Cedar-Riverside’s Mixed Blood Theater is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series that showcases its mission of disrupting injustice through the performing arts.

To celebrate, the theater launched “50 years of opening doors,” weekly YouTube re-recordings of monologues selected from plays that have been performed at the theater. 

To the organizers and contributors, the anniversary project embodies the theater’s objective of radical hospitality—or, as it notes on its website, modeling reciprocity, inclusion and genuine welcoming to build relationships. 

Katy Vernon, the development and communication associate of Mixed Blood, said the goal of the YouTube project is “looking back to look forward.”

Each monologue identifies a different sociopolitical conflict that has remained culturally relevant, including deportation, racism and the Israeli-Hamas war. 

Artistic director Mark Valdez said the four thematic priorities in narrowing down and selecting monologues were affordable housing, climate resilience, racial equity and mental health.

The theater was founded in 1976, by former artistic director Jack Reuler with a  mission to facilitate discussion, inform and involve audiences, and invoke change. According to Vernon and associate artistic director Alejandro Tey, two primary organizers of the anniversary project, the YouTube series aims to do the same. 

Vernon said she worked closely with Tey to dig through five decades of archived scripts to find the most compelling and pertinent monologues to include in the project. The series will include 50 episodes, one for every year the theater has been open.

“There’s some excellent, excellent stuff,” Tey said. “And I think what’s really exciting to me is when you take the work and you compare it to the date and you go, ‘Wow, Mixed Blood was doing this at a time before that was even a broad national conversation.’”

Since its inception, all of Mixed Blood’s programs and initiatives have centered on themes of social justice and advancing equity.

For their 50th season series, Tey said Mixed Blood chose passionate actors to step into the roles for the monologues, all with established lasting connections with the theater and its values.

Harry Waters Jr., an actor, director, activist and former professor at Macalester College,  said he will be performing a monologue about states rights from a production titled “Rational Man.” 

Waters, who has worked with Mixed Blood for more than 20 years following his first career as an actor in New York during the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, said he quickly identified with Mixed Blood’s values and modest nature when he relocated to Minneapolis.

“There was a can-do spirit, which kind of reminded me of times in New York where we were doing plays that were meaningful and that were written for deep exploration of human condition,” Waters said. “And we had to do it on a budget.”

According to its 2024 federal tax filing, the nonprofit theater’s revenue was $1.29 million, with most of the money coming from donors and foundations and nearly 17% of it coming from state and federal government grants, said managing director Kate Warner.

This year, however, the Trump administration worked to terminate National Endowment for the Arts grants, resulting in a $129,000 cut —60% of its government grant revenue, Warner said. The theater appealed by writing letters to the NEA in hopes of recovering a portion of their funding. 

Warner made it clear that budget cuts were not going to quash the theater’s primary goal of making the arts accessible. “Radical hospitality is the way we do things,” Warner said. “And if anything, I think we feel a little more defiant about it.”

After unveiling its radical hospitality initiative in 2011, Mixed Blood altered the operations of its theater to accommodate a more diverse audience, said Reuler. A significant piece of this process included making program tickets free.

Warner’s confidence in the theater’s future is shared by Reuler, who stepped down from his position as artistic director three years ago. “As it hits 50, I really believe the best is yet to come,” said Reuler.

The cyclical nature of the conversation about social justice, nurtured by projects like “50 years of opening doors,” is critical to keep alive, Tey said. 

“It is worth the constant tending,” said Tey. “It is not a race that one can win or lose. It’s not an election. It’s gardening, it’s tending.”

New monologues for “50 years of opening doors” anniversary project are published to the Mixed Blood Theater Company YouTube page every Thursday at 10 a.m.