Sarah Bellamy wanted mirrors. At the Theatre Communications Group conference last June, the Penumbra Theatre president invoked Junot Díaz’s notion that vampires don’t have reflections. “If you want to make a human being into a monster,” Díaz once said, “deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” In turn, what inspired his writing “was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”
That was also the impetus behind Generation Now, a program created with a 2021 grant from the Mellon Foundation, in which four culturally specific theatres—Latino Theater Company, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Native Voices at the Autry, and Penumbra—would partner with Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) to co-commission new works from 16 playwrights. So far these have included Michi Barall, Ifa Bayeza, Dustin Tahmahkera, Lloyd Suh, Diana Oh, Kalani Queypo, Chadwick Johnson, Gabriel Rivas Gomez, Nambi E. Kelley, and an ensemble with Latino Theater Company.
A number of the commissioned plays have had workshops and readings since. Last October the program birthed its first full production at CTC: Michi Barall’s Drawing Lessons, a play about a young graphic novelist’s imagination at work, now licensed through Plays for New Audiences. Generation Now also aims to fill a new-work development gap in the American theatre landscape left by the departure of The Lark and other new-play incubators. The intention is to provide holistic development opportunities not only to widen the Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) canon, but also to inspire artists and advance the form.
“It’s the conversations we have that set this partnership apart,” said DeLanna Studi, artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry, which is developing Tahmahkera’s play Comanche Girl on the Moon. “We were hesitant to join once approached. We wanted to make sure we wouldn’t sacrifice the way we do things in our community approach to work with this bigger theatre.”
But then, Studi shared, CTC told her, “We want you to bring your expertise. We don’t want to change anything about how you do your thing. We want to watch, learn, and hopefully grow as a cohort.” As Barall put it at the TCG conference, “This program has allowed communities of color to speak to and support one another.”
This symbiotic collaboration’s “now” is plenty bright. Its future? Organizers aim to give more workshops to each title, incentivize other artistic leaders to produce and resource the new plays, and develop funding for full productions. This includes funding access, ticket subsidies, transportation, and engagement at CTC and other participating theatres. All told, the program aims to offer 600 performances over five years for more than 200,000 anticipated audience members around the country. That’s a lot of mirrors.
Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is the digital editor for American Theatre.
