Nonprofit profile: Ten Thousand Things

Ten Thousand Things

Michelle Hensley is founder and artistic director of Ten Thousand Things, a theater company that presents critically acclaimed performances to audiences in prisons, shelters and low-income centers as well as to the general public.

Q: Why is your work important?

A: We're the only company in the nation that brings professional theater to such a wide array of audiences, and we demonstrate over and over again that theater is richer and better when you include everyone in the audience. Many people in our audiences have really hard-won life experiences. They live their lives on the extreme of human existence, just like many of the characters in Shakespeare or Greek tragedy. So we have to, as artists, bring even more honesty and depth, clarity and urgency to our work.

Q: What is your biggest accomplishment?

A: In a time when theater audiences seem to pretty much be upper-middle-class white older people, we have created this model that reaches an incredible diversity of audience. Our work is really focused on finding out what we as human beings all share rather just what wealthy people with education and access share. What often happens in a Ten Thousand Things show is you'll get a corporate CEO sitting next to a homeless person, watching a play as equals. How often does that happen in our society? And they learn from each other's responses to the play.

We don't have a building, we have very little in the way of sets, props, costumes. So almost all the money that's donated to us goes to paying artists, at a time when artists often get the short end of the paycheck. And I think you can feel that when you come to a Ten Thousand Things show. The artists onstage feel respected and valued and you can feel it in the liveliness and creativity of their work.

A: Getting more and more people to know about our work. We pretty much sell out all our shows. But our audiences, by the very nature of the intimacy of which we perform, are small.

We want to keep paying our artists more, quite honestly. [Donations are] really the only way we have to keep increasing our income. How we measure our growth is by how well we pay our artists. Ticket sales don't begin to pay for the cost of putting on a show, for any theater company.

Q: How can people get involved?