America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States.
The work is to really dig into and continue to deepen our understanding of what racial healing means. I think that it’s about trying to integrate the arts and equity and wellness, to create a holistic approach and have those disciplines inform one another and talk to each other, and ultimately, create something that none of them could do on their own. We’re birthing that, trying to approach the notion of a beloved community.
Sarah Bellamy, president, Penumbra Theatre
In Paradise Blue, a drama by Dominique Morisseau recently staged at Penumbra Theatre, there is a telling moment that demonstrates what theater can do for all participants, performers, and audiences. The play features several characters connected to Paradise, a jazz club located in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood in 1949. It opens with Pumpkin, who helps run the club with her romantic partner, Blue, reading poetry to herself and rehearsing the lines with irrepressible delight as she sweeps the floor. When the pianist, Corn, and drummer, P-Sam, arrive, she asks one of them to hold her book while she recites a poem about “the heart of a woman.” She begins then halts as she forgets a line, but Corn provides a word as a hint and she enthusiastically orates the rest of the lyric. Thereafter, P-Sam looks at her with admiration, and Corn emphatically states, “That was goooood.” This affirmation fills Pumpkin with such elation and pride that she seems to flower into her better self. This is how theater can knit a community together — providing a stage and occasion for its members to shine, and recognize the light in themselves, and have this brilliance celebrated.
The director of Paradise Blue, Lou Bellamy, argues that theater can’t help but constitute a community, can’t help but bring its members together, a result of practical matters: “Just the form of theater forces you to build community. The first thing you have to do is get a space. That means you’ve got to talk to someone with money who’s got a space, and you need to procure that space. Then you need to get information out, so you’ve got to go through the newspaper; you’ve got to hook up with the radio; you’ve got to have nonprofit status; you’ve got to start writing grants; you’ve got to get a board of directors. All this stuff builds community and holds people together.”
The Penumbra Theatre began in Rondo, now the Selby-Dale district of St. Paul, Minnesota. Its history is steeped in the intermingled developments of the Progressive Era’s initiation of settlement houses, Black-centered arts production, and the generation of employment opportunities via federal government intervention. It was founded in 1976, during the Black Arts Movement, which was birthed in the theatrical arts by the poet Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones); his establishment in 1965 of the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, New York, is regarded by historians as the inception of the movement. Penumbra was created with a $150,000 grant from a federal government program, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which, between 1973 and 1981, employed more than 10,000 artists around the country in the genres of visual, performing, and literary arts. CETA was brought about by the Nixon and Ford administrations during a time of high unemployment and was the largest federal public service employment program since the Works Progress Administration agency of the 1930s and ’40s. Through it, $300 million was invested in developing arts jobs that provided training, steady income, and benefits, particularly for artists who were economically depressed, unemployed, and underemployed.
The CETA grant was supplied to the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in St. Paul, essentially a settlement house founded by the Urban League in 1929. At the turn of the 20th century, settlement houses were places where destitute people could find food, social services, healthcare, and opportunities to participate in the civic life of the community. As Seitu Jones, a company member who joined Penumbra in its second year, describes the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, “It’s one of those places where folks that were coming up with the Great Migration in the ’20s would stop and learn how to be citizens. It was a place where folks would engage in social activities.”
The center was named for the civil rights activist Hallie Quinn Brown, who was born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of two formerly enslaved people. Starting her career as a teacher, Brown eventually became a founder of the Colored Woman’s League of Washington, DC, which merged with the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. According to the researcher Macelle Mahala, author of Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama (2013), which chronicles the theater’s history, in 1976 the Hallie Q. Brown Center hired Lou Bellamy as its cultural arts director to administer the CETA grant. In his youth, Bellamy had participated in programs at the center, so he knew the space, and he had a deep desire to tell stories of African-American experience. This led him to create a theater arts program that would eventually become Penumbra.
Thus, Penumbra is rooted in a history and tradition of communal care, civic participation, and arts engagement supported by public funding. Its ethos of community care has been exercised in practical ways. For example, in its early days, Penumbra offered tickets at nominal prices and provided free childcare at the center to better enable audiences to see their shows. The care was tied to a political mission. As Seitu Jones explains, “Our audiences were all Black when I first started here. We were caught up in the Black Arts Movement. With this mission we felt we had to raise consciousness, to touch, to expand, to change the world.”
Lou Bellamy opened the theater to address the scarcity of public stories about Black people and the African-American experience, which were rarely acknowledged in mainstream US culture. The Black Arts Movement emerged from the Civil Rights Movement, which provoked a wave of social and political change including a deep interest in Black experiences and stories in the arts. At Penumbra, storytelling would serve to raise consciousness by exciting empathy and provide a means for Black people to see themselves represented as whole, consequential human beings. Today, Penumbra’s program of staged productions contains a portfolio of nearly 225 plays and over 35 premieres, serving 40,000 patrons and 5,000 students each year.
It may be surprising to some that an art form that prioritizes presenting highly trained actors in fictionalized, staged contexts to tell stories is about more than launching careers, providing entertainment for audiences, or artistic self-expression. Sarah Bellamy, Lou’s daughter and president of the center, states it simply: “It wasn’t art for art’s sake ever here. That’s how I grew up.” This theater had ambitions to tell stories about African-American experiences.
For Chris Berry, the theater’s former arts director, it’s important for arts and cultural organizations to relate the unique story of people born in the United States whose ancestors originate in Africa because “if we don’t do it, who will? The people who founded [Black theater] organizations created something that did not exist for Black folks. I think of Lou, I think of Woodie King, I think of Douglas Turner Ward. I think of these giants, these titans that had to build something to tell a story so it would live on, so … that somewhere I could be seen on stage.”
To be seen onstage is a particular type of validation. It means being recognized as someone of historical meaning, weight, and significance — this is what makes an archetype. To be portrayed onstage as a character who lives in the stories we widely share means to live on despite the passage of time. Whether Troy Maxson, the lead protagonist of August Wilson’s Fences (1985), is played by James Earl Jones or Denzel Washington or other actors, the model of a Black, aging patriarch whose understanding of familial care is blinkered in its narrow focus on personal responsibility offers a nuanced picture of love to each successive generation experiencing this story.
But more than seeing Black characters as figures around whom we can construct moving, resonant stories, Penumbra provides a way to see the exigencies of the whole of the human condition. Rohan Preston, who has been the Minnesota-based Star Tribune’s chief theater critic for more than 25 years, relates: “Black people in particular have had to be ingenious to cope with less, and to transform poison into medicine, to use imagination to transform nothing into something. There’s a kind of alchemy in the culture — the creation of hip hop, right? It’s poor people using their genius to create this thing that gives a funky voice to the whole damn world.”
The Black experience of life in the US is resonant for many other groups who live here: those who have migrated here from elsewhere, those who are Native but marginalized, others who are dismissed because of their innate characteristics. This story is also uplifting, hopeful. Our ingenuity comes forward in extremely dire circumstances and our alchemical reinvention of these circumstances makes it known that such transformation is possible — despite how bleak the situation seems. Thus, others who experience marginalization and systemic oppression often make common cause with Black folks. Phyllis Rawls Goff, a volunteer and former board member of the theater, states that “Penumbra makes other traditions realize that the African-American human condition is really not that much different from theirs.” The reach of this message is evident in Penumbra’s majority-White audience.
The audience makeup of Penumbra Theatre points to a fundamental truth: that many or most people who do not identify as African American can find themselves, or an aspect of themselves, in the story of Black people born in the United States. On the other hand, stories that are told from the perspective of the dominant culture, particularly narratives that presume whiteness as the default worldview of the viewer, are not as welcoming. This may be a matter of percentages. A greater portion of the world scratches out an existence selling their physical labor or their intellectual output, or commodities they’ve fashioned. The majority of humanity does not subjugate other people and appropriate their resources. Therefore, more theater patrons will want to imagine themselves overcoming obstacles to their success that almost everyone faces but that show up in particularly vivid and dramatic ways in the lives of African Americans.
The theater gives this particular community the means to work through feelings of being alienated, by dint of their race, from the larger American story in which they are rooted. Goff’s first experience of a Penumbra production after moving to Minnesota was one of “feeling that I was at home, like I was seeing my aunts and uncles on the stage talking the way they talk, and it was very authentic to me, and it was very comforting to me. It was beyond whatever the message of the play was because, to this day, I cannot tell you what play it was.”
For Goff and many others in the Twin Cities, watching genuine portrayals of their extended families, neighbors, and friends contributes to their sense of belonging to this community. Seeing oneself as valid is a step toward self-determination. T. Mychael Rambo, an Emmy award-winning actor, vocalist, and Penumbra company member, arrived in Minnesota from Austin, Texas, in the 1980s, addicted to heroin, without a place to live, and looking to restart his life. He profoundly appreciates what storytelling on the stage has given him. He regards Penumbra as offering him the chance to be in the world in ways that are honest and true. “We have to figure out ways to tell our stories in spite of everyone who tells us not to,” he says. “I think social justice is about telling our stories. It is about honoring who we are. It is about our authentic selves. It is about being able to recognize what happens to us when we don’t have the justice that we require to be our full, authentic selves.”
This mission seemed particularly urgent when Penumbra was founded, and the company enthusiastically took it up. Lou Bellamy commissioned the then-budding poet August Wilson to write his first play, making Penumbra the training ground for a future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and highly esteemed chronicler of Black American life. From these beginnings the company grew.
As Macelle Mahala reports, in its first decade, Penumbra developed from being reliant on one government grant to generating an operating budget for the 1985–86 season that consisted of individual, in-kind, corporate, and government sources. Mahala confirms that, by 1990, the theater had increased its operating budget to half a million dollars and achieved 501(c)(3) status, which in turn granted the organization more agency in finding funding sources. Yet despite these accomplishments, it was thereafter beset by fiscal crises that threatened its dissolution. According to Rohan Preston, “Penumbra has been on the brink a number of times, having existential threats, and they’ve all been financial.”
Mahala relates information from Chris Widdess (a former staff member who was leading a restructuring effort that began that year) that a major crisis occurred in 2003 when Penumbra had to make drastic cuts: “A third of the staff was fired, all programs were canceled except for the main stage, and even there two shows were canceled. There were only three shows per season for two years … and everybody took pay cuts including Lou [Bellamy].”
The 2003–4 season was the only time in its history that the company did not stage its Christmas holiday show, Black Nativity, since introducing it in 1987. The perennial favorite of local audiences and the theater’s highest-earning production, its all-Black cast depicts a holiday-themed story of facing crises and being renewed by the effort of overcoming them.
The company clawed its way back from the precipice to complete the restructuring plan, raising more than $3 million in general operating support, which allowed it to eliminate $600,000 in long-term debt, and, as of December 2008, it had closed five consecutive years with a balanced budget.
However, another financial sinkhole opened up in 2012 when a nationwide recession led to a $800,000 budget shortfall. Mahala reports that in the 2012–13 season, Penumbra produced only one mainstage play, laying off six members of staff and suspending all new play programming. At this point, it seemed that Penumbra was going to have to close its doors permanently. Sarah Bellamy, who was then co-directing the theater with her father, explained that, “in 2012, everything imploded, and the conversation I was having was not about the future of the organization. It was about how to responsibly close it, how to make good on the debts to people who had been with us at hard times … we had to lay off a bunch of people, and this is my first foray into leadership.” She adds, “It was my father and me, Chris Widdess, our former managing director, and Russell Zook, the associate managing director — we said, ‘Are we going to do this, or are we going to close?’ And we said, ‘We’re going to try to keep it open.’ We did one show that year. We laid off nine people I think. We closed our entire new play development program. The education programs were stripped. It was really tough, but we put a show up, and all the artists were paid, and then we just slowly built back.”
During his tenure as artistic director, Lou Bellamy put his house up as collateral for a revolving line of credit at least eight times, “in order to make payroll during times when Penumbra was severely undercapitalized.”
It is bewildering that one of the nation’s principal Black professional theaters, an organization that was once home to August Wilson and key to his development, would be forced to endure this kind of precarity, particularly when the work produced by the theater is and has always been excellent, or, in Rohan Preston’s words, “extremely well-crafted, well-produced, moving work, moving work, work that’s palpable, work that you can feel, work that will get someone in the audience screaming out unconsciously.” Goff echoes this, relating that the issue arose when as a board member she had been tasked with approaching corporate funders who had already agreed to provide support, but on a faster schedule than was initially agreed to, in order to have Penumbra make payroll. She explains that she “never had to sell the art. I never had to sell the value of the art. I had to sell them on the fact that the excellence of the art and the excellence of the administration didn’t match because of undercapitalization, because we were always robbing Peter to pay Paul.” She adds, “We were always stretched to the max in staffing, and therefore, things fell through the cracks, never because of people not wanting to do the job. It was about people not having the bandwidth.”
Part of the difficulty that Penumbra has encountered in creating a sustainable income stream or carrying through on capital funding plans is that diversity and access initiatives created or disbursed through governmental agencies often primarily provided funds to the large, regional theaters, some of which have 10 times the budget of Penumbra. Because actors, directors, crews, and related personnel need to make a living, they often follow the funding to work on these larger stages. Thus, initiatives intended to increase diversity of the art and audiences end up affirming majority White institutions as the arbiters of what constitutes others’ experience.
Regardless of whether what is portrayed on their stages is authentic or truthful, these organizations receive funding that would otherwise go to theaters such as Penumbra, draining talent and resources from Penumbra and smaller theaters that cannot afford to pay personnel the same rates. Lou Bellamy has described this state of affairs as an ongoing “colonization of Black theater.” Sarah Bellamy clarifies that “what wasn’t written into [the artistic director] job description was that you had to change the field, that you had to deal with the endemic racism in theater, the capitalistic tendencies of large organizations to colonize our work and leach resources from our communities. I had to contend with the fact that there were deeply entrenched practices in philanthropy that were not just benign to us, but actually harming arts organizations of color.” She continues, “We are on a mission. We are in alignment. The problem is the ecosystem, and once you realize that, you start to turn the page toward healing.”
To respond to this issue of lacking the heft to reach audiences that larger theaters do, Penumbra reached out to other similar organizations and in 2014 joined forces with Mu Performing Arts, New Native Theater, Teatro del Pueblo, and Pangea to create the Theatres of Color Coalition, which aims to broaden the perspectives of audiences and patrons in the local theater scene. To illustrate the problem that the coalition means to address, the reporter Marianne Combs writes that a few years prior to its creation, “The Guthrie hosted a pre-Broadway run of the musical The Scottsboro Boys in which a young black man was depicted tap dancing while being electrocuted. The show’s playwright, composer, lyricist and director all were white.”
Such issues of misrecognition and misrepresentation of Black experience have something to do with race but more to do with culture. However, race is the means through which they become visible and legible. Most people steeped in Black culture would not imagine featuring a tap-dancing number — a moment of physical revelry — within a story relating the unjust killing of a Black man by the state. Chris Berry asserts that Black theater must be different from other art forms. It must do more than just spark a clichéd, simplistic expression of happiness: “I’ll paraphrase a colleague: theater can’t exist in the joy industrial complex. The beauty [that] comes out of the joy from conflict, the joy from turmoil, the joy from resistance, the joy in spite of, with, through, is an honest story.”
Giving itself permission to portray troublesome insights from the outset has made Penumbra unique. Its productions have consistently been memorable, but more importantly, they have been challenging, unexpected, unpredictable, and truthful, while communicating care for those who come to experience the truth. In Berry’s opinion, “For me, it’s being responsible with storytelling but not precious with the truth, not shielding people from it, and — because our audiences are super intelligent — [asking] them to do some of that work too, to trust and go with us and not take that for granted.” Berry further reflects, “It’s such a fragile thing to make sure that we’re not coddling them, but we’re carrying them through a story. It’s a conversation in that way, hopefully, we are holding but never crushing and never letting go.”
It’s the holding that Sarah Bellamy is most concerned with, creating a space that cultivates wholeness in Penumbra’s audiences, crew, staff, actors, and everyone else in the community. In 2015, as a fellow in the Bush Foundation, she took on the mission of reparative work and began cultivating the idea of making Penumbra a center for racial healing. Working with various colleagues, she developed a plan that was ratified by the board in 2019. This plan outlined an evolution from an organization intent on consciousness raising to one that pursued, as they say, “powerful artistic programs, customizable equity tools, and holistic wellness services.”
In addition to a season of challenging theater, Penumbra now offers equity workshops led by trained artists and facilitators, on subjects such as “Fostering Allyship,” “Foundations for Racial Healing,” and “Belonging.” The new programming also includes racial healing circles in which particular populations can engage in healing practices, as well as “Live Out Loud Nights,” pre-show receptions and post-show discussions geared toward Millennial and Gen-Z audiences. They are currently developing a PRIDE (Positive Racial Identity Development and Empowerment) program for children of all races and identities. A newly created position of wellness director illustrates how the mission of the theater has expanded and deepened. Sarah Bellamy says, “We are creating spaces where we can bring the inside out onstage, in classrooms, and on our yoga mats, to be gently regarded, acknowledged, and attended to.”
In the Penumbra community there has been a good deal of expectation, and some anxiety, generated by these changes. Austene Van, a longtime company member who grew up attending productions at the Hallie Q. Brown Center, and who was given her first directorial job by Lou Bellamy in 2006, for Black Nativity, admits that “People are nervous that Penumbra’s going to stop being a theater. It’s not. It’s theater and some essential tools that we need to continue doing the theater. If you don’t wreck people they can give you themselves, because they’re getting healed. I’m going to replenish you, and you’re going to keep going, and keep growing.”
Jeannine Befidi, the second vice chair of Penumbra’s board of directors, agrees, noting that, “We are not leaving behind our legacy and what has made us so strong but rather evolving and understanding that art can be a catalyst for wellness, wellbeing, healing, and so forth. That’s what’s transformative about what we’re doing — in many ways seeing around the corner and saying it’s not just art for art’s sake. That’s wonderful and we all love that, but it can do so much more. It could impact communities. It can bring people together. It can make you well. It can heal.”
Solidifying the foundations to make this healing possible, in September of 2020 the Ford Foundation granted Penumbra Theatre $2.5 million for general operating support. The following year, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott awarded them $5 million. Both gifts were unrestricted, allowing Penumbra’s staff and board to use the funds in whatever way they think is best. It is a powerful thing to finally be given the means to walk without fear of stumbling, to leave the ground without fear that you won’t be able to land safely.
In its steadfast loyalty to the community, Penumbra Theatre embeds itself into the lives of its members. For this story, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter insisted on adding his voice to the chorus of Penumbra supporters. He grew up attending Black Nativity each year and recalls his deep immersion in its story of overcoming obstacles and finding pride in this Black community. He also met his romantic partner through the theater. He says, “My relationship with Penumbra over the years has been very intimate. The day I proposed to my wife I tricked her into going to Hallie Q. Brown because that’s where we met, and I tricked her into going by promising her a Penumbra show and there was no Penumbra show that night.”
“I proposed instead and that was on the first Friday in November,” he continues. “So, I’m going to spend the rest of my life paying her back in Penumbra shows on the first Friday in November. So, when I tell you how intimate my relationship with Penumbra is and how much that institution just means to me, it’s super personal.”
To shape personal stories rooted in truths that resonate with others is difficult work. Theatre is useful for this work, Phyllis Goff attests.
“In the theater, you’re appreciating a live body you’re seeing right in front of you, and you’re seeing that emotion of that live being, and you are able to react to those emotions of that live being in a way that TV and movies are not [capable of],” Goff says. “You have to be able to touch. You’re not going to walk on stage, but you can touch, and be touched.”
Because theater can touch us, Penumbra understands that it must be thoughtful with that touch, caring and responsible. And this is the kind of touch that heals.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.