satire workshops in the country.

Other than that, there wasn’t much theater to speak of.

But Frank Whiting, who’d become head of the university’s theater department in 1944, had been leading productions at venues scattered all over the U’s East Bank. So when, in 1959, Sir Tyrone Guthrie published a small invitation on the drama page of the New York Times inquiring about any interest that cities outside of New York might have in starting a residential regional theater, Whiting succeeded in enticing Guthrie to Minneapolis with the area’s nascent enthusiasm for theater. “There was an audience here ready for more theater,” Nolte says. “Guthrie also liked Frank, who was a great humanist, and he liked the local the philanthropists and entrepreneurs—the Cowles, the Wintons, Pierce Butler—who were willing to fund a new theater.”

They made a persuasive case to Guthrie, Papatola says. “They said, ‘If we build it, will you come?’ Guthrie wanted someplace outside of the maw of New York, out of the klieg lights. Another reason Minneapolis was attractive is that [Guthrie’s group] did research and found more subscriptions to Harper’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly in Minneapolis than anywhere else in the country. They figured there was an intelligent population here.”

There were other signs of intelligence and artistic appreciation, too. The existence of the Minnesota Orchestra (formed in 1903), the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (started in 1958), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (which opened its doors in 1915), and the Walker Art Center (formed in 1927) pointed to a metropolitan community interested in and willing to support a variety of world-class arts organizations.

Guthrie opened his theater in 1963 on Vineland Place in Minneapolis (adjacent to the Walker). Papatola says it became “the grain of sand inside the pearl that things started accumulating around.”

Some wondered whether it would have the opposite effect. According to Nolte, “With the Guthrie opening, people worried no one would bother to go see other plays. But quite the reverse happened. It was an enormous stimulant to other theaters” in the Twin Cities, some started by graduates of the university’s theater program. In 1965, for example, John Clark Donahue founded the Moppet Players, which became the world-renowned Children’s Theatre Company. Founding artistic director Gary Gisselman directed the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre’s first production in 1968. In 1976, Jack Rueler (a graduate of Macalester College) formed Mixed Blood, one of the first theaters in the country with mixed-race casting, and hired Lou Bellamy as a director, who started the African-American Penumbra Theatre the same year.

More start-ups—In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, Illusion Theater, Park Square Theatre, Great American History Theatre—came throughout the 1970s.

“If you leave food out in your house, you get mice. If you leave actors alone, they’ll start making theaters,” Papatola quips. “The Guthrie created the idea that it could be done and people would come to see theater. There were also these actors in town, and more actors who came to town looking for work.” Few theaters paid a living wage, but the advertising and film-production industries here in the 1970s and ’80s provided voiceover work, training films, and other commercial work with which actors could supplement their incomes.

(Later, such long-running for-profit ventures as Triple Espresso (12 years) and the former Hey City Theater’s Tony ’n’ Tina’s Wedding (five years) served the same purpose. They “provide work weeks for actors,” Papatola says. “Every week an actor isn’t waiting tables is another excuse for why they should stay here as opposed to going to Seattle, Chicago, or New York.”)

A theater-industry ecology developed. Active community theaters in 1970s—Chimera, Theater of Involvement, Edith Bush Players—“didn’t pay anybody,” says Graydon Royce. But “they offered a lot of theater and helped develop audiences.” Also key to audience development was Professor Arthur Ballet’s Introduction to Theater course at the University of Minnesota (he taught it from approximately 1963 to 1985).

“Arthur taught 2,000 students a year who were forced to go to theater as class assignments,” Nolte recalls. “So Arthur planted a huge seedbed of people who were interested in theater.”

On the funding side, philanthropists, both private family foundations and a growing number of corporate ones (General Mills, Target, Medtronic), continued to get theaters started and keep them afloat. Royce says, “Those monies were absolutely critical to the nonprofit companies—which are generally about 55 percent funded and 45 percent earned—as they grew up.”

Papatola says, “Just like we have this healthy, intriguing ecosystem of small, medium, and big theaters, there’s a corresponding structure of funders. The Jerome Foundation, they’re the wet-dough people; they give you money to get going. When you get more established, you go for a McKnight Foundation grant or a Bush Foundation grant.” In addition, the Jerome Foundation supports the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. “So we have these communities of actors, playwrights, and theaters that have all worked together,” Papatola adds. “I don’t think the guys that started the Guthrie—and they were all guys—could have imagined, in their wildest dreams, what has been created here.”

A GUTHRIE ENCORE?

A boom continued through the 1980s and ’90s. The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts opened in downtown St. Paul in 1985, and in the early ’90s the refurbished historic State and Orpheum theaters were reopened on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. All present, in large part, Broadway touring productions.

“I think of us as the front door to the theater community,” says Tom Hoch, president and CEO of the Hennepin Theatre Trust, which owns and operates the State, the Orpheum, and the renovated Pantages that opened in 2002. “Many people have a first experience with a Phantom [of the Opera] or Annie or Lion King, and move from there to other theaters in the community.”

Theaters like Brass Tacks and Eye of the Storm came and went. But Children’s Theatre alumni Bain Boehlke and Wendy Lehr started the Jungle Theater in the 1991. In 1999, the company moved to its own building on Lyndale Avenue and helped spur the renaissance of the Lyn-Lake neighborhood.

“First wave” start-ups were spinning off a second wave of even greater diversity. Many of the newer Asian-American and African-American theaters (Theater Mu, Pillsbury House Theater) have relied on the Penumbra’s Lou Bellamy, who is teaching a new generation of theater artists at the university, as a mentor.

“Penumbra has a clear aesthetic; it’s black to the bone, ” Bellamy says. “But it’s also artistically excellent. Those two things make for a pretty valuable cultural asset. And people use us as a model they’d like to emulate.”

It’s the Guthrie effect all over again. Meanwhile, the theater community wonders what effect the new Guthrie will have. In its shiny riverfront building, it now has three stages to fill with actors, directors, and scenic, costume, and lighting designers—not to mention audiences. Will the Guthrie, long the nexus around which local theater has evolved, become a vortex that consumes what it created?

“The new Guthrie is such a profound change,” Royce says. “The question to look at is, what will that do to audiences? One, is that going to take away audience from smaller or midsize theaters? Two, is it going to take away designers, actors, and directors from the pool? Or conversely will it attract more actors, designers, and directors to the Twin Cities who will stay here and start their own theater companies? That’s a real issue.” The Guthrie was a positive catalyst before, but Royce says the issue now is scale, even when it comes to operating costs in the new building. “Maintenance did double in the first year, but it was fairly circumspect in the second year—of course, that’s compared to the huge spike in year one. The impressive thing is that they have grown from an $18 million budget in the final year at Vineland to $26 million—a 44 percent increase—and they balanced this year. Somebody’s doing something right.”

Still, he adds, “the costs associated with that new building are a real challenge, and how they grow out of that will be something to watch. Either [the Guthrie] sucks everything in—and it will for a little bit—or we’ll get our bearings and the question will be whether it raises all boats with it.”

HOMETOWN FANS

Whatever happens, Peter Rothstein is one artist who plans on sticking around. “I want the Twin Cities to be my home,” he says. “The commitment to my work has been so incredibly supportive and generous, and I want to be in a place where I contribute.” He recalls that before he and Tod Peterson wrote the wildly successful A Christmas Carole Petersen, which will run for its ninth year this December, the two wrote a little play called Oh Shit, I’m Turning into my Mother.

“We brought that show to a cabaret room in New York City, and opening night we were all jazzed,” he says. “We did the show, then we suddenly thought, ‘Why are these 80 people in New York more important than 80 people in Minneapolis or St. Paul?’ There’s all this hype about being in New York, and while that wasn’t a letdown, it was illuminating. There’s something great about creating work for the community in which you live.

“In the Twin Cities, theater is created for itself, in and of itself. It has its own legitimacy,” Rothstein continues. “Not every show is a sellout, but that’s also true in New York. You can’t stop creating work because you think your market is oversaturated. If artists waited for an audience, there wouldn’t be any art, historically.”

If the history of the Twin Cities theater community is any indication, he adds, people will continue making theater despite any future challenges. In other words, “Build it and they will come.”