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NEWS: Guthrie Theater Announces ICE-Response Commission

by Twin Cities Arts Reader -

The Minneapolis-based Guthrie Theater and New York City-based The Public Theater have announced a jointly developed work responding to the ICE presence in Minnesota. Since December 2025, an estimated 3,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minnesota have disrupted local services, killed Minnesota citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and provoked massive public protests.

The Guthrie/Public commission will engage acclaimed documentary theater artists Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen to respond to the so-called Operation Metro Surge and ICE agents’ actions in the Twin Cities. Since OMS began in December, it has disrupted the lives of thousands of Minnesotans and attracted international condemnation. Blank and Jensen, who have Minnesota roots and are actively developing the work on the ground in the Twin Cities, will create a documentary theater piece, told in Minnesotans’ own words, through firsthand interviews, in-depth research and engagement with affected communities. Still in active development, the project’s final form will evolve in the weeks and months to come.

Guthrie Theater Artistic Director Joseph Haj stated, “In this moment, when so many in our state are grappling with uncertainty, theater remains one of the most powerful forms of community-building we have. Theater invites us to gather in witness to one another, thereby illuminating our common humanity.”

Haj added, “Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen are artists of extraordinary empathy and integrity whose work centers the human experience. I believe their work will help create a vital record of this unprecedented time in Minnesota.”

Blank and Jensen’s prior documentary work has focused on directly impacted individuals at the heart of larger social justice issues, creating plays from interview transcripts and primary documents. They adhere to journalistic standards in preserving the language of the interview subjects and accurately representing the facts, while turning true stories into emotionally impactful and resonant works of art.

The Public Theater’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis said in a statement, “The theater isn’t always the best place for the latest new or rapid reaction to history. We often work over a longer timeline, and even our most powerfully urgent productions can take years to gestate. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart premiered at The Public 40 years ago this year, and it had a huge impact on the debate about the AIDS crisis, but even that ripped-from-the-headlines play took more than two years to come to production.”

Eustis continued, “But sometimes history demands an urgent ‘now!’ Minneapolis and its extraordinary citizens are making history in the eyes of the world, and we at The Public and the Guthrie want to do everything we can to honor and lift up what they are accomplishing. I was born and raised in Minnesota, and I have never been prouder of my home state than I have been over the last few weeks. We are so proud to be linking arms with our friends at the Guthrie to make some ‘good trouble.’”

In a further statement, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen said, “Our lives have been changed by what we’ve seen in Minnesota: both the organized brutality imposed on ordinary people and those people’s extraordinary response of care, protection, mutual aid and love. We are honored to have the opportunity to uplift the voices of the diverse Minnesotans impacted by and responding to this moment, and believe their stories carry great lessons for our nation as a whole.”

Blank and Jensen, a married creative team, were called named “among the foremost practitioners of documentary theater in the U.S.” by New Yorker magazine. Their award-winning work includes:

  • The Exonerated, a play based on interviews with death row exonerees across the U.S.
  • Aftermath, the first major American theatrical work to tackle the impact of the Iraq war on ordinary civilians.
  • Coal Country, based on interviews with survivors of the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster.
  • The Line, a rapid-response documentary play based on interviews with New York City medical first responders at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though currently based in Brooklyn, both artists have deep Minnesota roots and a strong personal connection to the state. Jensen was born in Detroit Lakes and grew up all over northern Minnesota before attending high school in Apple Valley. Blank came to the Twin Cities to attend Macalester College, then the University of Minnesota, and lived in South Minneapolis before moving to New York. They are also narrative filmmakers, television writers and actors, and Blank is a professor at The Juilliard School.

They maintain artistic ties to the Twin Cities; their most recent feature film, Brooklyn, Minnesota, starring Jensen and Amy Madigan, was filmed in and around Minneapolis in 2023 with a Minnesota creative team and crew. The film won the 2024 Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF).

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