Constellation Similarity Assertions

The Penumbra Theatre was founded in 1976 by Lou Bellamy, then the Cultural Arts Director at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Center included a 265 seat auditorium, where Bellamy began to stage plays with a specific focus on exploring the African-American experience. Funding for productions was initially through CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act), which was used to pay salaries to nonprofit employees.

In 1978, Bellamy was joined by an artistic team headed by Claude Purdy, who would go on to direct many of Penumbra’s plays over the next two decades, and the playwright August Wilson, invited to St. Paul by Purdy to develop material for the theater. From its inception, the theatre company has been associated with the Selby/Dale neighborhood in St. Paul. In the late 1990s, designs were drawn and funding assembled for the company to move to a new building designated as an African American cultural center located within the historic Rondo neighborhood boundaries near the Minnesota Capitol building. The center never materialized, and Penumbra has continued to produce plays at Hallie Q. Brown, as well as at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in partnership with the Guthrie. Other national and regional theaters Penumbra has partnered with include the Kennedy Center, Kansas City Repertory Theatre and the Arizona Theatre Company. The company has also mounted traveling productions, taking plays throughout the state of Minnesota for school and general audiences.

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