Arts Activities Support

This production was one of the most well-received in our company's decade in existence. A larger number of people saw this show than any other in our history: 1,018. And most importantly for us: Carson Kreitzer was able to see her play realized in the way she had always intended, for the Twin Cities community where the play was developed before going on to national productions. Workhaus Collective is tremendously proud of the work we did on LASSO OF TRUTH. Artistic goals were achieved for a very complicated show, working with a limited budget but apparently unlimited enthusiasm and teamwork. The strengths of the piece were its challenging form, which included moments of extremely non-traditional storytelling (including the use of drawn comic-panels telling a slightly different story than the one being told by the actors onstage, expanding the narrative and calling into question the truth of memory, and sections that were performed in darkness) and moments that dealt frankly with unusual sexualities. The strengths of the artistic process definitely included assembling the team of amazing actors and designers, beginning with director Leah Cooper, and nurturing and giving space to this astounding collection of talent. Ms. Cooper ran a thrilling, warm, and respectful process. Workhaus was able to attract a high level of acting talent, all people who had worked with Carson Kreitzer in the past, and were excited by the piece. Several accepted lower fees than their usual in order to work with us. The design team was similarly accomplished, and excited by the challenges inherent in the piece. These challenges, unfortunately, often fell upon the backs of the fantastic projection and sound designers, who had to wrestle an astonishingly large number of cues into Qlab. In the course of running the piece, the challenge fell upon the shoulders of our wonderful, young stage manager, who handled an intensely dense book with aplomb, calling cues pretty much non-stop for the whole show. The resulting theatrical event was absolutely thrilling, and one of our most successful productions in the history of the company. In future, we would take steps to ensure that there is sufficient additional tech time built into the schedule for a show of this complexity. The designers put in many hours at night after regular tech hours. We are eminently grateful to them, and everyone was thrilled with the final product. But in future, we would make sure they have time to get their best work done, and also get enough sleep! In our proposal, we hoped to reach an audience of at least 400. We are thrilled to report that actual audience attendance was a record-breaking 1,018. We absolutely reached new communities for Workhaus, especially the Comic/Geek community, and the bondage/alternative sexuality communities. We also continued to bring in new audience through outreach to universities, this time making special efforts to reach feminist communities within the universities, often through personal connections with feminist professors. This was very successful, pointing to a real need for more plays that put women at the center of the narrative. Working with Walking Shadow Theatre Company on this show was a wonderful chance to have our companies "cross-pollinate." Because of previous work they have done, Walking Shadow had access to those who would be particularly excited for a comic-book inspired play, and also members of the polyamory community, who were eager to see their lives reflected onstage in a non-sensationalistic, respectful manner. We got wonderful feedback from members of these communities. Walking Shadow also helped us reach out to the deaf community, even finding us an interpreter who has connections to the deaf LGBT/kink community. Her feedback on the process was invaluable! For the history of our company, we have always had pay-what-you-wish tickets available. This became a challenge for this show, because we were selling out so many shows ahead of time! But we wanted to insure that we would always have pay-what-you-wish seating available, so we added a front row of benches, which we held back from pre-sale, and let our audiences know that we would always have a certain number of pay-what-you-wish tickets available for every show, even if it appeared to be sold out online. This is certainly a show that appealed to younger audiences, and college students; making sure we had pay-what-you-wish tickets available definitely helped bring these audiences in.