Penumbra’s local mission
Penumbra Theatre began in 1976 as a cultural-arts program at St. Paul’s Hallie Q. Brown Community Center and grew into a professional Black theater company connected to the Black Arts Movement, according to MNopedia. Its history includes an important relationship with playwright August Wilson, who moved to St. Paul in 1977 and worked with the ensemble.
Sarah Bellamy, who succeeded her father, Lou Bellamy, as artistic director, has expanded the institution’s work beyond producing plays. A PBS NewsHour report described Penumbra’s planned transition into the Penumbra Center for Racial Healing, which includes equity training and wellness activities. That broader institutional direction is the context for Mothership, the theater’s production by Resmaa Menakem and Kristen Adele Calhoun.
The production
The Star Tribune describes Mothership as an Afrofuturist one-act set after a societal collapse. In the play’s imagined future, people on Earth build a spacecraft for 55,000 Black and Indigenous passengers, and the journey to a new planet depends on confronting unresolved trauma. This account of the premise comes from the newspaper’s interview and preview rather than original reporting for this article: Minnesota Star Tribune.
A St. Paul context
The production’s local setting also sits within the history of St. Paul’s Black communities. According to the Minnesota Department of Transportation, construction of Interstate 94 affected the city’s Rondo neighborhood in the 1960s; an MnDOT historic context found the neighborhood eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
Public support for arts organizations is part of the state’s broader cultural infrastructure. The Minnesota State Arts Board’s FY 2026 Operating Support program provides general support to established arts organizations and other eligible groups that produce, present or exhibit works of art, according to the Minnesota State Arts Board. The program description establishes the scope of that support but does not, in the supplied information, identify a Penumbra-specific award.
Menakem developed the project through conversations with Bellamy, according to the same Star Tribune report. The production is directed by Candis C. Jones. Menakem has identified Octavia Butler, Prince, George Clinton and Nina Simone as artistic influences, the newspaper reported.
Menakem’s background
Menakem is a Minneapolis psychotherapist whose work has included trauma treatment and counseling for police officers and American soldiers, according to the Star Tribune. The newspaper also reported that he spent 15 years as clinical director of the Harriet Tubman Center, holds a master’s degree in clinical social work focused on racialized trauma and previously worked in Afghanistan as a trauma therapist.
His book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies was published in 2017 and became a New York Times bestseller after George Floyd’s murder, according to MPR News. Those professional and literary credentials help explain the connection between Menakem’s therapeutic concerns and the play’s emphasis on collective healing, but the connection is an interpretation of the supplied reporting rather than independent analysis from a new interview.
Performances
Mothership runs through Oct. 4 at Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St. in St. Paul. Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and 4 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $20 to $45, and the theater lists its phone number as 651-224-3180, according to the Star Tribune.
Penumbra’s schedule lists audience discussions with Menakem on Sept. 17 and Oct. 1, as well as an ASL-interpreted performance on Sept. 26.
