Making the Scene

Last Phase of the Moon

In 1985, the first Minneapolis-based season of the collaborative Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Theater of the New Moon) opened with the zany and inventive Yang Zen Froggs. Theatergoers were hooked on Jeune Lune’s style of physical theater, and clamored for more.

In 1992, the itinerant company, whose four artistic directors had initially shuttled between bases in Paris and Minneapolis, purchased and renovated the former Allied Van Lines cold-storage building in the Warehouse District. Jeune Lune also began touring to places like the Yale Repertory Theatre and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In 2005, it won a Regional Tony Award. Then, like falling dominoes, its woes gained momentum.

In 2006, the artistic team disbanded, leaving Dominique Serrand as sole artistic director. In 2007, the company revealed it was laboring under debt of nearly $1 million. This summer, Jeune Lune announced that it would close at the end of July and sell its building to satisfy creditors.

The closing raised speculation about what was to blame and whether more closings might follow. Dominic Papatola, theater critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, sees Jeune Lune as an isolated case.

“The way the company was born, as a collective of artists, was a more important part of the theater’s success than people realize,” he says. “A big reason people went to Jeune Lune was they didn’t ever know what to expect, because there was this creative bouillabaisse, and you never knew whose creative vision was going to govern.”

With a single artistic director, the company became “something that I think Jeune Lune didn’t want to become: a regional theater company with one governing aesthetic,” Papatola says—and one whose financial obligations required it to “make art on a schedule.”

The company “lived idiosyncratically and died idiosyncratically,” he concludes. “I don’t think that Jeune Lune is the canary in the coal-mine, indicating that theater in the Twin Cities is in peril.”

—C. L.