Little known Minneapolis institution with big impact is moving to $18.5 million building in St. Paul

Where’s August Wilson’s writing chair?

As the Playwrights’ Center says goodbye to the former church it has called home for 46 years in a move that will take it to an $18.5 million building in St. Paul, folks are curious about the artifacts of its illustrious alums.

And none shine brighter than Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” who also wrote “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

“August always did his own first reading of his plays,” said Kevin Kling, who joined the center in 1979. “He would read all the parts, and you would be reminded of why Shakespeare called himself a poet.”

Both Wilson’s and Kling’s voices will be heard in snippets Sunday as part of a creative open house that hundreds are expected to attend. Little known to the public, the center is a key engine in the development of plays across the nation. Alums include Lee Blessing, Carlyle Brown, Craig Lucas, Qui Nguyen, Steven Dietz and Pulitzer winner Martyna Majok.

Dietz, one of the 20 most produced playwrights in America, happened upon the Playwrights’ Center by accident.

“I was driving cross country in 1980 when my old ’73 Plymouth Duster broke down on East Franklin Avenue, and I walked into this old church to borrow a telephone to call a tow truck,” he said. “The Playwrights’ Center changed my life.”

He hung around for years after, soaking up a craft, friendships and a career.

Larissa FastHorse had one of the first readings of “The Thanksgiving Play” at the center. It has since gone on to Broadway and had over 300 national productions.

“The center is so much more than building,” FastHorse said. “It fortifies you to help take on the world, and stays with you your whole career.”

And while there are new play development festivals around, the center and New Dramatists in New York are among the few year-round places of their kind.

“It says something that both the Playwrights’ Center and New Dramatists have their homes in former churches,” said playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who moved to Minnesota in 1987 on a one-year fellowship. “There’s a relationship between the rituals of church and theater right up to the spire gesturing towards something greater than yourself.”

The center was started in 1971 by University of Minnesota students, including Barbara Field, whose adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” ran for 35 years at the Guthrie Theater. The founders aimed to be a lab for developing new works with readings and a space for playwrights to write.

After incorporating in 1973, it grew fitfully, moving into its current home at 2301 E. Franklin Av. in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood in 1979.

Old and creaky, the building itself sometimes resembled something out of a Dickens novel. Kling remembers that those working there 40 years ago would draw straws to see who would get to chuck coal in the flue to get the heat going.

Finances also were always a challenge, leading to regular existential crises. In the mid-1980s, benefactor Waring Jones bought the building and gave it to the center but had to buy it back when the center could not keep it.

Around this same time, board members found out that the office furniture was rented after store officials came to repossess it.

“It often seemed to be operating on a limb that was cut off,” said David Moore, who ran the place for 11 years starting in 1987.

That image speaks to the miracle of its survival. And it would also explain why they might not have a chair with a spotlight on it saying, “The place where August Wilson wrote.”

Today, the center has a $2.7 million budget and 2,500 member playwrights across the country. It supports 47 writers annually with fellowships. All have access to classes, databases for research and a script club.

“We say theater begins here, and mean it,” said producing artistic director Nicole A. Watson. “If you see a lump of clay on a wheel, you would understand that’s just the starting point. Playwrights do that here — get their works in front of people and start the process to developing something that can live forever.”

Experimental theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones, who first went to the center 35 years ago, said that he found his voice there. “They gave me the space, the encouragement and support to figure things out,” he said.

Writers interviewed said that while they have nostalgia for the building — “the softwood has absorbed some spirits that might not migrate,” Hatcher said — they are hopeful about the move.

After all, the center is a testament not just to artists and their fever dreams but also to hardy Minnesotans who have sustained this hothouse of creativity.

Pulitzer winner Paula Vogel remembers that on the night of her scheduled reading of her absurdist play “The Baltimore Waltz,” it began to snow heavily.

“East Coaster that I am, I told everyone that we would have to cancel the reading,” Vogel said. “Everyone stared at me, and a staff member said, ‘When it snows heavy like this, we have to put out more chairs.’”

“And, lo and behold, there was a steady stream of audience members arriving on skis,” Vogel said. “I have been inspired ever since.”