Making the Scene

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.