By K. Obolensky,  Ten Thousand Things

Ten Thousand Things performs plays for everyone. The word “everyone” encompasses people in shelters, prisons, chemical dependency centers, immigrant centers, ELL learners, teens in juvenile detention centers, homes for the aged, tribal colleges. adult ed centers, community colleges, detox centers, housing projects, libraries in small towns, and a paying audience. By eliminating barriers—perceived and real—like cost and intimidating venues, Ten Thousand Things is redistributing the wealth of theater to many people who have never seen a play before.

Audience members at Hubbs Center, Music Man, Ten Thousand Things 2014. Photo: Paula Keller

This means for the actors and people who put on the show that every play has its own kind of tour.  Every Ten Thousand Things show will premiere at five to seven correctional facilities, eight to nine low income centers and have up to sixteen paid performances.  While Ten Thousand Things has nearly 50 different venue locations, the shows are rotated to minimize stress on the staff who work at the site; and to make sure that the play connects in the right ways to the potential audiences.

With a Ten Thousand Things performance, each site brings its own unique response, context and often challenges to the equation.  Each challenge, though, becomes part of the event; it’s own kind of theater.  Dorothy Day Center in St . Paull, one of Ten Thousand Things’ longtime sites is a day shelter—and at times, it can feel like a transit station, with people entering and exiting frequently.  Shows at Dorothy Day are always lively. But other than the idea that it will be lively, there’s little else to predict how the audience will respond or react even as a great deal of creative effort has gone into making sure that the play is clear, the story compellingly driven by actions, and the questions of the play big and encompassing of people from all sorts of walks of life.

Nancy Waldoch serves as the theater’s site coordinator and production manager.  She not only manages existing sites, she is always on the look out for a new potential partner community.  The process of finding a new site, she reports, is often a mixture of practical questions —is there a big enough space where the play can perform; is there an active and attentive staff; and finally, is there community of people who already frequent a location. This last point is critical to the ethos of Ten Thousand Things, who never performs to captive audiences—always to voluntary audiences.  “It is a thousand times easier to come to place that people already congregate at then to try and bring people, who often have very hard and busy lives, to an unfamiliar place. This is one of our major points of access, going TO a community in a place they already go to, feel comfortable at and is within their established routine,” explains Nancy.

Michelle Hensley, who is the artistic director of the theater as well as its founder, understands how important the staff can be at a site.   “Most important we need staff people who “get it” — they understand what a cool thing we are bringing, free of charge, to their clients, and are willing to drum up enthusiasm among their clients for several weeks before we come.  Most staff are already incredibly busy, working very hard for not a lot of pay, and we are always so grateful for the extra work they have to do to enable us to come in and perform,” says Michelle.

An hour before any performance starts, the actors arrive along with Nancy and Michelle.  The minimal props and sets have been wheeled in, often through a loading dock by actors, music director, production manager and any helping hands.  If the show is at a prison, the process requires identity checks, metal detectors and a series of locked gates  But the set up is usually the same.   As actors are warming up, music director Peter Vitale can be heard testing the acoustics.  Nancy and Michelle arrange fifty to sixty chairs in a square or a circle, with spaces between each section for actors to make room for entrances and exits. Nancy works quickly and efficiently.

Michelle, who founded the theater nearly 25 years ago, always has a pensive look on her face as she adjusts each chair. She is thinking about the audience; each chair an individual who will enter the room of this collective story and share in its interpretation.