Call and Response
Ten Thousand Things speaks to nontraditional audiences—
and they speak back
By Laura Butchy
"You never know what's going to happen at a Ten Thousand Things show!"
It's a familiar sentiment to actors, audiences and critics who've seen the work of the unique Minneapolis-based company—and it's echoed by Michelle Hensley, the troupe's award-winning founder and artistic director.
They all have the stories to prove it. Take, for example, the oft-repeated tale of veteran Ten Thousand Things Theater Company actor Steve Hendrickson. In 1998, he played Angelo in his first TTT production, which was also the company's first attempt at Shakespeare, Measure for Measure. The initial show of the run took place in a social services center in front of a large group of people who were sitting and waiting—either for a counselor or for the soup kitchen to open.
As the chaste Isabella departed following her first scene with the lecherous Angelo, Hendrickson turned toward a nearby woman in the audience to begin his soliloquy: "What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?"
Without missing a beat, the woman replied loudly, "I think it's you, shithead."
Above the laughter, a man's voice yelled out from the other side of the room, "Oh, just fuck her!"
"And the place erupts in laughter," remembers Hendrickson. "In a nanosecond I thought: I've totally lost this audience for this scene, maybe for the play! I'm screwed; what do I do now?—when the epiphany struck. The next line is an answer to the audience's laughter: 'Not she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I.'"
Hendrickson's induction into the TTT family is but one of many stories about the group's unusual performances in nontraditional venues. Produced with minimal sets and props, TTT shows are performed in the round with all the lights on, illuminating the audience sitting inches from the cast.
Those audiences range from a loyal following of fans who never miss a TTT show to far more unusual groups. Performing primarily at prisons, homeless shelters and other low-income centers, TTT reaches audiences that may never have seen a play before—and certainly aren't afraid to talk back.
"It's not a traditional theatre audience, that laughs when it's appropriate and is quiet when it's appropriate," says TTT mainstay Matt Guidry, who played Bassanio in the company's latest production, The Merchant of Venice, which ran this past October and November. "That's one of the best parts about it. It's invigorating to get that response.
"Some of them have never seen a play, so we're giving something to them, but I don't think they realize what we're getting out of it," Guidry continues. "And I don't mean we're helping the disadvantaged. We get to connect with them and get a reaction. Once you've done a Ten Thousand Things show, that's what you want to be doing."
The combination of TTT's reputation among actors and competitive compensation gives Hensley her pick of Minneapolis performers. "I'd wanted to work with them for a long time," says Stacia Rice, who played Portia in Merchant, her first TTT show. "Their shows are the coveted theatre jobs in town." And most TTT actors return to the company whenever they can, despite a job description that includes packing up and unloading along the road.
The bare-bones theatre company began its history in 1990 in Los Angeles. Hensley mounted a successful production of The Good Person of Szechwan at a Santa Monica homeless shelter—and knew she had found her audience. Using grant money, she took the show to other low-income centers in L.A., then produced a second show there in similar venues before relocating to Minneapolis in 1993.
By 1996, the company was producing regular seasons of two and then three plays a year around the Twin Cities, performing primarily in nontraditional venues with the support of grants. After conquering Brecht and the Greeks, Hensley added Shakespeare and musicals to the company's repertoire, garnering adulation from critics and audiences along the way. "We wish everyone could experience the immediacy of a Ten Thousand Things performance in Hennepin County Women's Prison," wrote a City Pages critic in 1998. "The troupe performed Aphra Behn and Shakespeare in a small cafeteria, surrounded by inmates sitting on the edge of their seats, talking back to the actors, screaming with laughter. Theatre should be allowed to do no less."
Though Merchant is more often referred to as tricky than beloved, watching the TTT cast draw it out in the round with little aid from sets or props is something to behold. To watch TTT is to glimpse the essence of theatre: gifted actors telling a story that sparks the audience's imagination. The unpredictability of live theatre is heightened here: There are not only the actors to watch as they live the story but also the unusually engaged audiences.
Critics were unanimous in their praise of TTT's Merchant, which starred Hendrickson as Shylock. The Star Tribune called Hensley's production "crisp and articulate," adding, "Indeed, this terrific staging reflects in its characters our own shortcomings and complexities. What a treat."
A Ten Thousand Things treat is no easy feat. In order to perform at the Shakopee Minnesota Correctional Facility for women, the cast packs up its costumes and drives 40 minutes from downtown Minneapolis. They meet in the prison parking lot to await the Reddy Rent van, driven by the stage manager, that contains the show's sets and props, which everyone unloads into the visitor's lobby.
While a guard checks the set and prop pieces and counts the metal coat hangers (to be sure they all leave), the group turns over IDs in exchange for visitor badges before being shuffled through the security doors.
This gymnasium is a particularly large playing space by TTT standards; many locations find the actors crunched into a community room or lobby that barely fits the actors, much less the sets. Today the actors hang their costumes on the exercise equipment in their makeshift dressing room, a workout space off the gym.
Music director Peter Vitale, who has been creating sound for TTT shows for more than 10 years as well as acting in some productions, sets up a keyboard, chimes, bass drum and cymbals. Though the instruments are minimal, Vitale explains that less is more in TTT stagings; every sound becomes more important in the intimate setting.
As Vitale unpacks, Hensley moves the rows of chairs closer together and chats with audience members who have arrived early.
"Excuse me," one inmate asks actor Rice. "Where would I get the best view?" She explains that the actors will be facing all directions, so the audience can sit anywhere. According to the facility's recreational therapist, TTT shows have become so popular with the inmates that they now have to draw names to select who may attend.
A woman named Marsha brings a camera to photograph the performance for the prison newsletter. "This is the only theatre group that comes in," she says. "I've been to seven or eight of these now. I come to all of them."
Once the group is seated, Hensley briefly introduces the production. "This play took place in a time when Christians passed really restrictive laws against Jews," she explains. "This is a play about taking risks with money and with love."
The audience listens attentively. Portia's first scene describing her suitors draws appreciative laughter, while failed suitors later earn sighs of sympathy. By the time the courtroom scene arrives in the second half, the audience is cheering and jeering characters, with divided opinions about Shylock's fate. "Yeah, that's what you get," crows one spectator, while another argues, "That's not right, to make a man change his religion."
"Michelle is very canny about the material she chooses," says Hendrickson. "In the shows, there's always an element of the institution of power and its abuse. It's something that our audiences, particularly prison audiences and those at the social service agencies, know very well. Because so many of them have led hard lives, many of them understand the abuse of justice and the abuse of power and loss of freedom in ways that a more traditional theatre audience perhaps doesn't."
In addition to seven prison performances, The Merchant of Venice's five-week run included nine paid performances and seven free ones at low-income centers around the Twin Cities area. A performance at the Aliveness Project, a community center offering programs to the HIV/AIDS community, played to an equally verbal audience the day after Shakopee.
"I always think that the most interesting audiences are the ones in social service agencies and shelters, because they don't have to come and they don't have to stay," Hendrickson says. "It's a very accurate barometer of how good the play is. The people who connect to it do so in such a powerful and visceral sense—if something affects them, they'll let you know."
That incredible performer-to-audience bond is what inspires Hensley. Raised in Iowa, she graduated from Princeton and went on to graduate school in directing at UCLA. "I began questioning what I wanted to do in theatre, and it was very much about connecting with an audience," she says. Over the years, her pursuit of this mission has won her national recognition, including the Francesca Primus prize in 2005 from the American Theatre Critics Association.
During the run of Merchant, Hensley offered insights into how she finds and reaches her audiences, and TTT's role in the American theatre landscape.
LAURA BUTCHY: How were you inspired to create Ten Thousand Things?
MICHELLE HENSLEY: It's really important to know that I never had the idea to start a "poor people's" theatre company, or social service theatre company. It really just began after I finished grad school in Los Angeles—some friends and I wanted to do a Brecht play, and we basically wanted to find an audience who would care about it. The play was The Good Person of Szechwan, and we started thinking about who would appreciate the story. It seemed that people without very much money would care about Shen Teh's struggle. But there's no way those people would come to a normal theatre, so we made sets we could put on a clothesline and set up in the lobby of this homeless shelter.
We were really scared. It's a huge play, we didn't know what they would think. We felt somewhat intimidated about doing a play about living in poverty for people who actually are poor—what could we know about living in poverty that they don't?
Finally about 30 people congregated around, and once they got that we weren't there to preach to them or tell them how to live their lives or condescend—that we were there to just try to do our job as well as we could—they really opened up. That was the biggest theatre audience of my life, because they opened their hearts to us. They shouted out advice to the characters; they understood the characters of the play better than we did. It was an amazing way to do theatre that I'd never seen before, and I loved it. I got hooked. Ever since then, I've been looking for ways to connect the big stories that theatre tells so well with audiences who haven't ever seen theatre, and we keep making amazing discoveries about what makes theatre work.
How do you select your venues?
We look for places where low-income adults congregate that have a big room and chairs, and a staff that is energetic and enthusiastic. Most people who have never seen theatre before don't want to, or they don't think they want to. They believe it will be boring or over their heads, or that it's just not for them. So it takes a lot of individual staff encouragement over a period of days to say, "Come on, try it!"
This type of theatre seems incredibly challenging—finding venues, traveling around with your sets, winning over audiences. What drives you?
This allows me and the theatre artists I work with to do the best work we possibly can. I don't feel like I could do this quality of work with traditional theatre audiences in traditional venues. For me and a lot of the actors I work with, it's been very liberating how these audiences, and the conditions we have to perform under to reach them, make our work better.
Do you feel a stronger connection to nontraditional audiences?
The reaction from the audience is so strong; they will be so open and so honest with you. It reminds me why I wanted to do theatre in the first place.
It is a huge thing that they don't sit in the dark, because the actors see the audience, which they don't normally get to do, and you can tell right away if they're with you or they're not—which is scary but also great. Also, the audience members can see each other—you become part of a community of people watching the show and other people's responses.
The other thing that really strengthens that bond between the actors and the audience is that it is so bare-bones that the audience has to engage their imagination to create the world of the play. I find that when audiences are asked to do that, they love it.
You also allow the general public to attend performances at nontraditional venues. And these have become so popular that you have started requiring reservations.
We're sold out! Now we have a whole cadre of people who have been coming to Ten Thousand Things shows for years, and they love that immediacy and that rawness and the exposed feeling.
People are bringing their different life experiences and sharing in the play and watching each other watch it, and when that happens, it's great. And this was a discovery—it was nothing I could have planned. People from the outside just started coming to the homeless shelter shows, and it became something we tried to nurture.
How do you choose your shows?
It's hard to articulate. I know that big stories are great: people struggling over huge things, often stories that have big casts with people at every class level in them, like Shakespeare or the Greeks. Another thing that really helps is sort of a fairy-tale setting: another time, another place. The couple of times we tried doing realistic, contemporary urban-poverty plays, it didn't work so well. They live it, so why do they want to watch it? They know more about it than we do. But in the fairy-tale world, none of us really knows about it—we're all on the same level. It gives enough distance that people can look at things like revenge, or injustice, and apply it to their lives without taking it really personally. Theatre does that so well, creating other worlds, other times, other places, and using metaphors to connect with us. It's turned out that in addition to the Greeks and Shakespeare and Brecht, musicals are really great.
This spring, you're directing Little Shop of Horrors. How did you begin doing musicals?
The first musical we did was—believe it or not—The Unsinkable Molly Brown. You think of certain versions of it, and people roll their eyes, but I was attracted to that story because it is about a woman who really can't decide if money or love is more important. Paring it down to that bare-bones idea, I got interested in getting really good actors who could bring depth and complexity to the play and make the story truthful. We needed actors who could carry a tune, but they didn't have to have big booming Broadway voices. I think people liked hearing the vulnerability in their voices, and it made the act of singing very human.
Then stripping away the glitz and glamour and set and costume changes and focusing in on the story, and having Peter create a bare-bones accompaniment that's very imaginative—The Unsinkable Molly Brown became this wild hit! I remember we did a show at a women's prison where a woman got up and ran across the stage to the bathroom to get more Kleenex because she was sobbing. People were moved and crying at men's prisons, too. It became this incredible emotional thing, and it all comes down to that question, which isn't really that easy to answer, if you do so honestly: Which is more important, money or love?
Your other show this season, Blood Wedding, will have a guest director, Juliette Carrillo. Is that typical for Ten Thousand Things?
That's something we've started doing the last five or six years. We feel that we've created a model for doing theatre that's really high quality with amazing outreach at a pretty low cost. It seemed as though when other people around the country heard of this model, they'd get really interested and excited by it, so we thought a way to get the word out would be to bring in really good guest directors and let them experience this way of working. Last year, Emily Mann wrote a version of Antigone for us and came out to see the work and was really excited and inspired by it. She wants to start a prison outreach program at the McCarter [Theatre Center in Princeton, N.J.].
Do you think the Ten Thousand Things model could work in any city?
Yes, as long as you've got really good artists doing it. For me, it's been a delight to see what happens when you don't need so many of the institutional trappings we've come to think of as necessary to do theatre—that you don't need a stage or subscribers or lights—to see what gets released. I think it would be a great thing to see happening in other cities as long as the quality of the work is really high. I don't want people going in and doing bad theatre. I want people's first experience with theatre to be amazing, especially so that people who didn't think they'd like it will be blown away by the humor and the depth.
Though it wasn't started as a social service theatre company, Ten Thousand Things certainly seems to have an activist or social angle.
One way that you can do political theatre is to do a play that has political content. At Ten Thousand Things, I think what we've come up with is a pretty cool model of theatre that is political because of how we deliver the play. By choosing to go to places where there are people who don't go to the big institutional theatres, by making it available to low-income people or people with really different life experiences—that in itself is a political act. In that sense, Ten Thousand Things is a political theatre. We do this thing causing people of very different life experiences and backgrounds to come together. By creating a place where they can start to discover things they have in common—that is a political act in our world. In that sense too, I'd like to see this model happening other places.
But I will be clear that if you're going to do theatre this way, sometimes you'll take it to a place where it just doesn't work. Often because the audience doesn't show up, or sometimes a certain play doesn't resonate with a certain group of people the way you thought. Especially in our early years, it wasn't always easy. Now we've figured out a lot about how to do it, but it can be a real roller-coaster ride.
Is there any venue that you enjoy most?
I really love the women's prisons. They're so open and honest. The spectators are really engaged and attentive, but they can also be very vocal, which is just delightful. The men's prisons are good, too. When we do Shakespeare, it's like there's a hunger for the language. You can feel them just eating those words up; they're starved for some kind of stimulation and acknowledgement of their humanity.
People are always surprised that we do Shakespeare for nontraditional audiences. But Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings. He wrote expecting people to be vocal and shout out their opinions and shout out insults to characters—that rough-and-tumble interaction you can have with an audience. That is what Shakespeare is about, and it's not very prevalent in most of the Shakespeare that goes on in our country. There are wonderful discoveries you can make about him and his world when you have audiences that respond that way.
What themes led you to The Merchant of Venice?
There's the thread of judging people by their outsides, by what they look like, and prejudice. Justice is always huge with our audiences, because so many of them taste injustice daily in their lives. There's the great fairy tale of choosing the casket based on what it looks like on the outside, and the real meanings on the inside, and people keeping their oaths or breaking them. All those themes, plus it's just a great story. Also, it's great to take a real good look at hatred; people in our audiences have experienced a lot of it.
The most important thing is that it can't be a play that has any easy answers. It needs to be a play that asks hard questions and doesn't give you the answers to them. One of the things that is so wonderful about performing for the audiences we do is that they know that; they know that life doesn't have any easy answers. The Merchant of Venice is full of questions that don't have answers. When we've been able to do audience discussions, they really understand all the contradictions and complexities and see very clearly that there's no one character who is right all the way or legal all the way.
When you first started, was it difficult to find actors who were comfortable?
There's a certain kind of actor who's not a Ten Thousand Things actor. If they're just in it for the glitz and the glamour and the nice dressing room, it's not going to work. But really good actors have innate generosity, and they love the risks and the challenges. It's the chance to interact with human beings with whom you've been led to believe you have nothing in common. There's something about acting with Ten Thousand Things—it's suddenly something bigger than yourself. Something bigger than what the critics say.
But the critics seem to love you, including Merchant of Venice! Was it difficult to get critics to attend shows at the nontraditional venues?
It took a while to get them to come at first, but they've become very fond of it. It's great for them to see how different audiences respond. Performing in a women's prison is totally different from a men's prison, is totally different from a homeless shelter, is totally different from an elderly center, is totally different from the regular public, so the play gets stretched every which way.
And it means a lot to the people in prison to read the review. One of the obstacles we first faced is that people think if you're doing theatre in prisons, it must be really bad. They assume that it's skits about staying off drugs. I just want it to be the best theatre possible, and the thing that's so important to realize is that the reason it is so good is because of the audience. Not in spite of the audience, but because of it.
What do you feel your role is as a director for nontraditional audiences?
The thing that's most important to me about being a director is being an advocate for the audience. Making sure that it's clear, it's urgent, it's lively, for someone who walks in off the street and has no idea what's going on. That's the least I owe my audience. They have a whole lot more important things to do with their lives than sit around and watch a play. They have to find a bed for the night, or a job interview, so if I'm going to ask them to sit and watch something for two hours, it better be damn important.
Laura Butchy is a 2005-06 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant from the Jerome Foundation.