‘This is rehearsal for life’: Mixed Blood Theatre takes on thorny topics
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Throughout this year and next, Minneapolis theater company Mixed Blood is commissioning four plays dealing with thorny topics: mental health, affordable housing, climate resilience and racial justice.
“These are not plays that give you answers to anything,” said Mixed Blood’s artistic director Mark Valdez. “What they do, rather, is they provide a springboard for a conversation to happen.”
Those conversations happen over a meal afterwards — what Mixed Blood is calling “equitable dinners.” It’s a concept the theater is borrowing from an organization in Atlanta.
The dinners consist of a short original play, a meal and a facilitated discussion about the performance’s topics.
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The first of these events was held a few weeks ago, in the community room of a condo complex in Minneapolis. The play, “PARTS” by James Anthony Tyler, follows a conservative man dealing with loneliness and a strained relationship with his family.
In one scene, the man is leaving a voicemail for his daughter. “I would appreciate if you didn’t send me straight to voicemail when I call you,” he tells her.
He goes on to say that he hopes she has found a church where she lives that doesn’t enforce a mask mandate. “I’m not going to get into that right now. Just know that daddy loves you,” he says.
Afterwards, participants discussed the play. Though some might not have related to the character politically, they did have empathy for him.
“We have these magical technologies that are supposed to connect us more than ever before, and yet we feel increasingly disconnected,” said Alejandro Tey, Mixed Blood’s associate artistic director, who was facilitating the group conversation.
“I don’t think people walk around with bigoted attitudes that define them,” said participant Sonja Kuftinec. “But that Facebook comment sections, and I know because I’ve been in there, can be a place where you become your worst self.”
Valdez said that the dinners serve as practice for engaging with others, “so that we can build our muscles for listening, so that we can kind of understand the nuances of a particular topic, and so that we can just better show up to engage in that discourse.”
“I really believe in sharing space and food with community and having conversations across divides,” said Kit Shelton, another participant at the first dinner. A self-described external processor, she heard about the series through a fellow theater maker.
“Having an excuse to do that is part of why I’m here. It’s like having a container that invites that. I’m all about it.”
When the equitable dinner idea was announced, Valdez said he got dozens of people emailing wanting to attend.
For the first dinner, the theater tapped actor and director Harry Waters Jr. to host.
“It’s been some time since people have had dinner parties,” Waters said. “So, this is also an idea of, how do you reconstruct a new way of having a dinner party where you’re intentionally doing this kind of work.”
As part of the experiment, half of the audience are guests of the host, while the other half are those who secured tickets through Mixed Blood.
While the audience for the dinners may be a bit politically homogeneous, Waters says hearing how they think through their position is still valuable.
“There’s a learning, a growing in that,” he said. “I don’t think you want to invalidate the idea that, yes, you know, the group that is here can also learn from each other.”
Waters’ husband, Tom Borrup, served as co-host for the first dinner. His work as an academic deals with how the arts can be used to provide solutions to big societal problems.
“This is rehearsal for life, you know, and theater can be that way,” said Borrup. “It’s something we experience and get some new ways of thinking or seeing differently, and then we take that out through our daily lives, and we carry that into other spaces.”
Mental Health is the soup de jure for this series of equitable dinners.
Anyone can sign up for one, as long as they bring an open mind and an empty stomach.
Correction (Sept. 10, 2024): An earlier version of this story misspelled Mixed Blood Theatre’s name and incorrectly listed one of the topics the plays will be about.