Jenna Papke is an arts administrator and theater artist who  is currently the Executive Director at Arts' Nest in Uptown Minneapolis. Her organization opened their space at 2605 Hennepin Ave in November of 2014 at the the previous home of the Brave New Workshop (before BNW moved to downtown Minneapolis.)  The space has been branded Phoenix Theater (or just Phoenix) and includes a cafe, office space, and rehearsal/classroom spaces. Arts' Nest supports new work and assist emerging artists and also facilitates space rental at Phoenix. As you will read in the following interview with Jenna, the organization has ambitious goals that have already created a a multi-genre community art space.

Kendra: Tell me about yourself and your arts background.

Jenna: I was born in Minneapolis. I attended South High which is where I first got really into theater. I've always been a storyteller. I thought maybe I would go into creative writing but that is not necessarily where my skill set lies. I was 15 and I fell into theater and I never fell back out again.
 
I went to the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. My dual interests have always been administration and directing. There were some amazing teachers and people I took one-on-one classes with, but the directing Master of Fine Arts program had been disbanded a couple of years before I got there.  Instead, I got some experience through the student theater, which might not have been a bad thing. Directing is such a personal thing; there is only a certain amount of it that can be taught. Most of it you just kind of have to figure out through practice.

The best thing that happened to me in college was the internship semester I spent in London with a West End producer and I just learned everything. The six months hands-on in London were worth more than the three other years combined.

After college I spent a couple of years making work on my own, producing and directing, followed by a few years working together with former classmates under the name Six Elements, where we did some great work.

Two weeks after I parted ways with Six Elements I was approached by a guy I knew who legitimately said, "I'm going to buy a theater but I don't want to do the boring business stuff." And that is where I am today. It is really the perfect melding of the artistic and business sides. Plus, I get to do some directing.

The mission of Arts' Nest is to work with emerging artists, giving them access to space, connections, and the information necessary to be successful. The Phoenix Theater, which we call a project of Arts' Nest, is our physical location but Arts' Nest is the legal entity. I knew in order to make this work financially we'd also have to be a rental venue and we couldn't use every week to just do Fledgling Projects. I wanted a clean space that had a neutral identity so that many groups could come in and use the space. There have been many points in my time here in the Twin Cities where I've been to a theater three or four times before realizing, "Oh, there's a company here with the same name. I didn't know that." I wanted to avoid this by having separate names for each, which may confuse some, but I still stick by the fact that it was a good idea.

Phoenix as a space and as a community has come to mean a lot of things even separate from Arts' Nest. The plan down the line is for more of the weeks to be used for our mission-driven projects and fewer of them to be for rentals, but that will come with time; we are still only a year old.

​Kendra: Can you talk about some of the challenges and the things you've learned creating Arts' Nest?

Jenna: I've taken many jobs that would sort of train me for this experience, but sometimes the price of ignorance is very high, like not realizing that I had to deal with unemployment insurance. But even in those first few months it was all about getting the building ready. We got in here and the electrical and the plumbing had to be redone and all on a very tight timeline. Theater people run on deadlines; there is a show with an audience. I’ve discovered that doesn't work in the construction field, where it's just dealing with the sheer difference in work mentality.

It's been completely worth it, however; just having this place. On a night when everything clicks and the audience is happy and the artists are happy, being able to make things happen, and being able to reach out to a young artist and say, "You know what we don't have enough of in this town? A thing that you do." And they can come in and just have a smashing success, or a moderate success. It's just why I wanted to do it in the first place.

​​Kendra: Tell me more about the Fledgling Projects.

Jenna: There are a number of things we do under the Arts' Nest banner, and Fledgling is our production assistance program where most of the energy goes. It's a very simple application process on the Arts' Nest website: just fill out a little bit about yourself, what kind of artist you are, and an idea of a project you want to do. It's not to say you necessarily need to pitch a project; we also love to get applications saying, "I'm a lighting designer who recently came to town and want more opportunities."

We collect applications on a rolling basis and then three times a year the board sits down and reviews them to pick the ones that seem to fit in with our mission; ones we can help make successful.

​​Kendra: Do you feel like at this point you have a built-in audience for the venue that comes from show to show?

The biggest thing we have going for us is 50 feet of window ads on Hennepin Avenue. We put up posters and there are people walking by who stop to look. We also have a quickly growing Facebook page and an email list of 700+ people.

​​Kendra: I want to ask about your philosophy for building and keeping healthy collaborations, since you work with so many people here.

Jenna: One thing that we have been working to push here is bringing together different kinds of art and rethinking what art is. We work to display and sell visual art, so we are kind of becoming a gallery space. We are trying to do it in a thoughtful way, and it has been a learning process for me. Visual arts is something I always enjoyed and something I would consume as a viewer, but it's a different world. Why should these worlds be so distinct? That's why when we made the sign I pushed really hard to just make it Phoenix. I didn't want "Phoenix Theater." I didn't want to close off the possibilities that exist. The goal, down the line, is to have this place open on a more regular basis. So few performing venues have lobbies the way this one does, and to make it a networking space is a goal of mine.

It all comes down to your collaborators. Finding the right ones, knowing how to communicate with them, respecting them and trusting them. It's why the community can get very closed off, because sometimes it's hard to take the risks to find new collaborators.

​​Kendra: How do you get the word out and the community involved? How do people learn about what's coming up next for you?

Jenna: It has been a slow process. I keep saying yes anytime someone wants to talk. The Minnesota Theater Alliance did a profile on us. We have a bunch of memberships now including Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, Minnesota Theater Alliance, and Minnesota Playlist. We are trying to become part of the community so that the word spreads in an organic way. We can't afford ads. We've also started right away with our programming even though we weren't necessarily in a firm financial spot to do all these Fledgling programs. I really wanted to get the word out that this is what we do and who we are. A lot of it is spreading from people we have already worked with and who have had positive experiences. We are definitely seeing an uptick in interest.

Tickets:
$20 or Pay-What-You-Can

About the show:
Cynthia Debrett is a brilliant espionage agent, careless with her safety, fiercely devoted to her country, and quite painfully in love with her best friend, Robin Bell. Robin however, is quite taken with the newest agent in Cynthia’s unit and knowing nothing of her unrequited love, begs her help in getting closer. Fighting fascism is easy. Coping with a breaking heart, much more difficult.

Matthew A. Everett is the playwright in residence at Workhouse Theatre Company in Minneapolis. He is a colleague of mine and for a while now I have been bugging him to sit down and talk to me about his upcoming work. He finally gave in and I am pleased to present this interview that covers a lot of ground including: Matthew's playwrighting residency at Workhouse, the use of show hashtags, his educational path to working in the arts,  and info about his new play in development TV Boyfriend.

Enjoy the interview and support Matthew's work by attending an upcoming free play reading at the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis. He gave me a sneak peek of the script for TV Boyfriend and I am telling you that you do not want to miss your chance to experience the public reading of his engaging "coming out romance!"

If you could describe TV Boyfriend in three words, what would they be?

Matthew: Well, the subtitle for the play is “a different sort of fairy tale” but if I had to hold it to just three words, they would be: coming out romance.

How did you decide that TV Boyfriend was a play that you were going to
write?
Matthew: I tend not to like plays where people talk about theater.  I also have a bias against plays that have writers - or any artists - as characters.  I feel like it shows a lack of imagination.  Come on, write about real people.  The whole world doesn’t revolve around theater.

TV Boyfriend is a play that has both of those things - a playwright as one of the main characters, and a bunch of people who keep talking about theater.  It’s so meta it makes me nervous.  A writer friend of mine laughed and told me it’s almost like this play had to trick me into writing it.

The trick was initiated by Red Theater in Chicago. They do a writing challenge in the month of November each year. They post a prompt each day, and you can either write to the prompt or not, but you have to write something and post it in their online forum by 7am the next morning.  So you not only write it, but everyone else is also going to be able to read it.  Everyone puts $15 in the pot, and Red Theater takes percentage off the top as a mini-fundraiser. The remainder of the money is split between however many of the writers who sign on make it all the way to the end of the month writing something every single day.  I figured it would be a good way to get me to refocus on my writing and blast past my internal censor.  Plus I might get raw material for a new play or two. There were 57 writers participating this year, 31 of us, made it to the end writing every day. So I got a new play, and a $22.06 payout, out of it. Not bad.

Halfway through the month of November they posted this:

“Writing Challenge – Treat Yourself - Write something that only you understand and that probably only you enjoy. If you're not giggling to yourself or blushing you're doing it wrong. Listen to your Id. Be naughty! Be coded. Be fun. Comment on your work as you do it. Break and forget any and every rule except that writing can be FUN. F-U-N! Crack yourself up. Fall in love with yourself again. Masturbatory writing can unleash some wonderful creative energies. Treat yourself.”

That’s where the first half of the first scene of the play came from, and it’s stayed essentially the same.  Four days later I thought, “I think I know what the scene between the writer and the sister looks like.”  So instead of writing to that day’s prompt, I wrote that scene instead. For the next twelve days, every day I ended up writing a new scene for TV Boyfriend. That got me almost to the end of the month.  And when I looked up, I had almost 130 pages of dialogue. There’s gotta be a play in there somewhere.  So I started putting it in order and giving it some structure. Then I realized I needed some bits between the scenes to allow the actors to change their clothes if nothing else, and also to allow the audience to mentally make the transition from present to past and back again. One of those things was journal entries from the character of Jake. The other was a song written by the character of Ken - who, like me, is learning to play the guitar. So it didn’t need to be a great song, it just needed to be a song. Which I’ll be playing at the reading in the different sections where it appears in the script.

So in a lot of ways, TV Boyfriend decided that I was going to write it, rather than the other way around.

What's your favorite line from the play...right now, of course, since the
play is still being developed?
Matthew: There are so many I really like, that’s a tough one.  Also I’m not sure how much sense any of them make out of context. But if I was forced to choose, it’d probably be: “As far as I’m concerned, you are the prize in this box of Crackerjack.”

Just because it’s almost unbearably sweet in the context of the scene. So it’s the line that always makes me happy.

Who do you think will appreciate this play? Who is this show for?
Matthew: Anyone who appreciates a good love story, but I think anybody gay looking for a positive story dealing with love, relationships and coming out will have a special connection to it. And theater junkies and writers will have a lot they can latch onto as well.

What inspired you to become a Playwright?
Matthew: I’d been writing almost as soon as I could read when I was a kid. I even had a little red, white and blue plastic typewriter (remember typewriters?) as a birthday present at a young age. When I got involved in theater, which was inevitable since my mom was heavily involved in the local community theater, I realized I had a facility for dialogue. Prose was never my strong suit, so playwriting was a perfect fit.

What was your educational path and did it prepare you well for a life in
the arts?
Matthew: I got a fantastic hands-on liberal arts education at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana - a double major of Communications (Radio/TV/Film) and Theater. I was accepted there and at a bigger name school but the difference between the campus tours is what sold me.  At ISU, they took us into TV studio and got our hands on the cameras and the control room. The other school pointed out the building the TV studio was in up the hill as we walked past, essentially saying that if we also went to grad school here, we’d eventually get a chance to play with the toys. While attending ISU I got to do a little bit of everything - acting, writing, directing, design, stage management, shop, and tech crew.  (I started as just a Theater minor but after my first year, I’d spent so much time at the theater that I figured I might as well make the double major official.) I learned what my strengths and weaknesses were, and I also learned to appreciate the role everyone plays in getting a script up on a stage in front of an audience.

My grad school focus at the Yale School of Drama was in stage management, which gave me an even greater appreciation of everyone’s role.  But the writing was always there. My best friends in grad school were the playwrights. I just didn’t trust myself enough as a writer yet. I moved to Minneapolis after grad school and got a job as a stage manager. Finally, I’d spent one too many days in rehearsal saying to myself, “I can write better plays than this.” So I sat myself down and figured, either shut up and do your job, or get out of stage managing, take a desk job and focus all your creative energy on writing. I gave myself five years until I’d start to worry if I’d ever get a play on stage. I got my first production in three years. I like to think my background means I always have an eye on how the story can be told, and what I’m asking the creative and production teams to do - writing for the way actors speak, understanding what set and costume changes require in real time, etc.

What are some upcoming projects that you are excited about?
Matthew: Of the ideas for scripts I’m noodling over at the moment, first in line is a trilogy of short plays following the same set of characters through their 20s, 30s and 40s, using an ensemble where each of those age brackets takes prominence in one story, and serves as the supporting players for the others. The whole thing pivots around an atheist and a minister meeting and falling in love, and having to deal with the notions of how religion, faith and belief factor into their life together. Various manifestations of God make cameo appearances. The overall working title is The God Trilogy. The goal is to design them in such a way that they can be done separately or presented all together, interwoven and reflecting off one another thematically in a fashion similar to the way Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy of films does.

There’s also a riff I’m doing on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in which all but one of the characters are women, called Autumn Roses.

Also I’m trying to revisit and finalize the script for Love’s Prick my modern day riff on Shakespeare’s As You Like It that I workshopped back in 2007.

I don’t have any other readings or productions in the pipeline at the moment, but I’m pushing to get more of my scripts out there in the world so with luck that will be changing soon.

I was really excited to see that you are using a hashtag for the show!
#TVBoyfriend. Is that something new for Workhouse and what do you see
as the benefit of including that in your show information?
Matthew: Workhouse is trying to figure out the most effective way to generate interest in the different plays that are being presented in The Greenhouse Project monthly play reading series. Hashtagging #GreenhouseProject and #PlayTitle is something we’re playing with, along with trying to pull daily quotes from the play to see if we can pique people’s interest with things that are funny or odd out of context - clues to the play that will only make sense if you come and hear the whole thing.

How did Workhouse Theatre end up doing a reading of your play this February?
Matthew: This wasn’t the plan. Another play and playwright were on the schedule for February, but just a couple of weeks ago the playwright in question contacted us saying he was having health issues and needed to postpone. As we’re still working our way through reading scripts and deciding what to put in our March and April slots on the schedule for The Greenhouse Project, having February suddenly open up as well was a challenge.  “TV Boyfriend” is still very new in its development. It didn’t even exist in October of last year. But I’d banged it into sufficient shape through my writing group and their feedback that I felt comfortable showing it around. Plays in progress is what the reading series is supposed to be for, so to buy us some time to read and decide on other plays for March and April, we decided to put TV Boyfriend on the calendar for February.

We’re really trying to grow the audience for the reading series and help introduce writers and audiences and local artists to each other with The Greenhouse Project. Hearing the words read aloud by actors is invaluable to a playwright. Hearing an audience’s response, both in the moment of the reading and in discussion afterward, is equally invaluable. So the more, the merrier. Come out and support new work and help it grow and get better.

Charla Marie Bailey is an accomplished theater artist in the Twin Cities. She has written and directed short plays and performed on a variety of local stages. Charla is currently a company member at Theatre Unbound, a leader on the Teen Ivey Awards Committee, and an ambassador for Ten Thousand Things Theater Company. She took some time to chat with me about her artistry and her current experience acting in Ruby! The Story of Ruby Bridges at SteppingStone Theatre, which plays February 5-28, 2016 in Saint Paul.

How do you keep your performance skills sharp?
Charla: I relive [the performance] before I take it to the stage. A mini performance either within myself or in the car or theater space. Then I listen. I'm becoming more comfortable now with acting my lines out at home even if my husband is there; I used to be shy around him. Now I have a "dressing room" at home where I can do just that.

Why were you initially drawn to be a part of Ruby?
Charla: Well, first of all it's a Black history play and I'm always trying to make people aware of the history that we don't want to repeat. Ruby! is a story about a brave little six-year-old girl who dealt with a lot of hate just to go to school with white students and receive an equal education. I also enjoy getting to work with director Anya Kremenetsky again, and working on a play by Christina Ham, a Black female playwright here in Minnesota, is an honor.

What's the process been like so far?
Charla: Rewarding. There are more children than adults in the cast and I've never experienced a kid's show like that before. These kids are doing their thing. You ask, they do. I've also gotten the chance to move muscles both physically and vocally that I haven't used in a while.

What has it been like working with this cast of young people?
Charla: Fun, a lot of fun. I love working with kids. I also know that they are watching me so I'm trying to be the example for them to follow. I'm also watching them and learning as well.

This is the second time that SteppingStone Theater is producing this [Christina Ham] version of Ruby! From your experience so far, why do you think this show has been so popular?
Charla: It's history; people want to hear about it and they want their kids to know about it, and getting kids to tell the story is a great way to do that. These kids are enjoying themselves immensely.

What's next for you?
Charla: I'm working with Theatre Coup D' Etat. I'll be playing Titania in A Midwinter Night's Dream, a role I've always wanted to play. I'm very excited about that and getting to work with the Ivey Award-winning director James Napoleon Stone. This play is actually a Valentine's Day benefit gala for SAVE - Suicide Awareness Voices of Education.

How do you promote your theater work since you work with a number of local companies?
Charla: I do a lot of promotion via social media. I use Facebook, Twitter, occasionally LinkedIn, emails, word of mouth, and if I have postcards I drop those off at local theaters, bring them to rehearsals and pass them out, whatever I can. These interviews help as well, thank you for the opportunity.