By Rohan Preston
Mixed Blood Theatre founder Jack Reuler was honored in front of his peers at the anual Theatre Communications Group conference, held this year in Chicago.
Reuler won the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award last weekend, an honor that recognizes his "pioneering practices in theater, [his] dedicated to freedom of expression" and risk-taking to advance the art form.
He founded Mixed Blood in 1976, the same year as Penumbra Theatre, and has commissioned or produced many new plays by such writers as Aditi Brennan Kapil, Kristoffer Diaz and Lynn Nottage, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning "Ruined" was a stand-out last year.
"It has been said that a community is defined by those who stick around long enough to become a parody of themselves," Reuler said in prepared remarks. "I look in the mirror every day to see if that applies to me...Parody or not, I'm sticking around because the best is yet to come."
