GUTHRIE THEATER AND THE PUBLIC THEATER PARTNER
WITH ACCLAIMED ARTISTS JESSICA BLANK AND ERIK JENSEN
TO DEVELOP DOCUMENTARY THEATER PIECE
IN RESPONSE TO ICE PRESENCE IN MINNESOTA
(Minneapolis/St. Paul) — The Guthrie Theater (Joseph Haj, Artistic Director), in collaboration with The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director), today announced their partnership with acclaimed documentary theater artists Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen on the development of a new work. Conceived as a direct artistic response to Operation Metro Surge, the presence of an estimated 3,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minnesota, the project addresses their actions in the Twin Cities, the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and Minnesotans’ collective response — events that upended the daily lives of thousands of Minnesotans, with major repercussions for the Twin Cities and the nation as a whole. Blank and Jensen, who have Minnesota roots and are actively developing the work on the ground in the Twin Cities, will create a documentary theater piece, told in Minnesotans’ own words, through firsthand interviews, in-depth research and engagement with affected communities. Still in active development, the project’s final form will evolve in the weeks and months to come.
Guthrie Theater Artistic Director Joseph Haj stated, “In this moment, when so many in our state are grappling with uncertainty, theater remains one of the most powerful forms of community-building we have. Theater invites us to gather in witness to one another, thereby illuminating our common humanity.” Haj added, “Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen are artists of extraordinary empathy and integrity whose work centers the human experience. I believe their work will help create a vital record of this unprecedented time in Minnesota.”
Blank and Jensen’s documentary work focuses on directly impacted individuals at the heart of larger social justice issues. Their plays are created from interview transcripts and primary documents. They adhere to journalistic standards in preserving the language of the interview subjects and accurately representing the facts, while turning true stories into emotionally impactful and resonant works of art. They believe the medium of documentary theater is uniquely able to move audiences, create empathy and unmoor fixed preconceptions, creating tangible opportunities for change.
Blank and Jensen are investing time in the Twin Cities to listen, learn and conduct interviews with the people at the center of the story unfolding locally and across the state of Minnesota. They believe the nation needs to hear and understand the human stories at the heart of what’s happening in Minnesota, and they are dedicated to using theater’s enormous power to help tell these stories with the depth, care and attention they deserve.
The Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis shared, “The theater isn’t always the best place for the latest new or rapid reaction to history. We often work over a longer timeline, and even our most powerfully urgent productions can take years to gestate. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart premiered at The Public 40 years ago this year, and it had a huge impact on the debate about the AIDS crisis, but even that ripped-from-the-headlines play took more than two years to come to production.”
Eustis continued, “But sometimes history demands an urgent ‘now!’ Minneapolis and its extraordinary citizens are making history in the eyes of the world, and we at The Public and the Guthrie want to do everything we can to honor and lift up what they are accomplishing. I was born and raised in Minnesota, and I have never been prouder of my home state than I have been over the last few weeks. We are so proud to be linking arms with our friends at the Guthrie to make some ‘good trouble.’”
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen said, “Our documentary theater work is conceived as an act of service to the communities we interview. Our lives have been changed by what we’ve seen in Minnesota: both the organized brutality imposed on ordinary people and those people’s extraordinary response of care, protection, mutual aid and love. We are honored to have the opportunity to uplift the voices of the diverse Minnesotans impacted by and responding to this moment, and believe their stories carry great lessons for our nation as a whole.”
Blank and Jensen are a multihyphenate, married creative team whom The New Yorker calls “among the foremost practitioners of documentary theater in the U.S.” They have spent over two decades creating documentary theater that wrestles with the most urgent issues of our time while circumventing the false polarization that too often diminishes our national dialogue and blinds us to the human experience behind the headlines.
Their award-winning work includes The Exonerated, a play based on interviews with death row exonerees across the U.S.; Aftermath, the first major American theatrical work to tackle the impact of the Iraq war on ordinary civilians; Coal Country, based on interviews with survivors of the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster; The Line, a rapid-response documentary play based on interviews with New York City medical first responders at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic; and numerous others.
Though currently based in Brooklyn, both artists have deep Minnesota roots and a strong personal connection to the state. Jensen was born in Detroit Lakes and grew up all over northern Minnesota before attending high school in Apple Valley. Blank came to the Twin Cities to attend Macalester College, then the University of Minnesota, and lived in South Minneapolis before moving to New York. They are also narrative filmmakers, television writers and actors, and Blank is a professor at The Juilliard School. They maintain artistic ties to the Twin Cities; their most recent feature film, Brooklyn, Minnesota, starring Jensen and Amy Madigan, was filmed in and around Minneapolis in 2023 with a Minnesota creative team and crew. The film won the 2024 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF).
Land Acknowledgment
The Guthrie would like to acknowledge that we gather on the traditional land of the Dakota People and honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations, including the Ojibwe and other Indigenous nations.
The GUTHRIE THEATER (Joseph Haj, Artistic Director) is an American center for theater performance in Minneapolis, Minnesota, dedicated to producing a mix of classic and contemporary plays and cultivating the next generation of theater artists. Under Haj’s leadership, the Guthrie is guided by four core values: Artistic Excellence; Community; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility; and Fiscal Responsibility. Since its founding in 1963, the theater has continued to set a national standard for excellence in the field and serve the people of Minnesota as a vital cultural resource. The Guthrie houses three state-of-the-art stages, production facilities, classrooms and dramatic public spaces. guthrietheater.org
THE PUBLIC continues the work of its visionary founder Joe Papp as a civic institution engaging, both on-stage and off, with some of the most important ideas and social issues of today. Conceived over 60 years ago as one of the nation’s first nonprofit theaters, The Public has long operated on the principles that theater is an essential cultural force and that art and culture belong to everyone. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Patrick Willingham, The Public’s wide breadth of programming includes an annual season of new work at its landmark home at Astor Place, Free Shakespeare in the Park at The Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the Mobile Unit touring throughout New York City’s five boroughs, Public Works, and Joe’s Pub. Since premiering HAIR in 1967, The Public continues to create the canon of American Theater and is currently represented on Broadway by the Tony Award-winning musicals Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hell’s Kitchen by Alicia Keys and Kristoffer Diaz. Their programs and productions can also be seen regionally across the country and around the world. The Public has received 64 Tony Awards, 197 Obie Awards, 62 Drama Desk Awards, 64 Lortel Awards, 36 Outer Critic Circle Awards, 13 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, 72 AUDELCO Awards, 6 Antonyo Awards and 6 Pulitzer Prizes. publictheater.org
