Getting Into the Act

Photograph by Keri Pickett/WPN

After two years of directing plays in Los Angeles theaters, Michelle Hensley longed for something more than the polite applause middle-class audiences usually provided. So when she directed a Bertolt Brecht play about a prostitute’s struggles, she decided to stage it for 30 residents at a homeless shelter instead, using a bare-bones set, no lights, and seven actors playing 35 characters.

The people at the shelter “connected with the play on a deep level that the paying audience hadn’t,” says Ms. Hensley.

That experience 15 years ago inspired Ms. Hensley to form the Ten Thousand Things Theater Company, now in Minneapolis. The company performs three productions a year, mainly for residents of prisons, homeless shelters, and housing projects.

The company — named for a book Ms. Hensley was reading at the time, as well as the “breadth of imaginative possibilities” the phrase suggests — performs modern and classic works, and also musicals.

About 60 percent of the audience members, who watch the stripped-down productions in a close ring around the performers without dimmed lights, have never seen live theater before and often talk back to the characters on stage, becoming part of the experience.

“We never make any claims, like we change people’s lives or get them off drugs,” says Ms. Hensley. But when prisoners or homeless people watch a play with others, “they get a sense of being connected to humanity. People who have been cast out, cast aside, cut off — they find themselves connecting up through these stories.”

As a way to encourage others to copy her work, Ms. Hensley has begun inviting theater directors from around the country to take part in her productions.

The theater’s $240,000 annual budget comes mostly from foundation and corporate gifts, with the remainder from individuals. The company also sells tickets to a third of its shows.

Here, inmates at a women’s prison in Roseville, Minn., watch cast members perform a scene from the musical Ragtime.