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| Address | 1501 South Fourth St. Minneapolis, MN 55454 United States |
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| Capacity | 200 |
| Opened | 1976 |
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| mixedblood | |
The Mixed Blood Theatre Company is a professional multiracial theatre company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [1] It was founded in 1976 by artistic director Jack Reuler, to explore race via the use of theater. [2] [3]
Jack Reuler founded Mixed Blood in 1976 to explore issues around race within the theater framework. [2] [3] Mixed Blood operates out of an old Cedar-Riverside firehouse. [4]
In the 1990s Jack Reuler worked with Syl Jones, playwright who had formerly worked in the corporate setting, to create customized plays and workshops for corporate and governmental clients ranging from Medtronic and Honeywell to the William Mitchell College of Law and the Ramsey County Attorney's Office. Syl Jones would write the play or workshop, merging his corporate experience with his playwriting skills. Jones formerly won accolades for his new works at Mixed Blood (Cincinnati Man) and Penumbra (Shine), both in 1992. [3]
Mixed Blood Theatre was the first company to use the Joe Dowling Studio in the Guthrie Theater with its play Yellowman in 2006. [5] [6]
In 2021 Jack Reuler's retirement was announced and in 2022 Mark Valdez was announced as the new Artistic Director. [7] [8]
Mixed Blood's plays range from chamber theatre to political satires. The theatre presents over 500 performances annually in the Alan Page Auditorium of its historic firehouse theatre, as well as in schools, churches, community centers, juvenile detention centers, and workplaces. [2] Mixed Blood seeks to "addresses injustices, inequities, and cultural collisions, providing a voice for the unheard—on stage, in the workplace, in the company’s own Cedar Riverside neighborhood and beyond." [9]
Mixed Blood is a member of Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the National New Play Network (NNPN).
The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963, is a center for theater performance, production, education, and professional training in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The concept of the theater was born in 1959 in a series of discussions among Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Oliver Rea and Peter Zeisler. Disenchanted with Broadway, they intended to form a theater with a resident acting company, to perform classic plays in rotating repertory, while maintaining the highest professional standards.
Joe Dowling is an artistic director. He was artistic director for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. He is known for his work as artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland and his production involvement can be found in the Abbey Theatre archives. He has also directed plays in other theatres in Ireland as well as theatres in London, New York City, Washington D.C., Montreal, and Alberta. In 1975 he directed "Katie Roche" by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy.
Dael Orlandersmith is an American actress, poet and playwright. She is known for her Obie Award-winning Beauty's Daughter and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama, Yellowman.
David Esbjornson is a director and producer who has worked throughout the United States in regional theatres and on Broadway, and has established strong and productive relationships with some of the profession's top playwrights, actors, and companies. Esbjornson was the artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre in Seattle, Washington, but left that position in summer 2008.
Playwrights' Center is a non-profit theatre organization focused on both supporting playwrights and promoting new plays to production at theaters. It is located in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In October of 2020, the organization announced plans to move to a larger space in St. Paul.
The Children's Theatre Company (CTC) is a regional theater established in 1965 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, specializing in plays for families, young audiences and the very young. The theater is the largest theater for multigenerational audiences in the United States and is the recipient of 2003 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. The November 2, 2004, edition of Time magazine named the company as the top theater for children in the U.S.
Marguerite Duffy, known professionally as Megan Terry, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist.
The Southern Theater is located in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Built in 1910 as a cultural center and legitimate theater for the burgeoning Scandinavian community centered on Cedar Avenue, the Southern has been re-established as a center for contemporary performing arts over the past quarter-century. The Southern Theater is the home of Balls Cabaret, a weekly midnight cabaret entering its twenty-fourth year.
The Penumbra Theatre Company, an African-American theatre company in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was founded by Lou Bellamy in 1976. The theater has been recognized for its artistic quality and its role in launching the careers of playwrights including two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson.
The Ivey Awards were an annual award show, celebrating Twin Cities professional theater. Established in 2004, the non-nomination based awards served to recognize outstanding achievements within the past theater season in direction, performance, design, etc. The awards were founded by Scott Mayer and administered by a panel of local theater professionals and theater patrons. The Iveys ceased in 2018 due to lack of funding.
Theater Mu,, located in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is an Asian American arts organization in the Midwest, the second largest in the country. According to Mu's website, the company name "Mu" is "the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character Mu for the shaman-artist-warrior who connects the heavens and the earth through the tree of life."
Les Waters is a British theatre director. Waters was the Artistic Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He has directed plays Off-Broadway and also at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Actors Theatre.
Tracey Scott Wilson is an American playwright, television writer, television producer, and screenwriter. She graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and from Temple University with an MA in English Literature.
Aditi Brennan Kapil is an American playwright and screenwriter.
Ike Holter is an American playwright. He won a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for drama in 2017. Holter is a resident playwright at Victory Gardens Theater, and has been commissioned by The Kennedy Center, The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, South Coast Repertory and The Playwrights' Center.
Blackout Improv is an improvisational comedy theatre troupe in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Founded in 2015, the cast is completely black. Topics of monthly comedy performances include standard improv audience suggestions as well as a special focus on civil rights issues like police brutality, white privilege, and cultural appropriation. Blackout Improv responded to the shooting of Jamar Clark as well as the acquittal of police officer Jeronimo Yanez after the shooting of Philando Castile.
Theatre in the Round Players (TRP) is a community theatre performing on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. In existence since 1953, it is the longest-running theatre in Minneapolis, and the second-oldest (non-academic) theatre in the Twin Cities. Since 1969 it has performed in its own 287-seat arena stage in with the audience surrounds the stage. TRP continues its work of supporting the theatre community today, in ongoing partnerships with the University of Minnesota Theater and others, providing a training ground for theater professionals in training. In 2018, TRP's Jeeves in Bloom was its 550th mainstage production.
The Firehouse Theater of Minneapolis and later of San Francisco was a significant producer of experimental, theater of the absurd, and avant guard theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Its productions included new plays and world premieres, often presented with radical or inventive directorial styles. The Firehouse introduced playwrights and new plays to Minneapolis and San Francisco. It premiered plays by Megan Terry, Sam Shepard, Jean-Claude van Itallie, María Irene Fornés and others; and it presented plays by Harold Pinter, John Arden, August Strindberg, John Osborne, Arthur Kopit, Eugène Ionesco, Berthold Brecht, Samuel Beckett and others. In a 1987 interview Martha Boesing, the artistic director of another Minneapolis theatre, described the Firehouse Theater as "the most extreme of all the groups creating experimental theater in the sixties, and the closest to Artaud’s vision." Writing in 1968, The New York Times said that the Firehouse Theater "has been doing avantgarde plays in Minneapolis nearly as long as the Tyrone Guthrie Theater has been doing the other kind, and with much less help from the Establishment." That same year, when a federal grant was provided to support the Firehouse, it was pointed out in the Congressional Record that the Firehouse Theatre "is the only major theatre dealing experimentally with the writing of plays and their production outside the metropolitan New York area."
Dan Sullivan was a widely-read American theater critic with columns in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Minneapolis Tribune, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He was the director of the Eugene O'Neill National Critics Institute, and co-founded the American Theater Critics Association. He was a founding member of Brave New Workshop, which for more than half a century continues to be a theater venue for satiric comedy in Minneapolis.