All the lights on: reimagining theater to include everyone | Michelle Hensley | TEDxMinneapolis

Michelle Hensley describes the motivation behind starting her theater company, Ten Thousand Things, which takes award-winning professional theater - Shakespeare, Greek Tragedy, Brecht - to audiences who live on the margins in shelters and prisons and immigrant centers as well as to a savvy theater-going public. She highlights the discoveries the company has made about theater by doing it this way, and she makes a strong case for the radical and positive change that can happen to any human endeavor when inclusion becomes a priority.

Michelle Hensley is the artistic director of Ten Thousand Things, where she has directed and produced over 60 tours of award-winning drama to nontraditional audiences in prisons, shelters and housing projects as well as the general public. Many of these productions make the local critics' Top Ten Lists. A McKnight Theater Fellow, Michelle was named the 2012 Star Tribune's Best Artistic Director. She received the Francesca Primus Prize from the American Theater Critics Association for outstanding contribution to the American theater by a female artist. She is a founding member of the Minnesota Theater Alliance, serves on the boards of the Theater Communications Group and Howlround, and in March published her book, "All The Lights On: Reimagining Theater with Ten Thousand Things."

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

So when I was in my twenties,

trying to figure out how I wanted
to spend the rest of my life,

I knew that theater was my passion,

but there were some things
about it that troubled me,

especially when I looked out
in the audience.

Theater audiences are pretty much
white and upper middle class,

and I really didn't want to spend my life
making art only for wealthy people.

I really didn't want to leave anyone out.

My grandfather came to mind.

He was a farmer in Iowa
who lost his land during the Depression.

He was really smart,
but he never went to college.

And I never saw him without his overalls
and his seed corn cap.

And when I imagined him walking
into most of the theaters I'd been in,

I thought he would feel
pretty uncomfortable

and think things were maybe
a little pretentious.

I also really wanted to find
an audience that cared.

I was living in LA at the time,

and LA is not a town about theater.

It's about film and TV.

And most of the people who go
do so very grudgingly

because they have a friend in the cast
or they are casting agents,

and they're all checking their watches,
wishing they were somewhere else.

I had a play that I loved,

"The Good Person of Szechwan,"
by Bertolt Brecht.

It's about a prostitute who gets
a bag of silver from the gods

as a reward for doing a good deed.

And it's about her wanting to help out
all her friends who were also poor,

but stay financially solvent herself.

And I thought people without much money
would really care about that story.

They would probably
really understand her struggles.

But I knew there was no way
they would go into a theater.

And really, the price of the ticket
is the least of it.

There are a whole host of cultural
assumptions that scare people away,

like feeling like they won't know
how to dress or how to behave.

And people really just feel
like they won't fit in.

So I decided,

instead of expecting people
to come to me, I would go to them.

We thought we could find some people
without much money in a homeless shelter.

So we found one in Santa Monica.

And we designed a little set

that we could hang up
on a clothesline with clothespins,

and we started to rehearse.

We were really scared
because it's like a 2 1/2-hour-long play,

and there are 35 characters,

and we only had 7 actors
playing all the parts.

And then on top of that, we wondered,

"Who are we to tell people
that live their lives in poverty every day

anything about that?"

But finally, opening afternoon
at the shelter arrived.

And finally, about 30 people
congregated around, very skeptically.

But I like to tell people

that that audience of 30
was the biggest one of my life

because once they got
that we were not there to preach to them,

we were not trying to tell them
how to get off drugs

or how to be a better person,

we were just trying
to tell the story as best we could.

Once they got that,
they just opened up their hearts.

I don't know how else to explain it.

They started shouting out
advice to the characters.

They'd be like, "Oh, honey.
You stay away from him. He's bad news."

(Laughter)

And there is nothing
more thrilling for an actor

to have an audience member
care so much about your character

that they'll shout out advice to you.

(Laughter)

And they did know more
about the world of the play than we did,

but because they were so honest
and so vocal in their responses,

we could listen and learn from them.

At the end of the play,

I remember a janitor,

who'd been standing at the back
of the room, watching whenever he could,

came up to me,
and he looked me in the eye,

and he said,

"Thank you for treating us
like we have brains in our heads."

And I took that to heart.

I have never forgotten it.

Because while I believe
that our non-traditional audiences

give us more than we can give them,

what we can give them
is respect for their intelligence,

for their imaginations,

and for their very hard-won
life experiences.

Respect that is so often in short supply

in the lives of people
who live on the margins.

(Applause)

Thank you.

I had never experienced
an exchange like that in theater,

and so I was hooked.

And so I decided to set out on a journey
of taking the big stories of theater -

Shakespeare, Greek tragedy,
Beckett, American musicals -

to people who've never seen it before.

And we have learned some amazing things
about theater as a result.

Not long after "The Good Person,"

I had a child, and I decided
I didn't want to raise her in LA.

So I started looking for a place
where we could afford a house,

we could use the public schools,

and where there was
an excellent theater community.

And guess what?

There's kind of about one city
left in this country like that.

(Applause and cheering)

I just want to say that the Twin Cities

are the healthiest place
to do theater in this country

because you can afford
to live here as an artist

and because the community
is so generous and kind.

So now, 25 years -

(Applause)

So now, 25 years later,

my theater company,
"Ten Thousand Things,"

does three shows a year.

But we take each play
to six or seven correctional facilities

that could be men's, women's or juvenile.

We take it to nine or ten
low-income centers.

So that could be homeless shelters,
housing projects, detox centers,

adult ed centers, Indian reservations,
small towns in rural Minnesota.

And we do four weekends
for the paying general public.

So we take each play to every kind
of human being imaginable.

And we work with the best actors
in the Twin Cities,

people that you see regularly

on the stages of the Guthrie
or the Jungle or Penumbra.

And I guarantee you,

most of those actors would tell you
that they have become much better artists

because of our non-traditional audiences,

as I know I have become
a much better director

than had I followed the conventional path

and tried to climb the ladder
at a regional theater.

I'm here to tell you that theater

and, I believe, every art form
and really every human endeavor

is absolutely richer when you figure out
how to include everyone.

(Applause)

One of the things that starts to change

when you know that everybody
is going to be in your audience in theater

is the kind of stories you start to tell.

If you look on Broadway right now

or in a lot of the big regional theaters,

you'll find that many
of the plays being done

fall under the category
of rich people being mean to each other.

(Laughter)

So an inmate or a homeless person

isn't going to be
very interested in that story.

And quite frankly,
I don't know why anyone is.

Those stories are really
very narrow and very small.

We need big stories that wrestle
with fundamental human struggles

like jealousy, betrayal, revenge, desire -

stories that include people
from all economic classes.

And we need stories
set in another time and another place.

Because just as we wouldn't do a play
set in a suburban ranch house,

we also don't do plays
about contemporary urban poverty,

because, again, our audiences
know more about that than we do,

and they live it everyday,

so they don't really want
to sit around and watch more of it.

(Laughter)

But a made-up world creates
this level playing field

where we can all enter as equals.

No one can be an expert

because we're all
making it up together, on the spot.

So I want to tell you
about the first time we did Shakespeare,

who is a playwright
that meets all those criteria.

I had never directed Shakespeare before,

but I was reading "Measure for Measure,"

which is set in brothels and taverns
and palaces and courtrooms.

And it's about justice and injustice

and being judged unfairly by others,

and I thought,

"If I can just make this story clear."

And may I add, most of the time
when I go to Shakespeare,

I don't understand
what's going on onstage.

But, I thought, If I could
just make the story clear,

I think my audiences would really like it.

So - and I want to just say
I didn't change the language.

Clarity in Shakespeare has to do
with being able to feel in your gut

what one character
is trying to do to another.

If that's clear, then the meaning
of the words is also very clear.

So anyway, our first performance

was at the Dorothy Day Center
for the Homeless

in downtown St. Paul,

and we had a very experienced
Shakespearean actor playing Lord Angelo.

And there's this scene
where this young nun, Isabella,

comes to Angelo and pleads for him
to spare her brother's life.

And then Isabella leaves,
and Angelo starts lusting after Isabella.

He's left alone on stage, and he says,

"What's this, what's this?

The tempter or the [tempted],
who sins most?"

And there was a homeless woman sitting
right next to where he was standing,

and she looked up at him, and she said,

"Well, I think it's your fault, shithead."

(Laughter)

And then, there was this guy
standing in the back of the room,

and he shouted out,

"Ah, just go ahead and fuck her."

(Laughter)

And yep, the whole audience
erupted into laughter,

and the actor said
his bowels just fell to the floor.

He said, "Oh, my God.
I've totally lost this audience.

What am I going to do?"

And then he realized all he had to do
was say the next line,

which is "not she, not she, but it is I."

And it was a perfect response

to what the audience
had just shouted out to him.

And that's where we have
what we call our Shakespeare epiphany.

Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings.

He wrote for those people

who paid a penny to be a able
to come and stand in front of the stage.

And they shouted stuff
out at the actors all the time.

Shakespeare didn't write for an audience

that was just wealthy and educated
and quiet and polite.

And ever since then,

Shakespeare has been
one of our very favorite playwrights.

Because he wrote knowing

that people from all economic classes
were going to be in his audience,

just like they are in ours.

So, I think you can start to see

how doing theater this way
would start to make you a better artist.

Because our audiences live their lives
at the same extremes,

many of them,

the same extremes of human existence
as characters in Shakespeare's plays

or in Greek tragedies.

And actors have to dig much deeper

to be sure that they
really match the truth

of the audience's experience
of the situation.

If you are going to be doing Richard III

for an audience that includes some guys
that have probably killed people,

you better know what you're talking about.

(Laughter)

Because it's the first time
our audiences have seen theater,

they demand that we be
very clear, very urgent,

very truthful and very lively
in everything that we do.

Another thing that happens

when you know you're going
to have everyone in your audience

is that your casting becomes very diverse.

I want everyone in my audiences
to be able to see themselves on stage

in ways they've never been able
to see themselves before.

So we have Marian the Librarian
and Harold Hill in "Music Man."

We have Stella and Blanche
in "Streetcar Named Desire."

And we have Queen Titania played by a man

and Bottom played by a woman

in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

I guarantee you,

actors as well as audiences
take great delight

in being able to play
major parts in stories

that they have traditionally
been left out of.

The joy radiates off the stage.

Another great discovery we've made

is that you don't need
a lot of stuff to do theater.

We don't use a stage.

All we need is a big room

that is big enough for us to make
a circle of chairs about 15 feet across,

and we perform right in the middle.

We couldn't use a stage

because that would really limit the number
of places that we could perform.

The principle of
Ten Thousand Things' set design

is "Yeah, but do you want to carry it?"

(Laughter)

Actors and myself
have to load and unload the van,

haul stuff up stairways, down hallways,
squeeze into elevators.

So we work really hard

to figure out what is the least amount
of stuff we need to tell the story.

And audiences love being invited
to use their imagination.

It's so much more fun
to, like, like hold up a hula hoop

and go, "This is the moon,"

instead of having some like 20,000 dollar
laser high-tech re-creation

of the moon onstage.

I really believe that theater works best
when there are lots of empty spaces

for our imagination to fill in, right?

So this is Don Quixote
in "Man of La Mancha."

(Laughter)

Yeah.

And here we have Seymour
in "Little Shop of Horrors,"

with the giant man-eating plant.

(Laughter)

Yep, that's his hand.

All he does is to stick it
through the metal loop in the flower pot,

and it talks to him.

Audiences love it.

So, if you don't need buildings
and fancy sets and elaborate costumes,

suddenly, your money is free
to pay actors fairly.

(Applause)

That doesn't happen
very often in this world.

(Applause)

Your money can reward
the human creative energies involved.

When actors feel respected
by being paid a livable wage,

that energy comes across on stage too.

Another thing
is that we don't need lights.

We just use whatever fluorescent lights
are on in the room because we have to.

But wonderful things happen as a result.

First of all, the actors
can see the audience,

which usually they can't in a dark house,
like I can't really see you now.

And the opportunities for playfulness
are dramatically increased.

And there's no place to hide.

If you are standing
like two feet away from an inmate

that is getting bored and restless,

as an actor, you figure out
how to dig in and adjust

and make that scene
more interesting on the spot.

Also, when all the lights are on
and the audiences are seated in the round,

they can see each other.

And this is especially cool
when we perform at low-income centers

where people from the general public
can come as well.

Because there,

you will often get a corporate CEO
sitting next to a homeless guy.

And the homeless guy
will laugh at something,

and the CEO will go,
"Oh, yeah, that's funny. I see."

And then, the CEO will laugh at something;

the homeless guy will go,
"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it."

Now, how often does it happen in our world

that someone of extreme wealth
and extreme poverty

sit next to each other as equals,

engaging with their imaginations together

in a story about the struggles
that human beings share together?

Not very often in this world.

And one last thing happens
when you do theater this way.

It's like 20 and 30-somethings love it.

It's not this far off,
remote, stuffy, formal thing.

It's intimate, it's immediate, it's raw.

It surrounds you.

Like someone said,
it's like mainlining theater.

It's a really fun way to watch theater.

So, what does all have to do
with the world outside of theater?

I hope you will take this
as an inspiration

to discover for yourselves
the riches and rewards that await

when you dedicate yourself completely

to figuring out how to include everyone
in whatever it is you do,

people of all economic classes and races
and genders and all life experiences.

Don't expect them to come to you.

If you can't figure out how to bring
what you do to them,

then you are going to have to spend
a lot of time building relationships

so that they will learn to trust
that you're for real.

You are going to have to find a way
to meet them as equals

and open yourself with humility
to listen deeply.

When you do, you will find
that your assumptions are shattered,

that your usual way of doing things
is radically altered

and that your world is profoundly changed.

Find a way, figure out
how to include everyone.

Figure out how to do it.

Your life will be so much richer

in the things that really
matter in this world.

Thank you.

(Applause)