National multicultural theater partnership that includes Penumbra and Children’s Theatre announces first round of commissions

Jared Kaufman, Pioneer Press
·4 min read

With a goal of expanding the canon of multicultural works for young audiences, a national theater partnership that includes two Twin Cities theaters has announced its first four commissioned plays.

The Generation Now partnership, which specifically aims to develop 16 new plays over five years by playwrights of color for multigenerational audiences, was launched in 2021 with a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Each play is co-commissioned by the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis and another partner theater: Penumbra Theater, in St. Paul; Mai-Yi Theater Company in New York City; and Latino Theater Company and Native Voices at the Autry, both in Los Angeles.

Penumbra’s play is called “One Small Alice,” by award-winning playwright Ifa Bayeza, and focuses on an enslaved young person named Alice trying not only to leave plantation life but also to grapple with the world once she does. The work uses Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as a framework to comment on how characters both have agency and are at the same time controlled by a surreal world.

“For the field to change, the canon must be diversified and young people in particular need to see themselves lovingly and authentically represented onstage,” Penumbra’s artistic director Sarah Bellamy said previously. “When we imagine the impact of this project, the possibilities are myriad and so vitalizing.”

For their production, Mai-Yi Theater Company commissioned a play called “Drawing Lessons” by a member of its respected Writers Lab, Michi Barall, who’s also incorporating live drawing and digital projection. Native Voices put out a call for proposals, and narrowed dozens of entries to the top 12, then four or five, then chose “Comanche Girl on the Moon,” by Dustin Tahmahkera. In true company style, Latino Theater’s actors and directors are all working together to ideate and develop a play that focuses on Mexican folkloric dance traditions.

And because each theater company works differently, each of the four plays is in various stages of development. “Drawing Lessons” is in its second draft and directors have already begun casting discussions, while Latino Theater Company’s collaborative and strong community-centered approach means their not-yet-titled production will take longer to develop.

All five theaters are meeting in April at Mai-Yi, in New York City, to continue workshopping each production. When the plays are finished and stage-ready, Children’s Theatre artistic director Peter Brosius said, the goal is to showcase them at theaters around the country, including in the Twin Cities.

“We feel very, very fortunate to be working with leaders who are doing such important work honoring artists, welcoming their community, creating a sense of home and space and deep dialogue — and beautiful work, also. Beautiful theater,” Brosius said.

And the collaborative nature of the Generation Now program is what truly propels it, Brosius said. Children’s Theatre ostensibly could — and does — commission work by playwrights of color on its own. But by partnering so closely with other theaters, he said, each director and playwright can workshop their ideas for local audiences outside their own geographic area or personal experience.

“Being with (them) in that process is a window into another way of hearing a work, another way of listening to an artist, another way of honoring an artist, another way of supporting an artist,” Brosius said. “When we make work on our own, we do a good job. We work hard. But here, we’re being given a window into a whole other set of ways of thinking, ways of dialogue, and ways of understanding.”

Respecting kids’ complex worlds

In return, Children’s Theatre can guide playwrights who are used to writing for adults in turning their eye toward youth audiences without sacrificing maturity or complexity.

It’s counterproductive and almost disrespectful, Brosius said, for adults to dismiss or sugar-coat kids’ concerns around climate change, gun violence, racism. Instead, quality multigenerational theater like the plays coming from the Generation Now project should provide a “moral rudder” to help kids to navigate their world.

“How are you centering the experience of young people? How are you having them not be passive recipients of information but people wrestling with their own destiny; characters with agency and curiosity?” he said. “Part of that is a shift to finding their voice and centering their voice so young people and families get to see young people negotiating complex situations, deep situations, comic situations, heartbreaking situations, learning situations, growth situations.”

Often, this involves recruiting young actors so characters on stage appear age-appropriate to their characters. At a recent workshop with playwright Barall, the team invited a child actor to a table read so she could get a better sense of “the curiosity (and) directness of the young person,” Brosius said.

“We know they’re thinking about these things, and we want to try and find a place where they can have these thoughts and these conversations, and exercise these emotions, in ways that can be productive, healing, transformative and empowering,” he said. “We don’t pretend that they don’t live in this world.”

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