 Hi, everyone. Is it this? This mic? All right. Welcome everyone. It's great to see you here Tuesday night and it's spring. Well, maybe it's not meteorological spring, but it feels like it to me. I'm Pam McClanahan, the director of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, and I can't move my head left and right. Sorry. Oh. Sorry. I clicked the mic here right. This one? There you go. There's a clicker right at the top. It is clear I am not in the theater. Can you hear? No. No. So it's not this one at all. How about here? No. I'll get rid of that one. Now? Now? Yes. Oh. I won't stop all the way over. But hello. Welcome to the book launch of All the Lights On by Michelle Hemsley. We're here at the MNHS Press, the publisher with Hal Brown of the book, and I'm so glad to see you here tonight. I love this book. I just love it, and it's not because I'm the publisher alone. It is so clear and honest and full of vision. I hope you'll like it too. We have a nice evening planned. Michelle will speak, and we have a few actors who will follow. After the event, Michelle will be signing books, and we'll have refreshments. Please stay for the conversation and good cheer. We want to give a few thanks. Thank you to Joe Schifter and the staff at Open Book for this wonderful space. To Michelle, Amy Tang, and Kathy Graves of 10,000 Things for the Marketing and Promotion Collaboration. To Mary Pajoni and Allison Aitton of the MNHS Press. And thank you to the people at Hal Brown, including Vijay Mathew and Polly Carl, who are co-publishers of this book, and who are live streaming the event tonight to our web audience. For those online, if you'd like to join in on the conversation, please use the hashtag Hal Brown, so just hashtag Hal Brown. Also after our speakers, we'll have a Q&A session. So hold your questions for then, but else in terms of housekeeping. I think that's it. If you're like me, you've long admired the work of Michelle Hensley and experienced the radiant theater she and her talented staff and actors have brought to the world. But if you're new to the work of 10,000 Things, let me just say, Michelle Hensley is founder and artistic director of 10,000 Things in Minneapolis, where she has brought over 50 tours of award-winning drama to non-traditional audiences in prisons, shelters, and housing projects, as well as the general public. Now she's brought another inspiring work to the world. This new book, All the Lights On. We were in conversation about the book with our friends at Hal Brown, and when we heard they were working with Michelle, we suggested a co-publishing endeavor. And here we are today. I'm moved by this quote, which is on the back of the book, by Marion McClinton, Tony-nominated director. Working with 10,000 Things remains one of the most artistic and humanitarian experiences of my adult life as an artist in person. The world of 10,000 Things reflects the world we live in, and no audience is turned away. It is unlike any other theater I know of. To support 10,000 Things is to support the human in us all. So welcome, Michelle Hensley. Hi. Okay. This is strange. I'm up on a stage in this room, reading, I'm going to be reading to you instead of down on the floor talking to you. Can you hear me? Is this, am I like, wait, move this one? There's this like this? No? Is that good? Yeah. All right. Great. Okay. And it's also really nice as I look out into the audience, I recognize almost every face. And I can say that almost every face here has really played a part in making 10,000 Things. I really feel like it's a creation of the whole Twin Cities community. The artists and the board members and donors and audience members have really kind of made this thing that is unique in the country. There's no place like it. I also want to take, so I want to thank you all for everything you've done to help make this thing happen. I want to take a moment tonight to recognize two really important people though in helping this book be birthed because book writing is not my normal thing. And so the first is Paula Anderson, who took all the photos, almost all the photos in this book is such a huge part and this book really wouldn't work without those photos. So thank you so much Paula. And then I have to thank my midwife, Kiro Blensky, who was like such a positive coach. And when I was about ready to despair, she was like, no, this is good, keep going, really? So thank you so much, Kiro, your partner. And then the final person I want to thank, especially specifically tonight, is my partner Bill Simonson, who is an amazing big band composer, jazz composer, who gets up every morning, six days a week, no matter what, and writes for two hours. And just being around his constant steadfast discipline inspired me to say, okay, I can do it too. If he can do it, I can do it. So Bill, thank you very much. And of course, thanks to Lynette and Polly and everybody at HowlRound and thanks to Pam and Mary and Allison and everyone at the Historical Society Press, you guys have been great. All right, so I'll read you a chapter. I think almost everyone here has heard me tell at least once some people more than like a million times the story of how 10,000 things started with the good person of such one in the shelter in Santa Monica. So I'm not going to redo that. That's the introduction. And I go into a little more detail about how all that happened. But I did figure out a few new things while writing the book. And so I thought I'd share one of those things with you. This is the first chapter. It's called Radiance. That very first chuckle from the audience in the Santa Monica shelter was a tiny burst of treasure that I have been searching ardently for more of ever since. That chuckle was a sign that we as theater artists somehow had emitted something that had touched one homeless woman's experience of the world. Her small breath of laughter had in turn fed us easing our enormous insecurity that we might fail to touch on anything we had in common. As the performance went on, the audience began to trust us still more, letting down their guard, first murmuring and then talking to the characters. They encouraged the actors to adjust and deepen and then to reach further out and try for more. The energies that were released and exchanged grew until at times it seemed like small suns within each of us had been uncovered. This ineffable feeling of deep exchange with an audience is one I would venture to say most theater practitioners long for, yet don't experience as often as they would like in their careers. I've just recently thought of a name for these bursts, which come from humans sharing with each other even just for a moment. Their most profound and honest selves, Radiance. Radiance is more than a connection, which suggests energy flowing just two ways back and forth from actor to audience and back again. Because Radiance comes from such a deep place with minds, hearts, and imaginations all engaged at once, it spills out into the world in all directions in surprising and unexpected ways. Theater is uniquely suited to create Radiance because of its collective aliveness because we meet in one space and imagine new worlds together in the moment. The pursuit of Radiance has shaped everything I've done at 10,000 things. I love the first experience of it so much that I wanted to figure out everything else I could possibly do to encourage it. My thirst for Radiance came, of course, from wanting people to be blown away by their very first encounter with theater. But it also came from craving the way our work as artists was clarified and deepened by the audience's refreshing responses. For many years I was compelled to sit and watch each and every performance from beginning to end, observing the audience and the actors intently, obsessively, hoping for moments of engagement, basking them if they happened, writhing in quiet agony if there was any confusion or disinterest instead. Every moment got etched into my being and all the way through each tour I worked on figuring out how we could make it work better. And yet, as ineffable as Radiance is, I believe there are many factors that are in fact quite technical that can help to foster it. Going to regular theater where I very rarely felt this quality, I began to notice so many obstacles and barriers that were put in the way. I began to realize that a lot of what 10,000 things did to increase Radiance was simply to remove those obstacles and barriers. If a small sun is hidden in each of us, then a big part of allowing it to shine comes from taking away whatever keeps it hidden. And so I talk about a lot of the physical barriers to Radiance stages which we learned in the early years when we tried to perform for audience on stages, huge barrier, way too far away, way too much distance. Having the audience sit in the dark, of course, is another one because it prevents the actors and the audience from really connecting with each other. Having very few things, taking away all the stuff that sometimes gets on a stage makes the audience use their imagination and that increases the Radiance that happens, I think, when everybody's imaginations are working full force and when the storytelling isn't clear. Then people really disengage and get confused and that also puts up a big barrier to Radiance. Now I'll read to you about the last one, which is audience resistance. As we were noticing how certain physical requirements for theater actually got in the way, we were also encountering the enormous barriers presented by the initial attitudes of our audience members. We had sort of guessed but didn't fully understand until we started that most people who have never seen theater before really don't want to see it. So many have picked up, so many have picked up the impression that it's just for rich people who have college degrees and it's boring and hard to understand. The audiences we encounter can be defensive at first and this sometimes comes off as contempt. I remember one homeless woman who upon walking into a shelter and seeing our little setup exclaimed, I don't want to see no Shakespeare shit. She turned right back out and exited out the door. We weren't actually doing Shakespeare that time. On top of these learned attitudes there was also usually well-founded suspicion and distrust of strangers who came into their space so often they were just do-gooders who wanted to feel better about themselves by helping. As we began almost every show we had to confront these very thick walls of suspicion, contempt, and indifference head on. As performers we had no choice but to learn to blast right through it with the only tools we had, honesty, humility, focus, and playfulness. Such attitudes took audiences by surprise. Overall these years I've come to greatly appreciate the enormous importance of the element of surprise in cracking through people's barriers. Almost always after 10 minutes or so of strong doses of these unexpected demonstrations of respect towards people who aren't usually afforded, who are usually afforded so little of it the walls started to fall. Radiance would start to seep through. Now more than 20 years in half of the performances we do are for members of the paying public. Always the exact same bare bones manner in which we perform for our other audiences. I want to be very clear that audiences who pay for their tickets and have seen a lot of theater also put up barriers. Indeed their attitudes were the very barriers that had moved me to seek other audiences in the first place. Quite honestly we almost always find that the walls of judgment and critical distance erected by experienced theater goers are much harder to blast through than anything non-traditional audiences offer. And yet all the ways we've had to shape our theater in order to reach first time audiences focus on clarity, urgency, depth, and honesty with no darkness in which to hide. All this has worked to shake up those jaded paying audiences. We surprise them too. Eventually though it usually takes about 30 minutes instead of 10 we are able to break through the walls put up by people with wealth and watch them begin to allow their own radiance burst through. Here I'd like to highlight the potential for radiance that all people bring with them to the meeting place of theater. While I truly believe all humans have light inside them, at 10,000 things we've noticed over the years that some people just seem to have easier access to this light. With many of our non-traditional audiences despite all the hardships they've experienced, there's not as much crust to remove. In a funny way, both 10,000 things actors and non-traditional audiences have a radiance that is perhaps a little closer to the surface than usual. I've also noticed over time that the veteran theater goers who keep returning to our bare bones performances seem to have easier access to that radiance as well. The theatrical work we do attracts a certain kind of artist. It doesn't really appeal to people who are primarily interested in bolstering their resumes and advancing their careers. Indeed, many actors have told me that our work provides a welcome relief from those kinds of pressures because it calls on something much more powerful, a desire to reach out for something bigger than oneself, to find a way to connect with other humans who on the surface appear very different. I think the work actually attracts, if I may call them this, radiant artists. Artists with easy access to the honesty, humility, humor, and generosity that are necessary to break through audience barriers. And our audiences in prisons and shelters in turn often bring that same kind of easy access to radiance in their beings once we've earned their trust to be treated with respect for their intelligence, imaginations, and life experiences rare. And when it actually happens, they permit their radiance to burst through. They have often experienced a long drought of respect. And once they feel it, they are eager to give back in return. Of course, every good theater performance in any venue can bring about connections and exchanges between actors and audience. But the extremes of our performance conditions can cause an intensity so strong, a connection that feels so immediate and charged that I think radiance occurs more often. Truthfully, I haven't experienced a lot of radiance in most theaters I've attended in buildings where we sit far away in the dark, watching a story unfold on a stage laden with detailed sets that fill in every empty space with every conceivable prop to make things easier on our imaginations. There is radiance sometimes, absolutely, to be sure. But I think more of it in theater couldn't hurt. In the chapters that follow, I want to share in more detail the discoveries we've made about what creates more radiant theater. As I talk about these discoveries, I'll follow a path that roughly corresponds to the way a production is created and born through the first imaginings of an audience, the choice of a play, the imagining of production values, rehearsing and performing. I also want to discuss the political consequences of this way of doing theater in the big world, as well as describe the organization that has organically emerged to support this work. I hope simply to spark your own questionings of theater today and encourage your own reimagining of how else it might be. I hope you will take for yourself anything you find provocative, inspiring, or useful, and ignore anything you don't. Most of these discoveries were made through absolute necessity. They were made because of the inescapable conditions that come as part of wanting to connect plays to audiences who might find their stories urgent. Indeed, it strikes me that theater is perhaps at its most radiant when everything about it is utterly necessary, when there is nothing that is superfluous. I think of the simple circle of chairs in which we perform with actors and rings of audience radiating their energies from the center. I see it from an aerial view. While this book is a no way meant to be an argument to urge others to do theater exactly the way we do it, I start to zoom out, getting a view of people pulling up chairs to make other small circles in other places, each generating their own light, dotting the land with small, radiant fires. It does seem like something we could use more of. And I thought it would just be fun because really, what's fun about 10,000 Things Are The Actors? So I thought it would be fun if I invited a couple of our own radiant actors to come up and just share with you a little story. We do this thing at the beginning of rehearsal where actors go around and share their most exhilarating or most excruciating performance moment with 10,000 Things. Or just a good story, just the story of a really interesting connection they had with an audience member. So we have three members from our artist's core at 10,000 Things. We have Kimberly Richardson and H. Adam Harris and Ricardo Vasquez. So do you guys wanna come up and tell a little quick story and then we'll do some quick questions and answers if you have any. It'd be great. You guys, whoever wants to go first, I'm here. This is the order, I guess. All right, hello everybody. I'm Ricardo Vasquez and I had the privilege of working with 10,000 Things in two productions. The first being the music, excuse me, the first being the seven and the second being the music man. But today I'm gonna talk just about the seven and my experience with that particular piece. As an actor, I'm always concerned about my communication, both of the story, but also of the character and the essence of the character. And at the point in my career that I am now, it's a constant search for that discipline and for that communication. And with 10,000 Things, you're able to see your audiences and you're able to see that communication and relate to it. And that forces you to take your craft seriously and to push yourself to new ways to communicate with new and challenging rooms that you encounter every single time that you perform. Whether it be a youth facility, an all men's facility, a women's facility, a domestic abuse facility, no matter what that place is, there's a room full of people that you have to find a way to communicate with. And in the seven, I was given a beautiful role of Tideas and Tideas is a very, very strong character and very, very sure of himself and much more comfortable in his skin than even I am in my own day in and day out life. And I knew that I had to love him and I had to find my way to make other people communicate and love him because Tideas was a very complicated character and had a lot of navigation in his story and in his journey. And the one thing that was very true with him and shown the brightest to me was that he was in love with this man and he needed to let this man know this and he needed to communicate it and he was desperately in love. And I knew in speaking with the director that that might pose some challenges in some of the facilities. And I never had any doubt in my mind that whatever challenges existed, that if I loved him, that that love would shine through and that love would connect into somebody else. And I remember at one youth facility in particular, we were doing the show and it was one of those days as an actor, you wake up and you're like, oh my God, I have to do this. And with 10,000 things, with 10,000 things, you're there and you're doing everything. You're moving in the set, you're moving out the set. You know, there's a little bit of involvement with it. But, and I knew that I had to do a show on top of that. And I did it and I knew that I loved Tideas so he would get me through it and he did. But during the show, I remembered seeing a young lady with blue hair that was sitting watching the show and she was somewhat separated from everybody. Even though she was amongst her peers, she was somewhat separated, but she was totally engaged. And I was totally engaged with her offstage because I was just drawn to her because she was again separated, but enjoying it. And afterward, she came up to me as I was taking home the set and it's me again. It's not Tideas who's awesome. And she said, I gotta talk to you because that, you were me. And I said, oh, Tideas was you. She's like, no, no, no, you were me. And I could see it on her face that slight moment of disappointment when you meet the actor and you don't see the character. But, but she wanted to let me know and she told me that she loved him because she identified with him because she loved herself, she was sure of herself, she was comfortable on her skin and she wanted me to know that. And so that really resonated with me afterward and it's still to this day resonates with me that no matter what, I'm very humbled by my opportunities as an actor to be able to communicate with audience members. And 10,000 Things has given me the opportunity to see that and to work with that and to ultimately celebrate that when you get to connect with somebody that you might not ever be able to connect with just across the dark auditorium. So thank you, 10,000 Things. I wanna add real quick that all of us at 10,000 Things, I think would agree that Ricardo's performances of Tideas going into some places where gay men or men loving men was not a cool thing. They were just fearless. They were just awesome. He just put it out there in this incredibly brave way and really broke down quite a few barriers by doing it. So thank you, Ricardo. All right, Kimberly has a fun story. Hi there, I'm Kimberly Richardson. I've worked with 10,000 Things, I think, on eight shows. I should have counted, but I didn't. So something like eight shows. And I wanted to share my favorite little anecdote that's from My Fair Lady. I was playing Colonel Pickering, of course. But I was offstage for this. I was crouching behind the audience, as you do, before you make your entrance. And one of the things that's so great about working with 10,000 Things and performing for unconventional theater audiences is that people maybe don't know how the story goes. And often, when you're doing a classic, like My Fair Lady, the audience knows exactly what's going to happen, but not the situation in a woman's prison, which is where the story took place. So I was crouching behind the audience and it was the last scene of the musical where Henry Higgins, Eliza has left Henry Higgins. He's alone on stage. It was played by Steve Hendrickson and he's very sad, alone on stage. And he goes and he gets this little phonograph and he brings it to the center of the stage. And what's going to happen is the phonograph plays Eliza's voice, like the old Eliza with the accent, right? So he's missing her. And this lady that I think only I can hear, because she's in the back row, she whispers, play some Marvin Gaye. Play some Marvin Gaye. Which I really think she just meant to cheer him up. You know, because maybe that was what she would have, would have wanted if she was missing someone and alone like he would have. And anyway, that's it. Hello, everyone. My name is H. Adam Harris. I've done three shows now of 10,000 Things. I got to play a million different people and be on single with Molly Brown. I got to play an orphan kind of who was kind of in love with his sister mother and Ciaro Volinsky's dirt sticks last season. And I got to do the seven with Ricardo. The seven was my first show of 10,000 Things. And I'll just say that one of the, my first show that I ever experienced was once on this island and it was in this room. And I remember telling Michelle the other day that what was so weird, I think she forgot to make the announcement about that the lights won't go out. Cause the entire first half of the seven, I was like, somebody forgot to turn on the lights. And I kept waiting. I was like, this is so awkward. I feel so bad for the actors. Like, oh God. And then act two came around and I was like, they didn't do it. And then my name was like, maybe the lights are supposed to be on. But I just really, I just, all the lights are on. I was just like, whoa. But when we were doing the seven, I got to play this character. The seven was this hip hop adaptation of the seven against thieves. And I got to play this really wonderful character, Takeles, who's very much like taking control over the city. And then this hip hop adaptation, he sort of has this crew of people and the way he kind of walks into a room very often eventually is a whole crew of people just go king, king, me and Peter, who did the music on that. He had to cue that king, king. It was very difficult for me, but Peter made it happen. But king, king just becomes associated with Takeles when he walks into a room. So much so that as he grows in confidence, you know that king, king becomes his thing. And I don't remember which women's facility we were at, but we read this women's facility and the women were just loving the show and they were loving king, king. So like as I'm walking around they're like, that's king, king, that's king, king, king. So I and Takeles always entered from this corner. And so I felt like I had this whole crew, like had my whole crew of like women and when I came in the corner like king, king and I was like, yeah, this is so great. I'm like vibing, I'm having a good time. This is amazing, I'm so connected to these people. They're loving it king, king, it was beautiful. And then at the end of the play, there's a fight that happens between Takeles and Paula Nicese. And it's a really, it was choreographed by Bruce Young of this incredible fight choreographer. So it looked violent and scary. And I was, Paula Nicese, my little brother, he's played by a guy who's like shorter than me and like maybe like one third of my weight. Like he's a very tiny dude. And he's, we plays my brother and we finally come to this climax and we're fighting. So we're hitting each other and these Bruce Young just boom, boom, boom. And we take six and we knock him and I end up getting knocked into the corner. I get knocked into the corner where all my people are, right? And so I get knocked down into the corner and I'm in the zone. I'm doing the acting thing. And this wonderful woman who was like my main fan, she's sitting on the corner. She just leaned down to me and she goes, baby, you too big to be getting your ass beat. You better get out. She's like, you're just like in this moment where you're like in character, you're like down in the zone. And then you like hear this voice and you're like, what's she saying? Okay, all right. I better get back up, huh? Okay. And I have always, I just always love this story partly because I think one of the reasons I just love working with 10,000 things is that you love when you get to see yourself in the audience. And it's very rare that you get to see yourself in the normal conventional theater audience. And so one of the things I always joke about is sometimes when I'm doing a play at major theaters around town, if I happen to see someone who looks like me, sometimes I go, this one's gonna be for you. Like I'm gonna do this performance but I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper because I don't know what barriers you came through to make, for there to be room made in the space for you. So immediately in that moment, I just kind of sink in a little bit more. And what I've discovered with TTT is that very often, especially with the commitment to the pain audiences that Michelle has made, now at every opportunity, I get the opportunity to sink in a little bit more because there's always someone who looks like me there. And it just makes it so powerful. And that one was so connected to me and I just will always remember that. And I just now will remember to always just get my ass up and make it happen. Thank you. So they're really why 10,000 Things is great. I don't know, do you have any questions you wanna ask? I mean, you could ask those guys too if you want, any questions? You guys probably know everything about 10,000 Things, most of you. Yes. This is more of a comment. Yeah. Oh here, she's gonna come over with a microphone because we're being live streamed by HellRound. Yes, we want the audience at home. I'm Jim Verhoij, I'm the director of the audience. Can we come back? Can we come back? I'm an East folks person there, right, a citizen. It's kind of funny about that. But I just wanna say thank you. I'm sure just through the applause that happens at these events, at these shows, you understand that the people who are there appreciate what you're doing. But I don't know that you hear it from people like me very often, people get busy, they have these very complicated and difficult jobs to do. Yeah. So I just, I saw that you were gonna be here tonight and I thought, you know what, I don't know if it's gonna be the kind of thing that others, from facilities or shelters or whatever that comes, or then I just wanted to say thank you. And also, maybe ask you what had been said about some of the biggest challenges that you had to face given your bureaucracies and rules and writing. I mean, that's a huge part of what we have to navigate on our end, given all the policies and restrictions and all that. So maybe if you could just comment a little bit. Sure, sure. Well, first of all, we're always, he asked, do you want me to repeat that? He just asked, okay, we're always so grateful to the staff people at the places we perform because they do have insanely busy jobs. And then on top of it, they take on bringing in a theater troupe to perform for their clients and they're underpaid and overworked as it is. And in general, we found that everyone has been really welcoming. Like once, remember the first time we did a show at Hennepin County Women's Prison? That was our first prison, really, and they were sort of like, you wanna do what? Oh, okay, yeah. But then once they saw how much that inmates appreciated it, they really have really welcomed us. What I'd say about Shakopee is we can't go there now because they have a new rule or some rule about how we can't bring instruments in. So anything you could do to help with that, we love performing at Shakopee. And for the past year or two, we haven't been able to. So anyway, you can help us get back in. We would love it, that's what I could say. But mostly thank you for coming. That was so awesome that you came. Thanks. Yes. Oh, sure, that's a good question. Well, at the time, I knew that I didn't wanna call it the Poor People's Theater Company. And at the time I was reading this novel, it's really a great novel by this Dutch woman, Maria Dermu, about this mysterious island in the Malakas and it was called The Ten Thousand Things. And I just thought, oh, that's a cool name because it suggests we could do any kind of theater. It might be anything at all. It just suggested this breadth of imaginative possibility. So that's what I called it. And then a few years later, I found out that's the Buddhist concept for all the material things in the world, the Ten Thousand Things. They kind of put like a box around it, which is kind of cool because most people in our audiences have very few of those Ten Thousand Things and we as theater makers also have very few of them. And so then that makes you think about, well, what's outside that box? And then it's the things that aren't the material things which are interesting to look at. So it turned out to be a good name, but it was just the name of this book I liked. Nothing to do with Ten Thousand Things. Nothing, I know. I was in California at the time. I had no idea I was moving to Minneapolis. Nothing to do with that, yeah. Even though the Minnesota Historical Society is great and of course this, but yeah. Yeah, did you have a question? Oh, is it? Oh, okay, yes. Sorry. That's great. Name layers. It didn't occur to us that we had too many layers working with Michelle Hensley. So she wrote that and said, you know, can you give it about one layer that is in the part openers and we said sure. She said, because I kind of think it gets in the way of the story. We said sure. And then the next day she called back and she said, you know, can you get rid of that frame that's in the back that's with all the appendixes? Because it's just too much. It gets in the way. And then why don't we, she emailed, she said, can you get rid of it all? It's a simple heading and black type on a white page because that's what our views are. And that's what we all need to do is edit more, right? So that's my story about it. That's so nice. And you guys were so nice to be so receptive to my, because I don't think all publishers are. So thank you so much for that. Yeah. Well, thank you. That's a great story. Thanks a lot. I have to say thank you for the paper and the book that it's not shiny. Oh, thank them. Yeah. Isn't that good? Thank you. Good work. I'm just wondering, I mean, you've arrived and then of course you just, you know, take off or something else. So I'm wondering in your process of imagining this theater, are there some directions, you know, some place you want to explore beyond where you've already taken it, which is wonderful. Yeah, well, thank you. You know, in a funny way for me, this is the only way I've been able to figure out to bring theater to people who don't have access. And so in a funny, like I just can't, my brain won't figure out another way, but I know there are other ways out there, which is part of the reason why, you know, four or five years, it would be nice to pass it on to someone else who's equally excited and committed to doing this, but maybe we'll have some other ways of doing it. It just took so long for me to figure this out and make it work really well. That I think that's good. And the other fun thing is that now other theaters around the country are starting to do it, so it is a little bit of a Johnny Appleseed project, and it's fun. I mean, I think every community that starts doing theater this way will find themselves very enriched, so that's exciting too. But yeah, I think it will be good to get some new blood in, because like my brain, like this is the only way I can figure out how to do it, but maybe there's some other ways too, to be great. For spiritual traditions that you draw from or inspire or somehow. That is so nice. That comes from Mary Beth, who is a member of Twin Cities Friends meeting, which is a place, a Quaker meeting I attended when I first moved to the Twin Cities and was our rehearsal space for probably the first 10 years of the company and where I think really subconsciously coming up with the idea of the circle really comes from Quaker meeting where you just sit in a circle and you're just in the presence of all the other people there. And of course you heard me mention the idea of a light inside, which is probably the only thing Quakers are dogmatic about is like that. So yeah, I don't, I mean, I can't say I have the patience to be a Quaker. I remember once I went to like a committee meeting where they were like, had everything had to be a consensus like thrashing it out. And I get how that's really great and the decisions that are made are really strong. I'm just like, okay, no, let's just do this. Because I'm a director, right? So I think I'm probably not truly a Quaker, but there are many things about that sitting in the circle in the presence of others and listening and having a light inside that are really key. Yes. I'm not sure I have a well formulated question, but I'm interested in this idea of theater as a larger community, especially when you say there's been some seeding this on the country. And I don't know if this is something that actors might speak to or better to. Yeah. But I don't know if there's, besides the fact that the actors have been currently still phoning other places, I don't know if there's a way in which this model of theater, how it affects or interacts with regular theater, versus these times that are falling apart. Yeah. That's so great. And if any of you guys would wanna come up and say something, if you feel like it has affected how you go into regular theater world, I've had some actors tell me stories. Like I remember we had a wonderful actress be in a play, I think it was Symboline. And then her next gig, she got cast as Eliza Doolittle at Chanhassen. And she said, the way I approached Eliza was completely different. Because I imagined that instead of just having suburbanites in the audience, what if I was performing for an audience of Eliza Doolittle's? And that totally changed the way she approached the character. So I mean, I've heard stories, but do any of you guys have anything you wanna say about it? But I think it does in a lot of ways. But I shouldn't really speak because I'm, did you? That's okay. I mean, I think it, I've heard actors tell me that it helps them get really clear about what they're doing. They're always really aware of the storytelling and how that's been communicated to the audience, perhaps in a way they hadn't been before. Bob Davis, do you wanna come up? Oh, I can say from here. Well, but you gotta get a microphone because we're live streaming. Okay, no, no. Bob, yay. Oh, Bob will have something to say. That's great. No, I was really affected by doing Shakespeare. I'm going to do Shakespeare at The Guthrie, particularly in the director's dress and the aside, when you have a monologue to the audience, after you've done it, moving around, and it's so close, we had seats, a thine in that place, I would sit down next to somebody that's close and do, and do the monologue to them, which is sort of the way Shakespeare wrote them, it occurred to me, and to a lot of people. It was that close to the ground but, and so when I did a part of The Guthrie in Winter's Tale, I definitely carried that with me in it. That, I searched out individual audience members like I learned to do at 10,000 things. That's great. To tell the story and find somebody who's responding, who's there, or work on somebody who wasn't responding. Yeah, exactly. Treat the Guthrie the same as one of those gyms. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's great. That's a good story. Yeah. Why you did it, and not just for the comparison. Yeah. What if you want this to go, what do you want the book to do? That's a great question, yeah. Well, I feel like we have made so many discoveries about how theater can work. When you have everyone in the audience that it makes you a better theater artist, and it makes the art form so much richer. And I really just wanted to share those discoveries with anyone who likes theater. I mean, particularly theater practitioners. I mean, some of you who don't do theater, you may find some of this book a little bit boring. I don't know. But for young people who are thinking about living their, leading their lives in theater. And not, again, not to say this is how you should do theater, but just to make people ask questions about things that they take for granted when the audience is primarily upper middle class white people, which is primarily who the audience is for theater these days. And suddenly, if you shift that, then a whole lot of other things shift, and you start to see a whole lot of other possibilities. So I really wrote it to provoke people, to ask questions, and maybe to inspire them to come up with new ways. Because Lord knows there are a lot of really cool theater companies in the Twin Cities that are also addressing these kind of questions in their own ways and coming up with, with lots of interesting discoveries. But I just thought if I could write it down, then it would be there to pass along to anyone who might want to ask those questions themselves, if that makes sense. Yeah, there's one. Okay. Well, I often go to Dorothy Day and Chris, I love your work there. And most people are quite respectful of course. I'm just wondering, have things ever, the wheels ever come off? And it's all like, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's why we start out our rehearsals with exhilarating and excruciating stories. And I thought in the early days, we would have fewer of these once we got better at it. But it's just part of doing theater this way. When you take it into a new place and you don't really know who's gonna show up, or what's gonna happen, there are always a couple of excruciating ones. And I can just say like, we just did the Uncindical Molly Brown. And I think we would all agree our hardest show was at, it was sort of a halfway house for a federal prison. And we hadn't realized it would be both men and women. And the men and women have been kept completely separate. But suddenly they were brought together to watch this play. And suddenly it's not about the play anymore. It's not, it's about something else. And also, they felt very exposed because they had their commissioners and guards and stuff watching them. So because they didn't wanna expose themselves to people of the opposite sex, and they didn't wanna expose themselves to people who were observing them, there was just nothing. The whole time. And I don't know if you guys saw Molly Brown, but it's kind of funny. You sort of wanna laugh sometimes. But it was just like this. And it was, but then what happened? It's so surprising. It was just like performing for concrete. But the actors are really good at those moments of knowing how to just tune into each other and work with each other. And still the show is really great. And afterwards people would come up and go, this was so good. It was amazing. Thank you so much for coming out here and doing this for us. We had no idea that they felt that way at all. So it's always good to try and talk, at least informally, to your audience members. But yeah, there are just, there's always one or two times on every tour where it's just like, as Peter said once, it's like, why? Why do we do this? Why? Do we even bother? But then the rest of them are usually really great. Are any of those really concrete situations that we've had? I don't think we've had, you know what we often experience is a more reserved reaction from the paying audience. And that's okay, you know, I'm that way too. We've all been trained to be polite and quiet and not expose ourselves too much. I do remember when we did, I think the weirdest transition was when we did Carousel a while back. And I cast it very non-traditionally, I don't know. And I think that many of our audience members, paying audience members remembered the movie, you know, with what's her name, Shirley Jones and that big guy. And I had cast someone who was not a petite and attractive Shirley Jones and a man who singing wasn't his forte though, he was a fabulous actor. The audiences and the prisons, it was a brand new story to them and they just loved it. And they actually really liked that the guy playing Billy Bigelow wasn't an awesome booming opera Broadway voice. They felt much more comfortable with his struggle to sing and feeling sort of insecure about it. They related to that, but our general public audience was just so disappointed because it was not like the movie that they remembered. My guy couldn't sing very well and Carrie was not that attract, you know, just like they had. So sometimes that happens, but usually I think we can really say all audiences, the way they respond is valid and it brings something of value and we learn something from everyone and even ones that seem quiet, people can be processing in a very deep and profound way and you never really know. So yeah, we try not to like make, this audience was great, that audience was terrible, but just try to accept each audience on its own terms for whatever it is that they bring. Yes. Erkert. Yes. Who has designed many of 10,000 Things Sets. Absolutely. Yay, Erkert. In addition to all the artistic and humanistic, you know, things that people talk about that are so wonderful about 10,000 Things, I think that there's an economic thing here that's really important. It's the allocation of resources going towards an artistic pursuit or any pursuit and 10,000 Things has it right. The resources, it's a well-supported theater. You guys probably know that. Awesome donors. But the resources are allocated towards the audience and their artists. But not being behind Michelle and Nancy and Amy and all those people are not borderline homeless, right? But I think that's something that needs to be propagated as well as some of the ways that Michelle talks about how to make theater that radiates, right? This idea of how to allocate resources. You know, a lot of people here are maybe on boards of donating to other theaters. That's something that could maybe be passed along. Yeah. And the proof in the pudding here is that the quality of the theater that comes out of 10,000 Things is not compromised by this way of learning business. And I think that that's something that's really important. I'm a small bit artist in the way because I'm a designer, right? Michelle's not big on sets and props. I know, this is coming from a set designer and I say, you only get 800 bucks. That's all you get. Well, I think, you know, with 10,000 Things, this is wonderful. I feel like I'm valued for what I do and what I need to do. I mean, it's obviously smaller than the actors in the play right now than, but I feel completely valued and it's because of the way Michelle and the theater wants to spend their money. You can decide how you spend your money. And I think that that's something that really needs to be done. Thank you, Irv. And it is addressed in chapters 10 and 11. But thank you very much. So, we have one more. Well, I'm so tempted just to gush. His question, I want you to give me an opportunity. The diversity of the cast, the non-traditional gender role, the colors, all of that, that's very intentional. And you can spoke into that with the actors not so much. I wonder if you have anything to add? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, it comes from necessity in a funny way because our audiences contain every color and every gender of person you could think of. So, I want those audiences to see themselves on stage. That's the first reason. The second reason is that it's so much fun and everyone has so much more fun when they're like, oh, I never get cast in this kind of part. You know, suddenly to get to play someone different than for an audience member to see themselves on stage in a way they've never seen themselves before. It just releases so much energy. And I mean, there is this adage, you know, that you learn in directing school, casting is 90% of directing. And I feel that's true, but I do feel like many directors do not put 90% of their imaginative energy into casting because for me, it's so much fun to take a part and go, ooh, what can I do with this that like be really different and really fun and let, you know, someone let this, all kinds of new things come out of this character. I mean, there are limitations, I know, but we love to play with gender. I mean, as a woman and an older woman too and have many friends who are older actresses that, you know, in Shakespeare, you have one scene, maybe, if you're lucky. So to give them a chance to dig into a meaty role is, you know, personally very satisfying for me, but I think it also lends a whole different color to the story when you do that. So I would just encourage all directors to stop casting by type and really dig in with your imagination and see who else you might let play that part and who else you might allow to see themselves on stage in a new way. Yes? Yeah. I just wanted to say that as a funny woman, I'm just, I'm so lucky to have 10,000 things because women just aren't, there aren't roles. They don't get to be funny. Yeah, I mean, they love men's roles and it adds 10,000 things. So they're the clown roles, they're the funny roles and they're the roles that are really physical and yeah, but just isn't, even now, even with, you know, all the fantastic, funny women that are playing really, that, you know, that are doing really well in movies and in television and all sorts of things, I still feel like it doesn't happen much. Yeah. It's also nice to have a woman playwright who has funny roles for women too, which is really great. And as you know, the biggest laughers in our audience are always the women's prisons. The place where you get raucous, hysterical laughter. We had a really great men's prison show this time. The men were like off the charts with their laughter but the women are always willing to laugh and it's so great to give them something to laugh about. That's, that is about them. Um, yeah. I'm wondering how you do your casting. Do you have auditions or do you go up and pick them or combination? Kind of combination. We always have open auditions once a year and then I try to see things and also I just have a roster of people that have worked with 10,000 things before that I love. I love, the hardest thing is not being able to cast every single actor that I love in every single play. Really, it is. So I'm always trying to figure out how to do more of that. Yeah. And you had a question? Okay. It's either. I go back to welcome theater and I'm a social worker. Oh, great. So I kind of came to 10,000 things with my friends even late, not knowing what to expect. And I have to say that a number of the places that I've seen, especially things like My Fair Lady, had me looking at my clients who have HIV, who have made homeless, who are really, you know, the people that you perform for in lots of the places you go to. So my clients don't even have the opportunity to go, you know, they wouldn't be able to see you. But While at My Fair Lady, especially, looking at a bunch of my clients in a whole new way, and you know, you kind of think you're good in what you do and you kind of think you got to figure it out. And you know all these things and I'm a little old and a little jaded. But I'm grateful for feeling having got all challenged in doing different things. That's so great. That's so great. Yeah, I mean I think some of the most important work we do is to help our traditional audiences challenge their perceptions of what people in jail and people in homeless shelters are like. Which is why I always share the stories at the beginning of the paying shows just so that people can start watching the play through someone else's eyes and suddenly you see, oh right, they're just human beings and they got into a little bit of trouble or they made a bad choice or whatever. That's really I think Yeah. Right, making connections like that. I mean I think that's really how our work is political. So read chapter 10, but yeah. Great. So I guess we should eat and have some bourbon and thank you. Thank you all so much for coming.