Translator: Yoko Faulkner Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
So when I was in my twenties,
trying to figure out how I wanted to spend the rest of my life,
I knew that theater was my passion,
but there were some things about it that troubled me,
especially when I looked out in the audience.
Theater audiences are pretty much white and upper middle class,
and I really didn't want to spend my life making art only for wealthy people.
I really didn't want to leave anyone out.
My grandfather came to mind.
He was a farmer in Iowa who lost his land during the Depression.
He was really smart, but he never went to college.
And I never saw him without his overalls and his seed corn cap.
And when I imagined him walking into most of the theaters I'd been in,
I thought he would feel pretty uncomfortable
and think things were maybe a little pretentious.
I also really wanted to find an audience that cared.
I was living in LA at the time,
and LA is not a town about theater.
It's about film and TV.
And most of the people who go do so very grudgingly
because they have a friend in the cast or they are casting agents,
and they're all checking their watches, wishing they were somewhere else.
I had a play that I loved,
"The Good Person of Szechwan," by Bertolt Brecht.
It's about a prostitute who gets a bag of silver from the gods
as a reward for doing a good deed.
And it's about her wanting to help out all her friends who were also poor,
but stay financially solvent herself.
And I thought people without much money would really care about that story.
They would probably really understand her struggles.
But I knew there was no way they would go into a theater.
And really, the price of the ticket is the least of it.
There are a whole host of cultural assumptions that scare people away,
like feeling like they won't know how to dress or how to behave.
And people really just feel like they won't fit in.
So I decided,
instead of expecting people to come to me, I would go to them.
We thought we could find some people without much money in a homeless shelter.
So we found one in Santa Monica.
And we designed a little set
that we could hang up on a clothesline with clothespins,
and we started to rehearse.
We were really scared because it's like a 2 1/2-hour-long play,
and there are 35 characters,
and we only had 7 actors playing all the parts.
And then on top of that, we wondered,
"Who are we to tell people that live their lives in poverty every day
anything about that?"
But finally, opening afternoon at the shelter arrived.
And finally, about 30 people congregated around, very skeptically.
But I like to tell people
that that audience of 30 was the biggest one of my life
because once they got that we were not there to preach to them,
we were not trying to tell them how to get off drugs
or how to be a better person,
we were just trying to tell the story as best we could.
Once they got that, they just opened up their hearts.
I don't know how else to explain it.
They started shouting out advice to the characters.
They'd be like, "Oh, honey. You stay away from him. He's bad news."
(Laughter)
And there is nothing more thrilling for an actor
to have an audience member care so much about your character
that they'll shout out advice to you.
(Laughter)
And they did know more about the world of the play than we did,
but because they were so honest and so vocal in their responses,
we could listen and learn from them.
At the end of the play,
I remember a janitor,
who'd been standing at the back of the room, watching whenever he could,
came up to me, and he looked me in the eye,
and he said,
"Thank you for treating us like we have brains in our heads."
And I took that to heart.
I have never forgotten it.
Because while I believe that our non-traditional audiences
give us more than we can give them,
what we can give them is respect for their intelligence,
for their imaginations,
and for their very hard-won life experiences.
Respect that is so often in short supply
in the lives of people who live on the margins.
(Applause)
Thank you.
I had never experienced an exchange like that in theater,
and so I was hooked.
And so I decided to set out on a journey of taking the big stories of theater -
Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Beckett, American musicals -
to people who've never seen it before.
And we have learned some amazing things about theater as a result.
Not long after "The Good Person,"
I had a child, and I decided I didn't want to raise her in LA.
So I started looking for a place where we could afford a house,
we could use the public schools,
and where there was an excellent theater community.
And guess what?
There's kind of about one city left in this country like that.
(Applause and cheering)
I just want to say that the Twin Cities
are the healthiest place to do theater in this country
because you can afford to live here as an artist
and because the community is so generous and kind.
So now, 25 years -
(Applause)
So now, 25 years later,
my theater company, "Ten Thousand Things,"
does three shows a year.
But we take each play to six or seven correctional facilities
that could be men's, women's or juvenile.
We take it to nine or ten low-income centers.
So that could be homeless shelters, housing projects, detox centers,
adult ed centers, Indian reservations, small towns in rural Minnesota.
And we do four weekends for the paying general public.
So we take each play to every kind of human being imaginable.
And we work with the best actors in the Twin Cities,
people that you see regularly
on the stages of the Guthrie or the Jungle or Penumbra.
And I guarantee you,
most of those actors would tell you that they have become much better artists
because of our non-traditional audiences,
as I know I have become a much better director
than had I followed the conventional path
and tried to climb the ladder at a regional theater.
I'm here to tell you that theater
and, I believe, every art form and really every human endeavor
is absolutely richer when you figure out how to include everyone.
(Applause)
One of the things that starts to change
when you know that everybody is going to be in your audience in theater
is the kind of stories you start to tell.
If you look on Broadway right now
or in a lot of the big regional theaters,
you'll find that many of the plays being done
fall under the category of rich people being mean to each other.
(Laughter)
So an inmate or a homeless person
isn't going to be very interested in that story.
And quite frankly, I don't know why anyone is.
Those stories are really very narrow and very small.
We need big stories that wrestle with fundamental human struggles
like jealousy, betrayal, revenge, desire -
stories that include people from all economic classes.
And we need stories set in another time and another place.
Because just as we wouldn't do a play set in a suburban ranch house,
we also don't do plays about contemporary urban poverty,
because, again, our audiences know more about that than we do,
and they live it everyday,
so they don't really want to sit around and watch more of it.
(Laughter)
But a made-up world creates this level playing field
where we can all enter as equals.
No one can be an expert
because we're all making it up together, on the spot.
So I want to tell you about the first time we did Shakespeare,
who is a playwright that meets all those criteria.
I had never directed Shakespeare before,
but I was reading "Measure for Measure,"
which is set in brothels and taverns and palaces and courtrooms.
And it's about justice and injustice
and being judged unfairly by others,
and I thought,
"If I can just make this story clear."
And may I add, most of the time when I go to Shakespeare,
I don't understand what's going on onstage.
But, I thought, If I could just make the story clear,
I think my audiences would really like it.
So - and I want to just say I didn't change the language.
Clarity in Shakespeare has to do with being able to feel in your gut
what one character is trying to do to another.
If that's clear, then the meaning of the words is also very clear.
So anyway, our first performance
was at the Dorothy Day Center for the Homeless
in downtown St. Paul,
and we had a very experienced Shakespearean actor playing Lord Angelo.
And there's this scene where this young nun, Isabella,
comes to Angelo and pleads for him to spare her brother's life.
And then Isabella leaves, and Angelo starts lusting after Isabella.
He's left alone on stage, and he says,
"What's this, what's this?
The tempter or the [tempted], who sins most?"
And there was a homeless woman sitting right next to where he was standing,
and she looked up at him, and she said,
"Well, I think it's your fault, shithead."
(Laughter)
And then, there was this guy standing in the back of the room,
and he shouted out,
"Ah, just go ahead and fuck her."
(Laughter)
And yep, the whole audience erupted into laughter,
and the actor said his bowels just fell to the floor.
He said, "Oh, my God. I've totally lost this audience.
What am I going to do?"
And then he realized all he had to do was say the next line,
which is "not she, not she, but it is I."
And it was a perfect response
to what the audience had just shouted out to him.
And that's where we have what we call our Shakespeare epiphany.
Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings.
He wrote for those people
who paid a penny to be a able to come and stand in front of the stage.
And they shouted stuff out at the actors all the time.
Shakespeare didn't write for an audience
that was just wealthy and educated and quiet and polite.
And ever since then,
Shakespeare has been one of our very favorite playwrights.
Because he wrote knowing
that people from all economic classes were going to be in his audience,
just like they are in ours.
So, I think you can start to see
how doing theater this way would start to make you a better artist.
Because our audiences live their lives at the same extremes,
many of them,
the same extremes of human existence as characters in Shakespeare's plays
or in Greek tragedies.
And actors have to dig much deeper
to be sure that they really match the truth
of the audience's experience of the situation.
If you are going to be doing Richard III
for an audience that includes some guys that have probably killed people,
you better know what you're talking about.
(Laughter)
Because it's the first time our audiences have seen theater,
they demand that we be very clear, very urgent,
very truthful and very lively in everything that we do.
Another thing that happens
when you know you're going to have everyone in your audience
is that your casting becomes very diverse.
I want everyone in my audiences to be able to see themselves on stage
in ways they've never been able to see themselves before.
So we have Marian the Librarian and Harold Hill in "Music Man."
We have Stella and Blanche in "Streetcar Named Desire."
And we have Queen Titania played by a man
and Bottom played by a woman
in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
I guarantee you,
actors as well as audiences take great delight
in being able to play major parts in stories
that they have traditionally been left out of.
The joy radiates off the stage.
Another great discovery we've made
is that you don't need a lot of stuff to do theater.
We don't use a stage.
All we need is a big room
that is big enough for us to make a circle of chairs about 15 feet across,
and we perform right in the middle.
We couldn't use a stage
because that would really limit the number of places that we could perform.
The principle of Ten Thousand Things' set design
is "Yeah, but do you want to carry it?"
(Laughter)
Actors and myself have to load and unload the van,
haul stuff up stairways, down hallways, squeeze into elevators.
So we work really hard
to figure out what is the least amount of stuff we need to tell the story.
And audiences love being invited to use their imagination.
It's so much more fun to, like, like hold up a hula hoop
and go, "This is the moon,"
instead of having some like 20,000 dollar laser high-tech re-creation
of the moon onstage.
I really believe that theater works best when there are lots of empty spaces
for our imagination to fill in, right?
So this is Don Quixote in "Man of La Mancha."
(Laughter)
Yeah.
And here we have Seymour in "Little Shop of Horrors,"
with the giant man-eating plant.
(Laughter)
Yep, that's his hand.
All he does is to stick it through the metal loop in the flower pot,
and it talks to him.
Audiences love it.
So, if you don't need buildings and fancy sets and elaborate costumes,
suddenly, your money is free to pay actors fairly.
(Applause)
That doesn't happen very often in this world.
(Applause)
Your money can reward the human creative energies involved.
When actors feel respected by being paid a livable wage,
that energy comes across on stage too.
Another thing is that we don't need lights.
We just use whatever fluorescent lights are on in the room because we have to.
But wonderful things happen as a result.
First of all, the actors can see the audience,
which usually they can't in a dark house, like I can't really see you now.
And the opportunities for playfulness are dramatically increased.
And there's no place to hide.
If you are standing like two feet away from an inmate
that is getting bored and restless,
as an actor, you figure out how to dig in and adjust
and make that scene more interesting on the spot.
Also, when all the lights are on and the audiences are seated in the round,
they can see each other.
And this is especially cool when we perform at low-income centers
where people from the general public can come as well.
Because there,
you will often get a corporate CEO sitting next to a homeless guy.
And the homeless guy will laugh at something,
and the CEO will go, "Oh, yeah, that's funny. I see."
And then, the CEO will laugh at something;
the homeless guy will go, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it."
Now, how often does it happen in our world
that someone of extreme wealth and extreme poverty
sit next to each other as equals,
engaging with their imaginations together
in a story about the struggles that human beings share together?
Not very often in this world.
And one last thing happens when you do theater this way.
It's like 20 and 30-somethings love it.
It's not this far off, remote, stuffy, formal thing.
It's intimate, it's immediate, it's raw.
It surrounds you.
Like someone said, it's like mainlining theater.
It's a really fun way to watch theater.
So, what does all have to do with the world outside of theater?
I hope you will take this as an inspiration
to discover for yourselves the riches and rewards that await
when you dedicate yourself completely
to figuring out how to include everyone in whatever it is you do,
people of all economic classes and races and genders and all life experiences.
Don't expect them to come to you.
If you can't figure out how to bring what you do to them,
then you are going to have to spend a lot of time building relationships
so that they will learn to trust that you're for real.
You are going to have to find a way to meet them as equals
and open yourself with humility to listen deeply.
When you do, you will find that your assumptions are shattered,
that your usual way of doing things is radically altered
and that your world is profoundly changed.
Find a way, figure out how to include everyone.
Figure out how to do it.
Your life will be so much richer
in the things that really matter in this world.
Thank you.
(Applause)