Minnesota’s only Black professional theater company, Penumbra Theatre, entered its 49th season, titled Luminaria, this fall.
This season includes four different productions with a variety of directors and genres.
“The season is ‘Luminaria,’ which is about how to find beacons of light in a community, learning what our pillars are that hold us up,” said Antonio De La Vega, Penumbra’s production manager.
Vega added by saying in the most recent production, Marisol, that this idea was present throughout the play.
“There’s a lot of trials and tribulations that (Marisol) goes through, but towards the end, she has this brilliant monologue where she talks about the hope and possibility that is found through the struggle that she endures.”
Sarah Bellamy, president of Penumbra Theatre said in their most recent newsletter “We hope to illuminate difficult truths so that they don’t grow in our imaginations. … We may not be able to eliminate the darkness, but we can light it up.”
The Penumbra Theatre is right next to the Hallie Q. Brown Center, which was originally a settlement house that was relocated to the MLK Recreation Center. Settlement houses were historically buildings in low-income areas where folks in the middle class would move to in order to aid that neighborhood through providing community services.
Client Services Manager Whiteney Blount Smith said that the building’s history is important.
“There is not just a big history there, but also a deeply rooted community partnership” Smith said.
The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act grant, enacted in 1973, allowed Hallie Q. Brown to expand their arts program. Then, in 1976, Lou Bellamy was brought in to run their cultural arts program. From there, those funds allowed him to found Penumbra, Smith said.
Now, Sarah Bellamy, Lou Bellamy’s daughter, is the president of Penumbra Theatre. In 2020, she led the theater in centering racial healing by intertwining it with the arts through various workshops and wellness programming.
Sarah Bellamy said that she hopes it will “bring some light into your life.”
Vega added that Bellamy has been “really intentional about cultivating relationships within the community and with our artists who are centered around healing and pedagogy of racial healing.”
Penumbra has provided space to be with their neighborhood through community meals, yoga, leading the creation of wellness plans, opening conversations on topics such as racial trauma and white allyship, and more on physical and mental health, according to their website.
“Marisol,” a play directed by Sarah Bellamy and created by Jose Rivera is Penumbra’s most recent production, but they also show “Black Nativity” this December, “Don’t Bother Me I Can’t Cope” next March and Joe Turner’s “Come and Gone” to finish off the season next June. Joe Turner’s “Come and Gone” and “Black Nativity” are both directed by Lou Bellamy.
Vega added that for this production in particular, Penumbra decided to partner with Teatro Del Pueblo, a non-profit Latino theater. This decision was made in order to foster a shared sense of allyship through producing and performing a play written by a Latina playwright, and putting it on Penumbra’s stage, a theater that has historically served Black Americans.
“(We) intended to illuminate the black experience told by black folks in a space built by black folks,” Smith said. “It was a space where our stories could be told from our perspective in a ‘for us, by us’ way. We invite people to see us as we see ourselves on stage.”
Penumbra Theatre’s upcoming production is Black Nativity, opening Dec. 2nd.
Angeline Patrick Pacheco can be reached at patr3972@stthomas.edu.
