Triangle Lab and TTT to Bring All-Female TWELFTH NIGHT to Bay Communities, Spring 2014

The Triangle Lab will work with Ten Thousand Things Theater (TTT) in spring 2014 to bring TTT's unique model of theater creation, performance, and outreach to Bay Area audiences, including those who have little or no access to the arts. The Triangle Lab, a joint program of California Shakespeare Theater and Intersection for the Arts, seeks to integrate art into community life.

TTT Artistic Director Michelle Hensley will direct her all-female production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, guiding Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone and other staff and artists through TTT's production model. This will not be a scaled-down school tour-style undertaking, but rather-as with TTT productions-a high-quality production performed by some of the Bay Area's leading actors. With no sets or lights, and minimal props and costumes, the actors will meet audiences on a level playing field, carrying them somewhere extraordinary through the raw power of story. The production will be staged in diverse community settings, with a mixture of free and paid performances. TTT's Music Director Peter Vitale will work with local musicians on creating a soundscape.

This production of Twelfth Night is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Michelle is a rare combination in the American theater-she is an artist/citizen," says Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone. "She has created a methodology that relies on a simple equation: make the work-whether it be Shakespeare, a classic, or a new play-as excellent as possible, and bring it as close as possible to people, especially to those with little or no access to theater. Quality and access are one and the same to her, and I long to bring that rare combination to bear on our work at Cal Shakes."

"The work that Michelle Hensley and TTT do is the model of theater that breaks down walls," adds Intersection for the Arts Program DirectorSean San José; "theater that gives us a chance to imagine and experience the work and the words as truly one. Knowing that creating great work and connecting with people-putting the people and the play TOGETHER-can be one and the same is very inspiring. We are thrilled to see this work, to learn from it and to follow its model."

"Shakespeare wrote big stories that everyone in his widely diverse audiences-whether of the lower classes, like the groundlings, or the upper class nobility-could enter into," adds TTT Artistic Director Michelle Hensley. "Twelfth Night, a story of the pain, delight, confusion and even madness of being in love, is a wonderful example of a story that truly embraces everyone."

Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, TTT is nationally recognized for its high quality, award-winning theater that regularly plays to sold-out paying audiences while also touring to prisons, youth and low-income centers, veterans organizations, and other non-traditional performance locations. The company annually tops "best of" critics' lists, and last year the Star Tribune, the region's largest newspaper, named Hensley "Best Theater Artistic Director." Hensley-regarded both as a pioneer in art-making for communities as well as one of our country's finest Shakespeare directors-previously brought TTT's model to The Public Theater in New York City.

Twelfth Night will tour to a range of community organizations in the East Bay and in San Francisco's Tenderloin and SOMA neighborhoods near Intersection for the Arts. Partnerships with tour sites will build on existing Cal Shakes relationships with service organizations, after-school programs, and Intersection relationships with organizations in their neighborhood, and will seek to build new relationships with senior centers, adult prisons, and homeless shelters. Using Ms. Hensley's model for intimate proximity to promote the most direct connection between artist and audience, Twelfth Night will be performed for audiences of no more than 120 people at each site, for a total of 2,160 audience members across a broad span of race, class and life circumstance. There will also be a select number of affordable performances offered at low-cost for economically-challenged audiences at Intersection for the Arts.

The Triangle Lab is about making theater together, expanding the definitions of who participates in theater making and how they participate. We aim for theater, artists, and community members (the three points of the triangle) to become equal partners in discovering and sharing the profound stories of our times. We expect our experiments to yield new ways of making plays, new stories, and new ways of telling them, and to engage a broad range of participants in our community. The Triangle Lab (www.thetrianglelab.org) is a joint program of California Shakespeare Theater (www.calshakes.org) and Intersection for the Arts (www.theintersection.org), supported by generous grants from The James Irvine Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Ten Thousand Things Theater brings high-quality, intelligent theater to both veteran theater-going audiences and people with little access to the wealth of the arts. This award-winning company invigorates ancient tales, classic stories, and contemporary plays through its search for honest, open interactions between actors and audience. Theater-goers experience the immediacy and vibrancy of theater through a performance in which there is no stage and actors perform in the middle of the audience, inches away from patrons. With minimal sets and costumes, the finest quality actors in the region fully engage the audience by distilling the story to its essence, lending an immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy. Michelle Hensley is the founding director of the award-winning Ten Thousand Things. She has directed and produced more than 40 tours for TTT and is the recipient of the Francesca Primus Prize for outstanding contribution to American theater by a female artist. This past year the Star Tribune chose Hensley as Best Theater Artistic Director and TTT's productions topped the "Best of" lists in the Star Tribune, City Pages and Pioneer Press.

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