WEBVTT

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So when I was in my twenties,

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

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I knew that theater was my passion,

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but there were some things
about it that troubled me,

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especially when I looked out
in the audience.

NOTE Paragraph

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Theater audiences are pretty much 
white and upper middle class,

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

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I really didn't want to leave anyone out.

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My grandfather came to mind.

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

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

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

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

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I thought he would feel
pretty uncomfortable

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and think things were maybe
a little pretentious.

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I also really wanted to find
an audience that cared.

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I was living in LA at the time,

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and LA is not a town about theater.

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It's about film and TV.

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And most of the people who go
do so very grudgingly

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

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

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I had a play that I loved,

NOTE Paragraph

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

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

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as a reward for doing a good deed.

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

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but stay financially solvent herself.

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

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They would probably
really understand her struggles.

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

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

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

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

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

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So I decided,

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

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

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So we found one in Santa Monica.

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And we designed a little set

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that we could hang up
on a clothesline with clothespins,

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and we started to rehearse.

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

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and there are 35 characters,

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and we only had 7 actors
playing all the parts.

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And then on top of that, we wondered,

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

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anything about that?"

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But finally, opening afternoon
at the shelter arrived.

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

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But I like to tell people

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

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

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

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or how to be a better person,

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

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

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I don't know how else to explain it.

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They started shouting out
advice to the characters.

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

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(Laughter)

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And there is nothing 
more thrilling for an actor

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to have an audience member 
care so much about your character

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that they'll shout out advice to you.

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(Laughter)

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

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

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we could listen and learn from them.

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At the end of the play,

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I remember a janitor,

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

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

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and he said,

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

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And I took that to heart.

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I have never forgotten it.

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Because while I believe
that our non-traditional audiences

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give us more than we can give them,

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what we can give them
is respect for their intelligence,

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for their imaginations,

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and for their very hard-won
life experiences.

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Respect that is so often in short supply

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in the lives of people
who live on the margins.

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(Applause)

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Thank you.

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I had never experienced
an exchange like that in theater,

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and so I was hooked.

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

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Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, 
Beckett, American musicals -

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to people who've never seen it before.

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

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Not long after "The Good Person,"

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

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

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we could use the public schools,

NOTE Paragraph

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and where there was
an excellent theater community.

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And guess what?

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

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(Applause and cheering)

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I just want to say that the Twin Cities

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are the healthiest place
to do theater in this country

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because you can afford
to live here as an artist

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and because the community
is so generous and kind.

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So now, 25 years -

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(Applause)

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So now, 25 years later,

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my theater company,
"Ten Thousand Things,"

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does three shows a year.

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But we take each play
to six or seven correctional facilities

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

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

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

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

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And we do four weekends
for the paying general public.

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

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

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people that you see regularly

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

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And I guarantee you,

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

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because of our non-traditional audiences,

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as I know I have become
a much better director

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than had I followed the conventional path

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and tried to climb the ladder 
at a regional theater.

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I'm here to tell you that theater

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

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

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(Applause)

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One of the things that starts to change

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

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is the kind of stories you start to tell.

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If you look on Broadway right now

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or in a lot of the big regional theaters,

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you'll find that many
of the plays being done

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

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(Laughter)

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So an inmate or a homeless person

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

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

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Those stories are really
very narrow and very small.

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We need big stories that wrestle
with fundamental human struggles

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like jealousy, betrayal, revenge, desire -

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stories that include people
from all economic classes.

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

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

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

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

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and they live it everyday,

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

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(Laughter)

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But a made-up world creates
this level playing field

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where we can all enter as equals.

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No one can be an expert

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

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

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who is a playwright
that meets all those criteria.

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I had never directed Shakespeare before,

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but I was reading "Measure for Measure,"

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

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And it's about justice and injustice

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and being judged unfairly by others,

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and I thought,

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"If I can just make this story clear."

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

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

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

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I think my audiences would really like it.

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

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

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what one character
is trying to do to another.

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

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So anyway, our first performance

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was at the Dorothy Day Center
for the Homeless

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in downtown St. Paul,

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

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

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

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

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

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"What's this, what's this?

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

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

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and she looked up at him, and she said,

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

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(Laughter)

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

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and he shouted out,

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"Ah, just go ahead and fuck her."

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(Laughter)

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And yep, the whole audience
erupted into laughter,

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

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

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What am I going to do?"

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

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

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And it was a perfect response

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to what the audience
had just shouted out to him.

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

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Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings.

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He wrote for those people

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

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

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Shakespeare didn't write for an audience

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that was just wealthy and educated
and quiet and polite.

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And ever since then,

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Shakespeare has been
one of our very favorite playwrights.

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Because he wrote knowing

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

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just like they are in ours.

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So, I think you can start to see

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

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Because our audiences live their lives
at the same extremes,

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many of them,

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

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or in Greek tragedies.

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And actors have to dig much deeper

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to be sure that they
really match the truth

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of the audience's experience
of the situation.

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If you are going to be doing Richard III

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

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you better know what you're talking about.

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(Laughter)

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

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they demand that we be
very clear, very urgent,

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very truthful and very lively
in everything that we do.

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Another thing that happens

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

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is that your casting becomes very diverse.

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

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

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

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

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And we have Queen Titania played by a man

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and Bottom played by a woman

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in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

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I guarantee you,

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actors as well as audiences
take great delight

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in being able to play
major parts in stories

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that they have traditionally
been left out of.

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The joy radiates off the stage.

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Another great discovery we've made

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

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We don't use a stage.

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All we need is a big room

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

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and we perform right in the middle.

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We couldn't use a stage

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

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The principle of 
Ten Thousand Things' set design

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

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(Laughter)

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Actors and myself
have to load and unload the van,

00:14:09.653 --> 00:14:13.643
haul stuff up stairways, down hallways,
squeeze into elevators.

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So we work really hard

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

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And audiences love being invited
to use their imagination.

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

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and go, "This is the moon,"

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

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of the moon onstage.

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

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for our imagination to fill in, right?

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

00:14:45.702 --> 00:14:46.923
(Laughter)

00:14:46.923 --> 00:14:48.313
Yeah.

00:14:48.326 --> 00:14:52.248
And here we have Seymour
in "Little Shop of Horrors,"

00:14:52.248 --> 00:14:54.571
with the giant man-eating plant.

00:14:54.571 --> 00:14:56.291
(Laughter)

00:14:56.291 --> 00:14:57.656
Yep, that's his hand.

00:14:57.656 --> 00:15:00.858
All he does is to stick it
through the metal loop in the flower pot,

00:15:00.858 --> 00:15:02.231
and it talks to him.

00:15:02.231 --> 00:15:03.805
Audiences love it.

00:15:06.677 --> 00:15:12.890
So, if you don't need buildings
and fancy sets and elaborate costumes,

00:15:13.195 --> 00:15:17.872
suddenly, your money is free
to pay actors fairly.

00:15:17.872 --> 00:15:18.879
(Applause)

00:15:18.879 --> 00:15:21.259
That doesn't happen
very often in this world.

00:15:21.259 --> 00:15:23.249
(Applause)

00:15:24.099 --> 00:15:29.273
Your money can reward
the human creative energies involved.

00:15:29.273 --> 00:15:33.415
When actors feel respected
by being paid a livable wage,

00:15:33.415 --> 00:15:36.775
that energy comes across on stage too.

00:15:37.561 --> 00:15:40.451
Another thing
is that we don't need lights.

00:15:40.451 --> 00:15:45.034
We just use whatever fluorescent lights
are on in the room because we have to.

00:15:45.034 --> 00:15:47.469
But wonderful things happen as a result.

00:15:47.493 --> 00:15:50.588
First of all, the actors
can see the audience,

00:15:50.588 --> 00:15:54.743
which usually they can't in a dark house,
like I can't really see you now.

00:15:55.083 --> 00:15:59.009
And the opportunities for playfulness
are dramatically increased.

00:15:59.602 --> 00:16:02.635
And there's no place to hide.

00:16:02.635 --> 00:16:06.013
If you are standing 
like two feet away from an inmate

00:16:06.013 --> 00:16:07.969
that is getting bored and restless,

00:16:07.969 --> 00:16:11.625
as an actor, you figure out
how to dig in and adjust

00:16:11.625 --> 00:16:14.710
and make that scene
more interesting on the spot.

00:16:15.223 --> 00:16:19.906
Also, when all the lights are on
and the audiences are seated in the round,

00:16:19.906 --> 00:16:21.665
they can see each other.

00:16:21.665 --> 00:16:25.433
And this is especially cool
when we perform at low-income centers

00:16:25.433 --> 00:16:28.500
where people from the general public
can come as well.

00:16:28.500 --> 00:16:29.522
Because there,

00:16:29.522 --> 00:16:33.849
you will often get a corporate CEO
sitting next to a homeless guy.

00:16:33.849 --> 00:16:36.301
And the homeless guy
will laugh at something,

00:16:36.301 --> 00:16:40.393
and the CEO will go,
"Oh, yeah, that's funny. I see."

00:16:40.393 --> 00:16:42.720
And then, the CEO will laugh at something;

00:16:42.720 --> 00:16:46.339
the homeless guy will go,
"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it."

00:16:46.339 --> 00:16:48.758
Now, how often does it happen in our world

00:16:48.758 --> 00:16:52.349
that someone of extreme wealth
and extreme poverty

00:16:52.349 --> 00:16:55.030
sit next to each other as equals,

00:16:55.030 --> 00:16:58.093
engaging with their imaginations together

00:16:58.093 --> 00:17:01.895
in a story about the struggles
that human beings share together?

00:17:01.895 --> 00:17:04.841
Not very often in this world.

00:17:06.133 --> 00:17:09.547
And one last thing happens
when you do theater this way.

00:17:09.547 --> 00:17:12.347
It's like 20 and 30-somethings love it.

00:17:12.347 --> 00:17:17.267
It's not this far off,
remote, stuffy, formal thing.

00:17:17.267 --> 00:17:20.371
It's intimate, it's immediate, it's raw.

00:17:20.371 --> 00:17:21.570
It surrounds you.

00:17:21.570 --> 00:17:24.768
Like someone said, 
it's like mainlining theater.

00:17:24.801 --> 00:17:28.591
It's a really fun way to watch theater.

00:17:29.719 --> 00:17:33.909
So, what does all have to do
with the world outside of theater?

00:17:35.369 --> 00:17:37.806
I hope you will take this
as an inspiration

00:17:37.806 --> 00:17:42.966
to discover for yourselves
the riches and rewards that await

00:17:42.966 --> 00:17:46.316
when you dedicate yourself completely

00:17:46.316 --> 00:17:51.461
to figuring out how to include everyone
in whatever it is you do,

00:17:51.461 --> 00:17:58.279
people of all economic classes and races
and genders and all life experiences.

00:17:58.599 --> 00:18:00.748
Don't expect them to come to you.

00:18:00.766 --> 00:18:03.806
If you can't figure out how to bring
what you do to them,

00:18:03.806 --> 00:18:07.437
then you are going to have to spend
a lot of time building relationships

00:18:07.437 --> 00:18:10.286
so that they will learn to trust
that you're for real.

00:18:10.286 --> 00:18:13.383
You are going to have to find a way
to meet them as equals

00:18:13.383 --> 00:18:18.036
and open yourself with humility
to listen deeply.

00:18:18.356 --> 00:18:23.007
When you do, you will find
that your assumptions are shattered,

00:18:23.774 --> 00:18:28.348
that your usual way of doing things
is radically altered

00:18:28.348 --> 00:18:31.838
and that your world is profoundly changed.

00:18:32.478 --> 00:18:36.425
Find a way, figure out
how to include everyone.

00:18:37.060 --> 00:18:39.515
Figure out how to do it.

00:18:39.515 --> 00:18:42.691
Your life will be so much richer

00:18:42.691 --> 00:18:45.961
in the things that really 
matter in this world.

00:18:45.961 --> 00:18:47.311
Thank you.

00:18:47.311 --> 00:18:49.921
(Applause)