Changing the Scene

By Laura Billings Coleman / Photo by Jake Armour

When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in May 2020 just blocks from the Pillsbury House + Theatre, longtime co-artistic producing director Faye Price ’77 prepared herself for the worst. As store windows were smashed, restaurants and businesses were boarded shut, and the nearest police precinct was burned to the ground, the theater and community center she’s helped lead for more than two decades transformed into a triage site for a city in turmoil.

“There were so many people hurting that we were able to use our corner of Chicago and 35th as a kind of exchange for the public,” Price says. As the murder site three blocks south became the focal point for mourning and demonstrations, Pillsbury House + Theatre became a de facto clearinghouse for community donations of food, water, and other necessities for neighbors displaced by night after night of protests, vigils, and confrontations. “If you needed cereal, if you needed diapers for your baby, people were bringing us donations, and we were putting them out for the public to get what they needed,” Price says. “It was a hard time, and I was worried about so many things, including that our building would be destroyed. But as time went on, I began to realize that wouldn’t happen—people were leaving us alone. I think there’s a respect for this place that comes from how many people have been touched by it.”

With programs that range from early drop-off day care to experimental late-night theater, the Pillsbury House + Theatre is respected not only by its neighbors and nearly thirty thousand annual clients, but also as a national model for what’s possible when an arts organization embeds itself deeply into a neighborhood in need. Located in the heart of one of Minneapolis’s most diverse communities, Pillsbury was founded in 1992 in the tradition of the nineteenth-century settlement house, urban community service centers like Chicago’s famous Hull House, which often featured their own community-focused theaters for citizen artists. In the wake of the 2008 recession, Pillsbury’s professional theater merged with Pillsbury United Communities as a one-stop shop for everything from truancy prevention programs to tax and legal services. Now the holding place for hundreds of offerings brought to the George Floyd memorial over the last year, Pillsbury House + Theatre has also become a case study for how the arts can help communities heal, says Price’s Macalester classmate Jack Reuler ’75, founder of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre. “At Pillsbury, Faye has found a way to make the arts, social service, and most importantly social justice all one conversation in ways that others have only talked about.”

Minnesota’s arts community has had a lot to say about Price herself this season since she was named the McKnight Foundation’s Distinguished Artist of 2021, an award that also comes with a $50,000 cash prize. As the first Black female artist ever to win the award, she has been the subject of headlines that have highlighted her success bringing seminal Black voices to the stage and originating new pieces that have entered the canon of African American theater literature. She has also been applauded for playing a critical supporting role as chair of Minnesota Citizens for the Arts during the 2008 passage of the Minnesota Legacy Amendment, a law that’s infused millions into arts organizations across the state. But Price admits she’s been uncomfortable in the spotlight: “I’ve been joking with my African American female friends that this is a reward for being the only one in the room for so many years.”

Price grew up in Chicago’s South Side, an only child who says she “entertained myself by entertaining the invisible audience in my backyard.” She got her first break in third grade, when her classmates chose her for the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the first of many experiences on stage and behind the scenes while she was a student at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. But when she came to Macalester, she found far fewer opportunities for actors of color.

“I would have thought about majoring in theater, but I didn’t see any role for Black people in the theater department at that time, on stage or off,” says Price, who majored in psychology instead. During her four years at Mac, she saw no Black faculty members in the theater department, no plays or productions focused on people of color, and little notion of the color-blind casting that’s become increasingly common over the last generation. She had a small role in Member of the Wedding that she remembers came about only because someone else got sick. “Now there are a lot of alumni of color who are here making a living in theater and making the arts such a wonderful part of the culture of this state. But I have to say it was despite the theater department, not because of it. I have to say it like that.”

Instead, Price turned her focus off campus, auditioning for a new play at St. Paul’s Hallie Q. Brown Center and becoming a founding member of the Penumbra Theatre, Minnesota’s first and only African American theater. The same year, she also became a founding player in the Mixed Blood Theatre, originally a summer project that’s since gone on to stage forty-five seasons of performances. In spite of her success, Price wasn’t convinced it was possible to make a living in the arts. “I remember sitting in Dayton Hall with graduate school catalogs all over my bed, trying to decide: psychology or theater? And I opted to go with what I thought at the time was the safest bet, psychology.”

After graduating from Mac in 1977, Price studied for a master’s degree in counseling and student personnel psychology, and tried to balance full-time work with after-hours acting, first in Minneapolis and then in New York City. “Like any good Macalester student, I thought I could do both,” she says. “But when I lost a role in for colored girls [who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf] because I had a full-time job as a therapist in a domestic abuse program, it really stung. I think that’s when I realized this theater stuff was really important to me.”

When she learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, also a Penumbra veteran, was endowing a new dramaturgy fellowship at the University of Minnesota focused on African American theater literature, she applied and won the prestigious award. She left New York City for internships at Penumbra and the Guthrie Theater, where she eventually joined the artistic staff as a full-time dramaturg. The utility players of the theater world, dramaturgs act as editors and fact-checkers of theater texts, Price says, collaborating with directors and producers and advocating for a play’s artistic vision.

After several years at the Guthrie, Price joined the Pillsbury House + Theater in 2000 as co-artistic producing director. “She recognized talent when it was young and undiscovered, and she was really good at nurturing it,” Reuler says. “She found voices in people who didn’t know they had voices.” Coartistic director Noël Raymond also credits her with making PHT an artistic home for a host of acclaimed artists, including director Marion McClinton, actor Laurie Carlos, and playwright Tracey Scott Wilson. “Her leadership style wasn’t about being the assertive, charismatic, out front, ‘I’m doing this’ person,” Raymond says. “Instead, she’s all about identifying, supporting, highlighting, and rallying around other artists. She herself made a way for herself in the arts where there was no way, and one of the brilliant things she always did was to open a way for others.”

When the recession hit in 2008, Price and Raymond also presided over the merger of the ninety-six-seat theater with Pillsbury House Neighborhood Center, a move that made it possible to infuse the arts into everything from theater programs for youth who are incarcerated to Full Cycle, a social enterprise bike repair garage that supports youth experiencing homelessness. While the scope of the work extends far beyond the stage, Price says that’s part of the settlement house theater tradition. “I think the mission was always there; we just embraced it fully,” she says.

After more than twenty years at PHT, Price was planning to step down in 2020 to pursue more personal projects. But as the pandemic surged, she stayed on to help steer the organization through the crisis, announcing her retirement only after vaccines began to promise the possibility of gathering in theaters once again. This past fall, she returned to Macalester’s campus to direct Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Part One, a title she picked in part to honor several Macalester classmates who died of AIDS. With a multicultural cast that better reflects the full spectrum of talent at the college, the production made Price consider how much has changed since she was a student.

“Just thinking about me being in a department that didn’t have any Black people in it, and now look at what I’m doing,” she says before breaking into the Hamilton lyric “how lucky we are to be alive right now.” Angels in America marked the first full indoor staging of a play at Macalester since the pandemic started, and she reflected on the moment as theaters everywhere began raising their curtains again. “When you’re in a darkened theater with people you don’t know, and something powerful is expressed and it hits you, or it hits the room, there’s just no feeling like that,” Price says. “The humanity that is expressed and absorbed by a bunch of people at the same time … that’s what I love about theater. We’ve all been missing that.”

St. Paul writer Laura Billings Coleman is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.