All the Lights On: Reimagining Theater with Ten Thousand Things by Michelle Hensley (review)

Michelle Hensley has a gift for distillation: naked metal hoops defining the Queens in an all-male Richard III, the decreasing size of furniture that parallels the unsinkable Molly Brown’s accumulating wealth until one finger collapses on a doll-size divan, the repeating trope of a bag of silver that grounds Hensley’s tale of producing The Good Person of Szechuan in a Santa Monica homeless shelter. Whether in theatrical staging or prose narrative, Hensley’s stripped-down storytelling communicates on multiple levels while often concealing the labor of her craft. All the Lights On makes that labor visible.

Over two decades as the artistic director of Ten Thousand Things, Hensley has devised a way of making theatre—first in Los Angeles, then Minneapolis—that generates what she calls “radiance”—an idea that seems related to Jill Dolan’s notion of performative utopias. Hensley describes radiance as a feeling of profound exchange connecting mind, heart, and imagination. Enabled by a spirit of playfulness that overcomes audience resistances, radiance prompts the collective imagining of new worlds with new (or neglected) audiences. Each of the three shows in a Ten Thousand Things season begins by touring to prisons, halfway houses, and other “marginalized” spaces before encountering the more conventional theatre-going public. As Hensley details, however, this is not intended as production preview or social service, but rather as a way to create deeper connections. Barriers to achieving those connections, she explains, are as powerful among middle-class theatregoers, who watch judgmentally with arms crossed, as with audiences (like her Iowa-farmer grandfather) who perceive theatre as potentially pretentious or preachy. In its structure, tone, and lively examples, All the Lights On illuminates how Ten Thousand Things breaks down these barriers to realize radiance.

Hensley organizes the book much like her productions, with a compelling introduction that orients readers to key themes and questions, related in a folksy style that belies the incisiveness of her analysis. “My favorite play,” she begins, “is The Good Person of Szechuan by Bertolt Brecht. In it, a poor woman named Shen Te gets a gift—a bag of silver from the gods. She has to figure out how to spend it wisely. It’s all she has” (1). In deceptively prosaic sentences, Hensley distills a concrete image and resonant problem that also speaks to her own journey. She does so while imagining multiple reading audiences—those who have never heard of Brecht, and those who have struggled for decades with how to sustain his ideas theatrically—while foregrounding the kind of materialist analysis that consistently undergirds her storytelling and producing. How are resources distributed, and how do we most productively share what we have? The Santa Monica audience described is not so much “under-served” as essential to making sense of Shen Te’s struggles as they vocalize shifting responses to her journey. The introduction thus interweaves key themes in Hensley’s praxis, including the importance of attending to audience responses in shaping clear, but complex storytelling, the “fairy tale” as invitation to reimagining social worlds, and an explicitly feminist rejection of conventional theatrical structures and ecologies.

The book’s remaining eleven chapters develop these themes through a structure that more or less reflects the production process. After exploring foundational ideas about radiance and reimagining audiences, Hensley discusses play selection, analysis, casting, production design, rehearsal, and performance through vivid performance examples and captivating production photos (often featuring forward-seat-leaning and clearly delighted audiences). Final chapters reflect on political theatre-making and associated organizational reinventions.

Hensley adopts the notion of fairy tales as a frame for script selection, which is broad enough to include Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and American musicals (as well as some original plays). Key elements of these plays are their allegorical openness featuring diverse social worlds that enable multiple audiences to connect with the stories’ struggles. Greek tragedies work at “life’s extremes” (53), asking fundamental questions like “How does one conduct one...