Marcela Lorca would like you to know that she’s stepping down from leadership of Ten Thousand Things Theater but is not stepping away from the field. To the contrary, she hopes to be more in our faces with her work as she becomes a full-time freelance director staging shows across Minnesota, the nation and the globe.
Her mother, an artist in their native Chile, worked into her late ‘80s, Lorca says. Daughter has a long way to go yet.
Lorca closes out her six years at the helm of TTT with a staging of “Helen,” an interpretation of the Greek figure whose kidnapping caused the Trojan War. In this version of the story, the Helen getting the blame or credit for all that warring is a body double. The real Helen, played by George Keller, has traveled to Egypt to wait out the travails.
“As someone who grew up in a dictatorship, I’m especially concerned about representations of truth,” Lorca said. “This is a really timely play.”
“Helen” is one of three strongly female-centric shows that Lorca staged for TTT. She also directed an all-female version of “Emilia,” Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s drama about Emilia Bassano, Shakespeare’s “dark muse” and a poet in her own right. And playwright Karen Zacarias came to see Lorca’s production of “The Sins of Sor Juana,” a drama about a groundbreaking 17th-century Mexican poet and writer who could only express her genius through religious texts.
“In these stories, women find ways to get their voices heard and exercise their creative genius in the best way they know how,” Lorca said. “I wish this was all historical. Women have had a rough time up to now, so I’m proud to bring these stories forward.”
Lorca spent 27 years at the Guthrie working under artistic directors Garland Wright, Joe Dowling and Joseph Haj. As a protégée of Wright, she developed an aesthetic that included creating images onstage that looked like moving artworks.
For someone with such a strong architectural and visual arts background, taking the reins at TTT would seem like a misfit. Founded by Michelle Hensley, TTT takes a minimalist, travel-ready approach to shows, eschewing burdensome and expensive design elements such as lights and elaborate sets.
