The theater we make in the Twin Cities isn’t merely “good for a midsized, Midwestern city.” As a guy who has seen performance all over the country, I can tell you that the average level of theatrical craft here is as high as you’ll find anywhere. At its best, local theater is objectively excellent.
If you want to insist on outside validation, it’s there in plentitude: Three of our local theaters have Tony Awards on their shelves proclaiming them as outstanding regional theaters. National publications tout the Guthrie and the Children’s Theatre as among the best theaters of their kind in the country. New York’s Public Theater is taking lessons from Minneapolis’ Ten Thousand Things on how to bring theater to low-income audiences.
If the local theater community is going to honor its own, then it should do so with the kind of innovative, idiosyncratic, quit-whining-and-get-it-done spirit that typifies the best of theater in the Twin Cities. That doesn’t mean people can’t dress up fancy and have a party; they’ve earned that right. But they’ve also earned the right to have that party feel like it’s their own, not a knockoff of what happens in New York or Los Angeles.
