Jack and His Amazing Theater of Many Colors

It was the winter of 1975 when what Jack Reuler calls “The Great White Hope incident” occurred. Theatre in the Round Players in Minneapolis wanted to extend its run of The Great White Hope, Howard Sackler’s take on black heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson’s tumultuous career, and the show’s lead, University of Minnesota student Ernie Hudson (who later appeared in Ghostbusters), wanted to get paid. In 1975, having the lead in a play in the Twin Cities was a rarity for a professional African-American actor, and since Hudson had already put in at least eight weeks of unpaid time, he felt he should be compensated for his additional labor.

“Theatre in the Round always has been a community theater with virtually no paid staff,” says Reuler, Mixed Blood Theatre artistic director. “They declined to pay him.” The media picked up on the dispute, and though Reuler in retrospect believes Theatre in the Round’s decision was based on policy, he says it became clear to him that “there were no opportunities for professional actors of color to make a living in this town.

“The incident crystallized for me a way I could try to create a home in which Dr. King’s vision could be embodied,” says Reuler. “I had always been a theater lover as an audience member and had dabbled a bit in high school and college. Since I was never going to be a preacher, a politician, or an orator, theater seemed like a good voice—and has been.”

That summer, Reuler, who'd admired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from boyhood, graduated from Macalester College with a degree in zoology and launched a theater project, which was intended to run for one season only. The novice upstart grabbed his bootstraps, spread word among his cohorts, and posted flyers. “I put out an announcement looking for a director of the summer project and found a U of M professor named Lou Deszeran,” he says. The professor urged his colleague and friend Lou Bellamy to participate, and Reuler drew in Faye Price, a Macalester classmate, as well as Ralph Lemon and Kim Hines—all relative unknowns at the time.

Soon, the summer project had a name—Mixed Blood Theatre—and a home in a converted 1887 firehouse on Minneapolis’s West Bank. Reuler still planned to start veterinarian school in the fall of 1976, but, he says, “The theater went well. The response was excellent. So, I just stayed—and stayed. And stayed.”

Mixed Blood is not the sort of theater that comes along everyday, much less one that achieves national prominence. Its track record as an authentic explorer of America’s cultural depths is a rarity. There are companies that do white theater, those that do black theater—for that matter, name a color, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, and there’s a theater that does it. Mixed Blood, though, encompasses the spectrum.

The Minnesota Council of Nonprofits’ 2004 Anti-Racism Initiative Mission Award is the most recent acknowledgement of Mixed Blood’s impact. Among numerous other accolades, the theater has also received the Actors’ Equity Association’s Rosetta LeNoire Award for nontraditional casting. Mixed Blood hits the artistic mark too, having copped three Twin Cities Drama Critics Circle awards.

Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning play, Take Me Out, opens this month at Mixed Blood. The drama, which confronts homophobia, race, and the fears behind discrimination, serves as what Reuler half-jokingly calls “a poster-child production.” Indeed, it’s an excellent example of what Reuler set out to do in 1976. “Our purpose,” he says, “is social action. Our mechanism is entertainment. We never forget we’re in show biz. Take Me Out is an ideal Mixed Blood show because it shows the messy utopia of our society.” The play works for Reuler also on a personal level: The lifelong Minnesota Twins fan set opening night of the show on opening day of the Major League Baseball season.

The play’s diverse characters make up a truly all-American cast, at the heart of which is gay, biracial (white-black) baseball star Darren Lemming, the franchise player for the league-dominating Empires club. When Lemming comes out of the closet, the ensuing uproar is less trouble for him than it is for the team, which finds its pennant hopes tied to the fate of Shane Mungitt, a rookie phenom and rabid homophobe. As subtext, we meet Kippy, a liberal, college-educated shortstop; Takeshi Kawabata, a faltering star relief pitcher from Japan whose deteriorated performance prompts Mungitt’s arrival; and Empires players Martinez and Rodriguez, who badmouth Kawabata in animated Spanish.

It’s easy to see why Take Me Out secures a place in Mixed Blood’s canon. Works preceding it include Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog, about desperation in urban African America; Jevetta Steele’s Two Queens, One Castle, which looks at the pain of a woman who learns her husband has a boyfriend; and Lisa Loomer’s cross-cultural satire Maria! Maria Maria Maria!, one of Reuler’s favorites. “I aspire for Mixed Blood to be an antidote to an entertainment industry woefully inept with proper images,” he says. “In content and casting, the play personifies that aspiration. It’s set on the sound stage of an over-the-top multiculti sitcom titled There Goes the Neighborhood, and the cast and producers address the absurdity of what it takes to make it in ‘ethnic show biz.’ That was a funny, substantive project.”

Mixed Blood, which began as a basic idea, “ran amuck” somewhere along the line, according to Reuler. Between its main stage season and productions at schools, churches, community centers, juvenile detention centers, and workplaces, Mixed Blood now puts on more than 500 performances a year. The theater has developed a partnership with the Guthrie Theater, a cultural training initiative for businesses, and an educational outreach program that’s mushroomed into a noteworthy entity in and of itself. Traveling constantly to schools—from kindergartens to universities, in Minnesota and around the country—the eight designated Mixed Blood shows in the outreach program currently include Dr. King’s Dream, a depiction of the historic civil rights leader; Minnecanos, a celebration of Chicano history in Minnesota; and the newest offering, The Deaf Duckling, which, based on the children’s classic The Ugly Duckling, tells the coming-of-age story of a deaf girl born to a hearing family.

The institution’s EnterTRaining program, scripted by Syl Jones, customizes theater pieces to address and foster discussion of potential barriers to workplace success, focusing on issues such as culture, gender, sexual orientation, age, and disability. Many organizations have used this service, including HealthPartners, Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, IDS Financial Services, Target Corporation, and the Minnesota State Board of Public Defense.

The partnership with the Guthrie has resulted in the production of Jones’s Black No More (Washington D.C.’s famed Arena Stage was a co-collaborator) and Mixed Blood’s 2004–05 season opener, Jane Martin’s Flags, about a father who loses his son to the war in Iraq. “The Guthrie commissioned Flags and developed the script,” Reuler says. “I fell in love with the script during a Guthrie workshop at Mixed Blood in March of 2004 and approached Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling after the Guthrie’s 2004–05 season was announced without that title. He agreed that its content’s immediacy merited a production before the 2004 presidential election, and we worked out an arrangement. The Guthrie’s literary director, Michael Bigelow Dixon, stayed involved throughout the creative process.”

Reuler is quick to point out that he hasn’t accomplished all this single-handedly. “Charlie Moore, who’s director of touring, is the anchor, serving as receptionist and house manager and booking thousands of touring shows and student matinees throughout the years,” Reuler says. “He’s been publicist and plumber. There are many others wearing similar hats here, but Charlie, associate producer Raúl Ramos, and artistic associate Warren Bowles have devoted their adult lives to the vision of Mixed Blood.”

Reuler honored another social pioneer, NFL Hall of Famer–turned– Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page, by naming the main stage after him, because, as Reuler says, “Alan Page’s belief in and action toward social justice are the embodiment of Mixed Blood’s mission.” Of the naming, Page says, “It’s quite an honor. Mixed Blood has always been in the forefront of presenting complex issues in ways people can understand and relate to. Jack has explored issues that many people don’t want to do deal with, and he does it in a way that’s real.”

One can argue that Mixed Blood’s educational outreach plays it safe, confining its content to mainstream historical figures—that people such as radical black activist Angela Davis, imprisoned Native American icon Leonard Peltier, and white revolutionary John Brown are overlooked. Or one could argue that white is a hue conspicuously scarce in Mixed Blood’s color scheme. Still, the organization’s contributions to Twin Cities theater and the Twin Cities are invaluable.

Reuler has significantly improved life for working actors and directors of color, and he’s brought the work of such playwrights as Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones), Ed Bullins, and Sharon Walton to the Twin Cities. Bellamy, who directed and acted on the original crew before he founded Penumbra Theatre, says, “It’s important that there was a space where black artists could exhibit their craft.” Actor-director Bowles, who directed Permanent Collection at Mixed Blood earlier this season, was there at the outset, as were television-film veteran Carl Lumbly, who coauthored Badd High with Reuler that first season, and film star Don Cheadle. As Reuler expanded his vision, other colors appeared on the palette. To date, Mixed Blood has produced more Native American theater than any other venue in the region. And, outside Teatro del Pueblo, Mixed Blood is the Twin Cities’ main source of Latino theater. In Minnesota, only Theater Mu gives Asian theater more exposure than Mixed Blood.

Though Reuler’s family has been in the Twin Cities for five generations, he attended kindergarten, first, and second grades in the segregated central Illinois town of Kankakee. “There was literally a train track and a river that divided the black and white communities,” he says. “My racial consciousness began there.” He also credits his brother, Jim, for influencing him on matters of racial politics and social justice.

Regardless, it’s not lost on Reuler that he’s a white man producing theater of color. “I’ve always been aware that being white and running this theater is my cross to bear and potentially an Achilles’ heel,” he says. “There’s a breed of pony-tailed, balding, middle-aged white guys working in nonprofitdom who feel they can walk in and out of different communities with immunity because of what they do or have done. I call them ‘The Schmoozeoisie’ and work hard not to be one of them.”

His peers—including Stan Wojewodski, who is the former Yale School of Drama dean, former Yale Repertory artistic director, and Take Me Out director—believe he has nothing to worry about in that regard. Wojewodski has worked at the Guthrie and on Bill of (W)Rights at Mixed Blood and says, “The production history of Mixed Blood and the continuity of Jack’s artistic spokesmanship demonstrate a deep commitment to this process of making theater. Take Me Out is a brave, interesting play, and Mixed Blood has always been a place that stands for that kind of work.” Peter Brosius, who is artistic director at Children’s Theatre Company, another multicultural success, says, “Jack Reuler is a true original. He’s been a terrific force, and his devotion has been inspiring to artists from all parts of this community. He knows that theater can make a difference.”

Dwight Hobbes is an essayist, a critic, and a playwright working in Minneapolis.