Youth Theater

The Mill City Players began in 2016 with 12 students from the Cedar Riverside neighborhood and 12 young people who were experiencing homelessness. The first 2 sessions were held in partnership with the Guthrie. After that we hired an artistic director, James A Williams, who taught acting, along with associate director Patricia Brown, who taught dance, and Ahanti Young, who taught paint pail drumming. All of our actors ‘graduated’ to college or to full-time jobs and by the time the pandemic had begun, we had just begun recruiting a new group. We are now working towards forming a new group in 2023 and plan to partner with theaters throughout the metro to provide classes for local youth to learn acting and about the theater while earning dual high school and college credits. The first class is tentatively scheduled to begin in fall of 2023.

Hope 612 began in February, 2024, and started with a ‘Dream Team” of alumni from the original group of the Mill City Players.  Mahad Ahmed, Anthony Anderson, Sam Karpeh, Mahamed Salad, and Miske Salad have met twice a week since February to write a play about their experiences growing up in Minneapolis.  The plot of the play is focused on 3 areas the playwrights identified as the most critical in their lives; racism, fentanyl abuse, and police brutality. Each character is based on their own experiences and the power of their words is clear. As they have written this play, they have insisted that it must end in hope. The discussions about hope, despite their experiences, have been wonderful and so heartening.

         The plan is to perform this powerful work all around Minneapolis; at Waterworks Park, the Commons, Elliot Park, the Capri Theater, and Mixed Blood.  We need your help. Be That Neighbor offers this program free to every participant. All the work in running this program is done by Be That Neighbor. Artists give away their work far too often, and these young people deserve to be paid for their artistry.  We know how important art is to the life and well-being of a community.  As one of our writers said, “It’s really special to do this work, but getting paid for it would be entirely different.”

         Please join us in “Hope 612”. These artists need your support so that we can share their work with you. Go to https://www.bethatneighbor.org to become a partner in this project.  Please watch this video, created by Mike Binkely.  https://vimeo.com/950782267