Penumbra Theatre Company
The Penumbra Theatre Company, an African-American theatre company in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was founded by Lou Bellamy in 1976. The theater has been recognized for its artistic quality and its role in launching the careers of playwrights including two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson. In 2020 the company announced its transformation into The Penumbra Center for Racial Healing. Origins. Due to displacement and segregation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many African Americans were aided by settlement homes for not only economic and social services, but programming for the arts as well. The Hallie  Q. Brown Community Center of St. Paul, Minnesota, much like the South Side Settlement house in Chicago and Henry Street Settlement house in New York, wanted to invest more in its art programming because it gave community members the tools to craft a voice within a community through visual arts, music, literature, and theatre. These centers were not only a popular outlet for entertainment, but also a critical part of the Black Arts Movement where African Americans spoke out about racial inequalities and allowed them to shape a sense of identity. The Hallie Q. Brown Community Center's second executive  director, Henry R. Thomas, drafted a construction plan to incorporate a fully functional theater within its Martin Luther King Jr. facility to support these demands. In 1976, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) awarded the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center a $150,000 grant to further develop its cultural arts programming. The CETA funding enabled the appointment of Lou Bellamy, a theatre arts graduate student at University of Minnesota, as the center's cultural arts director where he later founded the Penumbra Theatre Company. Early Seasons. "Eden (1976)" by Steve Carter was the first production to launch of the  1977–78 season of the Penumbra Theatre Company. It explores diversity of ethnicities within the African-American community. The Negro Ensemble Company had recently premiered this performance, giving the Penumbra a direct tie to the Black Arts movement. Another relation to the movement is Ed Bullins, a prominent editor, theorist, and playwright who wrote Penumbra's second production, the 1975 Broadway transfer of "The Taking of Miss Jane". The third production, "Heartland, Louisiana", showcases original work by Penumbra's resident playwright, Horace Bond, who was Bellamy's former graduate advisor and mentor. Bond focused mainly on developing African-American productions, particularly  in the south. This proved successful in captivating and connecting African-American audiences who either grew up in the heavily segregated south and moved to northern cities or had relatives that had done so. For the fourth production, the Company staged the historic work of William Wells Brown’s "The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom". Penumbra chose to actively produce plays that dealt with the implications and practices of minstrelsy in an effort to further investigate the history of African-American theatre. Penumbra initially identified itself as a multiracial company. While the company’s members, staff, and audience has  always been ethnically diverse, their leadership and productions have a distinguishable dominance of African-American culture.<ref name=UMP>