The man who slid in next to me in the church pew looked a little rough around the edges. Maybe it was the headband he wore to hold back shoulder-length hair. He stood out among the business haircuts and chinos at Pax Christi Catholic Community Church in Eden Prairie.
"You belong to this church?" I asked.
"No," he said. "But you never know where the Lord will take you."
A few minutes later, the man stood on his chair and, along with others scattered through the church, began a rap song.
The man, Richard Brinda, was one of a group of homeless or formerly homeless people who are part of a theater troupe that performs plays about being homeless. Since November, they've taken the play to places like Pax Christi to tell their stories of what it's like to be broke, and living in a car or shelter. They started the play by infiltrating the audience to prove a point: The homeless are often as close as the guy in the next seat; we just don't realize it.
The play, "The Reality Roadshow: Who Wants to be a Homeless Millionaire," was a takeoff on popular reality shows that expose people's lives for entertainment. This time, the "participants" were homeless people who competed in telling their life stories: the more desperate or depraved, the more likely they were to win the million-dollar prize.
What the play lacked in polish it made up for in raw energy. The stories of the characters were shaped by a playwright who interviewed the actors first about their own lives and lives of their acquaintances in shelters. As one of the characters said: "This is not an episode of 'Glee.'"
The zAmya Theater Project was started in 2004 and was originally its own nonprofit. Now it is run through St. Stephen's Human Services, a Minneapolis nonprofit devoted to ending homelessness. This year's play has ended its run, but the troupe does remounts for groups like Pax Christi for a fee.