Making the Scene

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.