Making the Scene

“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.”