Motivational Theater

The zAmya Theater Project helps bring attention to homelessness with the help of those who have been there.

Image credit: zAmya Theater Project

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At first Darrell Coles doesn’t seem like a guy you’d turn to when seeking out an art expert, yet he understands it in a way that many academics never will. It was a theater arts project that changed the course of his life--from being homeless, jobless and sleeping at the Salvation Army to a man with a job and his own place.
 
In 2008 a team calling itself zAmya came looking for input and actors to develop a play about homelessness. Coles signed on, and became involved in a zAmya production featuring characters whose lives resembled his own called Little (FORECLOSED) House on the (STOLEN) Prairie.

zAmya, which was founded in 2004 by Lecia Grossman, occupies a unique place in the Twin Cities theater community. The group, now part of St. Stephen’s Human Services, a nonprofit that also provides an emergency shelter, free stores and homelessness outreach, creates original works about the homeless experience by involving people who actually know something about the subject: those who are, or have been, homeless. With the help of a professional playwright and artistic director, they weave their own stories into a production in which their characters are drawn from their own experiences. The goal of the theater project is to create and present a new work every fall during National Hunger & Homelessness Awareness week. This year's production was Homeroom, a crash (musical) course in topics surrounding homelessness.
 
Grossman started zAmya (which is Sanskrit for “aiming at peace”) in an attempt to use theater as a means to transform lives and educate people about a subject for which she has a passion: homelessness. With guidance from artistic director Maren Ward and playwright Josef Evans, the company has put on seven productions. Along the way it has touched the lives of people like Coles, as well as many in the audience who may have only known the homeless as “those people” with cardboard signs along freeway entrances.
 
It was through the creative process of developing work at zAmya that Coles says he confronted his own life, an experience that began his therapy and healing, which prepared him to move on and ultimately find a job and a place of his own. Although he is no longer homeless, he remains involved with the zAmya project, most recently playing the role of an ‘invisible’ homeless person in Homeroom.
 
Grossman has also moved on. She is now back in graduate school and is working on developing effective leaders from all walks of life, from the corporate world to the arts to the helping services--but the theater remains a passion for her. She would surely agree when it comes to the purpose and value of art, as Coles sees it.

"Art is worthwhile if it motivates people to change," Coles says. "Otherwise it’s 'just pretty pictures'."