Photograph by Mark Kegans
Sarah Rasmussen of the Jungle Theater
It wasn’t inevitable that Sarah Rasmussen would wind up back in Minneapolis, working as the artistic director of the Jungle Theater, although she gives the impression that she very well might believe in fate, and in any case, she recognizes a geographic arc.
“I was in my twenties on Hennepin, trying to figure out my life,” she says about a short and aimless stretch spent in Uptown. This era came in the mid-aughts, in between the time she spent studying theater on a Fulbright grant in Oslo and going to grad school in San Diego. “Now I live on Lyndale,” she adds, “trying to make better choices.”
We’re sitting at Muddy Waters, the restaurant that the 40-year-old Rasmussen refers to as the “Jungle Annex,” just 10 blocks north (on Lyndale) from the house she shares with her husband, playwright Josh Tobiessen. Rasmussen is wearing a striped cotton button-down with the sleeves rolled up and straight-leg blue jeans, while her daughter, Nora, who’s sitting in the booth with us, sports a pink princess dress. Nora is celebrating her birthday. And what better way to celebrate a third birthday than with a gluten-free brownie, a glass of milk, a weird reporter, and his tape recorder?
Rasmussen apologizes to both of us, but her apology isn’t too grovel-y. “It’s a weird schedule, but we’ve got to make it work,” she says, before reconsidering the situation. “I’m jealous of my kids,” she admits. And here she opens up a wide, toothy grin at her daughter, and addresses her directly. “You get to grow up coming to a theater,” she says. “You are living my dream.”
Rasmussen is finishing her fourth season at the theater next month by directing her husband’s new play, Stinkers. The production will reunite Rasmussen and Tobiessen with local theater legend Sally Wingert. The three of them put on Tobiessen’s comedy Crashing the Party at Mixed Blood in 2012, after which Wingert requested that Tobiessen write something specifically for her. So he wrote a play about a grandmother who gets released from a Martha Stewart–level white-collar prison and moves back in with her son.
“Chaos ensues,” Rasmussen explains. “But my husband was a philosophy major, so it’s a serious critique of capitalism and America and how we say that we love kids but have no policies that actually support kids and families.”
Rasmussen clarifies that the play is funny; she wants people to see it. She thinks that so much of theater takes itself too seriously these days, constantly trying to educate instead of entertain. “I don’t think you can tell anybody anything,” she says. She wants her audiences to laugh together. “Those are the plays that I want to put on,” she says. “If something is a monologue about a point of view, write an Atlantic article.”
Which isn’t to say that, in her tenure here, Rasmussen hasn’t demonstrated a clear theatrical agenda. Under her leadership, the Jungle’s mission has pivoted toward producing new work and material written by women, such as Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, and Bess Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds. It’s a departure from the approach of Jungle founder Bain Boehlke, which concentrated more on midcentury classics from the canon, whether Shakespeare or Beckett or Mamet.
Rasmussen says she’s not anti-classics. She cites what a professor once told her: “You have to know how something is constructed before you deconstruct it.” But she is passionate about representation for women and people of color. And so, inevitably, she turns to new work, “because that’s where those stories are being told,” she says.
The theater’s new direction wasn’t received with universal enthusiasm, at least initially. When she informed the board of her intentions during the interview process, she says she could sense a great nervous inhale. Even Boehlke, she recalls, advised her that new plays “aren’t finished yet” and “can be too risky.”
But over four seasons, Rasmussen has been proven right. After an initial exodus at the box office, theater memberships now number 2,200—higher, she says, than before she took over. And the Jungle’s new members are a younger lot.
The new membership bucks a national trend of declining audiences. “I think theater is going to really struggle as an industry if we keep recycling the same titles just because we’re worried about ticket sales,” she says. New work by women doesn’t have to be obviously political, either. This season, Rasmussen and the Jungle return to the Jane Austen business with a pair of Christmas shows.
Despite the Jungle’s success, Rasmussen still gets pushback. “When we did The Wolves, an older actor came up to me and said, ‘The Jungle is all about women now.’ Even though a play we did before was Ishmael, which was an all-male cast. But when you do all women, people are like, Whoa, that’s crazy.”
She doesn’t take it personally. “It’s about our culture and our storytelling and our media,” she says.
•••••
Nora is losing interest in her birthday brownie and begins to gently fuss. In response, Rasmussen tries a bit of stage direction. She places Nora near the Muddy Waters window, where houseplants form a makeshift proscenium. “What if we put your little froggy in the weeds?” she asks her daughter. “See what happens!”
Photograph by Mark Kegans
Sarah Rasmussen
Rasmussen on preachy theater: “If something is a monologue about a point of view, write an Atlantic article.”
Rasmussen makes a point of crediting her own mother, an English teacher, for her first act. She carted Rasmussen to the Guthrie from their home in Sisseton, South Dakota, to see shows staged by avant-garde director Garland Wright. “She thought theater was important,” Rasmussen says.
She made stops in Northfield (at St. Olaf), Oslo (that Fulbright), and San Diego (grad school). She spent a few seasons as the resident director for new work at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, lived in New York, and taught on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. She didn’t need to come back to Minneapolis, but she’s happy she did.
“The talent is good here,” she says. “And the audiences are smart.” Audiences in Austin, by contrast, were “a little tipsy,” she recalls: great for rock ’n’ roll, not so great for theatrical comedies, when an actor and a director count on an audience to be alert enough to catch their punchlines.
Rasmussen comes back often to the importance of comedy at the Jungle. In an age when people tiptoe through social interactions in fear of saying the wrong thing, comedy “opens our hearts so we can go deeper into real stuff,” she says.
There’s nothing more real than a three-year-old whose attention is waning, so we walk over to the community garden on the Midtown Greenway, winding our way down to the walking path.
One unmistakable aspect of Rasmussen’s work is the scale of her ambition versus the size of the Jungle’s house. When she’s talking about transforming the community, she’s making a play for 150 hearts a night—a full house party, basically.
Her own life beyond theater is intentionally overfull. She paraphrases Amy Poehler—“‘treat your career like a bad boyfriend,’ because if you’re chasing it all the time, you will lose perspective.”
And at that, we walk back up the poorly marked Greenway ramp and back to the Jungle. Rasmussen seems to know exactly where she stands in this neighborhood.
