Good evening everyone:

If you founded a theater some 45 years ago (1976) and had been its executive director ever since, what would you choose for your final production before retiring? That’s the question Jack Reuler of Minneapolis’ Mixed Blood Theater faced earlier this year.

Scheduled to retire on February 2, 2022 (he loves numerology, so this is his date of choice), Jack chose to plumb his second great love (second only to creating, growing, and guiding a theater that “is dedicated to removing any and every barrier we find”):  animals. He accordingly commissioned a piece called “Animate,” which explores the intersections of race, philanthropy, species preservation, and conservation. I was in the audience for the second-to-last performance

So, a bunch of disclaimers before I get to the point.

First, Jack is one of my deepest and longest-standing friends. We met at Pomona College in 1973 and have never wandered too far apart since then.

Second, my father and my brother designed the renovation of the “firehouse” in which Mixed Blood is located – in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Never mind that it took Jack, my father, and Toby well more than a decade to pull it off – renovation capital for a hundred-year-old firehouse converted to a theater is hard to come by when times are tough.

Third, Mixed Blood is a Kresge grantee, Minnesota’s first multi-racial theater company. It is dedicated to addressing difference of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. More than a decade ago, it launched a program of “radical hospitality” designed to make its productions available to new audiences by offering free admission on a first-come, first-served basis and providing free parking and transportation for guests with disabilities.

It embodies equitable creative placemaking through programming at its theater, in its community, and in off-site locations throughout the Twin Cities. It has mounted perhaps 500 productions that – in its own words – “pay positive attention to difference, break down racial barriers, and make theater accessible to anyone and everyone.”

Fourth, when the Kresge Board was kind enough to celebrate my first ten years at the Foundation in 2016, we chose to have the dinner and program at the Fire House.

And fifth, I happen to agree with the statement that greets you when you get the answering machine at Mixed Blood: “You’ve reached the Mixed Blood Theater: the best theater in the history of the galaxy.”

With all of that out of the way, I wanted to answer the question about how a virtuoso approaches his capstone production.

First,  because you love animals, you perform it entirely at a zoo – the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul to be exact.

Second, because you’ve attracted A-level talent to your mission for nearly a half-century, you enlist every major theater figure in Mixed Blood’s past.

Apart from giraffes, lions, seals, monkeys, and sloths, the cast is a who’s-who of Mixed Blood’s history.

Don Cheadle (who starred in six Mixed Blood productions before going to Hollywood to appear in, among many other films, Hotel Rwanda, Iron Man, Black Monday) does the voice-over for the introductory video. Jevetta Steele (perhaps the state’s best-known rhythm and blues and gospel singer) is the head of the Coca Cola Foundation, a character Jack modeled on our own Regina. Sally Wingert (a mainstay of the Guthrie Theater for a quarter-century) plays the Zoo’s Board chair. Kevin Kling (with Garrison Keillor, the state’s most renown story-teller) is the head small-animal curator. Warren Bowles (who did a touring one-man Martin Luther King show in schools for some 30 years) is an old-school curator. Regina Marie Williams (a forty-year mainstay of multiple Minnesota theater companies) is the zoo director. Taj Reuler (a member of the Dudley Riggs Theater and Jack’s daughter) plays an in-your-face community activist.

Third, because you’re Jack, you resort to a heavy dose of P.T. Barnum.

The show opens with a helicopter landing on the lawn (a Federal Aeronautics Administration nightmare), delivering extremely rare sperm that will be used to inseminate the last female member of a small rodent-like species. And you close in the sea lions/seals’ amphitheater, voting on the fate of the plots you’ve been exposed to over the previous ninety minutes.

Fourth, because you think in nuanced complexities, you construct a plot that zig-zags between a number of conflicting imperatives:

. . . choosing between a curator attending his own wedding or breaking away to save the rodent-species by performing an emergency insemination procedure

. . . deciding to keep a deeply loving pair of great apes together despite their inability to produce off-spring or to separate them by sending one to another zoo to mate and bring new great apes into the world

. . . . continuing to house an ailing and beloved old giraffe (Annie) whose species is in no danger (a “surplus animal”) or deciding to bring in a breeding-age giraffe, and to (i) euthanize Annie, (ii) send her to another zoo, or (iii) find a wildlife preserve where she might or might not get the care she needs.

The humans are arrayed on both sides of each of these questions. So, the audience gets to make the final choice in the sea lion house.

And fifth, because you have a strong point of view about race, animal conservation, species survival, and human dignity, you construct a central plot-line that mixes them all up.

A wealthy philanthropist has pledged $40 million to launch a center at the zoo to rescue a white rhinoceros species from extinction. The zoo’s director and the board chair become the strongest proponents, understanding not just fit with mission, but also the likelihood of expanding its visitor base, reaching far more children, and attracting donors. But in an unfortunate podcast on the day of the announcement, the 82-year old donor uses decidedly retrograde, and implicitly racist, language (she is “street-smart” and “articulate”) to describe the zoo director, a Black woman.

A community activist seizes on the podcast as a moral crossroads, asking how the zoo could possibly accept a naming gift from a racist. She threatens to use her social media network to submarine the entire enterprise. Soon, the mayor rescinds the city’s decision to donate $10 million of land donated for the new exhibit. The Coca Cola foundation head, also a Black woman, is challenged as being hypocritical and complicit for not withdrawing her funding. Even when the board chair is able to convince the Governor to fill the hole, others begin to question the ethics of moving forward.

In the final scene, the zoo director gives an impassioned statement about the relative trade-offs. Acknowledging that the mega-donor’s comments were inappropriate, she points out that her entire career has involved absorbing and addressing these kind of passive aggressions. She argues that the institution’s mission has to take precedence over one ill-conceived statement by a person who didn’t realize his insensitivity. She suggests that this is not a choice between right and wrong, but between right and right, between the needs of the many and the needs of the few.  She then asks the audience to vote to accept the donation.

The audience did just that (together with the other decisions I mentioned above), I asked Jack if  the audiences in any of the performances had voted otherwise. He replied that they had not – rhinos win on a 10-0 vote.

So why do I bother you with all of this? Because Jack and his troupe are asking us to consider not just species preservation and the morality of accepting morally-tainted money, but to think long and hard about how we reconcile all the complexities, nuances, and ambiguities of competing needs surrounding perniciously difficult problems.

Nice way to exit, Jack. We in philanthropy would be well-advised to take your challenge seriously.

Rip

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