The Line Media Part 1
The Line Media Part 2
Lives in Twin Cities Theater (Excerpts from Offstage Voices)
Lighting designer Marcus Dilliard came to the theater after dabbling in studies as a biologist and an electrical engineer, but by the time he settled on the theater, he had let go of everything else. He says of his decision, “It was the fact that it [theater] was constantly mysterious. It felt like something you could dig into for a long, long time and not understand, and not get bored with. There was a long way to go with it.”
As Illusion Theater’s Bonnie Morris explains, people in the theater understand that they are supposed to create and that one of its pleasures is to create with other people. “In the work world,” she says, “not everybody gets to be in a team, or in a collaborative group, where you’re all working towards the same aim. We all believe that together we’re going to make something that’s bigger than anything that any one of us could create.”
Playwright Aditi Kapil has a clear idea of what theater is for and reflects that belief in every work she writes: “What the arts in a healthy society do is put us in dialogue with each other about things that are deep. The things we talk about are things that lay in the area of the soul and the subconscious and feelings and human connectivity.”
Actor Anna Sundberg’s father is a pastor and, although she says she has never felt very religious, she thinks they are in some ways in the same business. “I asked him once why he was called and I could have written down verbatim everything he said and it was why I do theater. A lot of us are here searching for the same thing. Why are we here? What does it mean to be a human being? How do we connect to other people? What does it mean to make mistakes and fail and struggle?”
“Why do we keep doing this?” she asks. “It’s mostly to figure out what we’re doing. Most of us just want to feel like we’re not alone. When I watch a great play, I feel I’m not alone.”
Actor and director Randy Reyes says that he’d be happy to “be in rehearsal forever. It’s the process of discovery: learning and company building and the exchange of stories. We get to analyze humanity and unpack humanity. No one can bother us and we can fail freely as we try to accomplish something that’s impossible; it’s an impossible task to tell the story ‘right.’ So it’s the pursuit of telling it the best that you can.”
“We are aware of [audience members],” says actor and writer Bradley Greenwald. “And we need them. We all need to be in the same room. They’re not watching a movie, and we’re not in a rehearsal room; we’re all there together, which is the beauty of communally shared performing arts.”
At Penumbra, co–artistic director Sarah Bellamy enjoys standing in the house during performances. “I love to watch the audience watch the play. I love seeing them lean forward, I love seeing their brows furrow. I love it when they erupt in laughter. I love it when I see someone pull a Kleenex from their purse. And I love watching them leave the theater, when I can see how they’ve reacted. They’re usually very talkative, or they’re really silent because they are emotionally processing.”
Playwright Kira Obolensky believes that the respect afforded to artists and theater people in the Twin Cities is not necessarily found in other communities. “There are certain places in the country where I just say I’m a writer,” she explains, “because if you define yourself as a playwright, you might just as well have announced that you make your own shoes. But here in the Cities, I can say I’m a playwright. I think that’s because there’s such a good theater community and such good people.”
