Matt Sciple Although Matt has appeared in, directed, and written over 80 shows in and around the Twin Cities, the 13 he has worked on with Ten Thousand Things have topped them all. From The Unsinkable Molly Brown to King Lear to Ragtime to Waiting for Godot, these audiences dove into the stories and fed on them, laughing and talking back to the characters, or hiding their eyes in tears. They didn't come to appreciate culture, they came to travel to a world beyond their prison walls, to revel in the glorious complexities of being human, or just to remember what it feels like to laugh with your entire body. They didn't care how many scholars have written books attempting to explain Beckett or Shakespeare, they so themselves onstage. They got it. And in the process, they taught us what the plays were really about. How cool is that? There are so many stories I could tell about working with this great company: There was the time I was playing a big potato, asking "Is this why we have come to life? To live like this and hurt like this?" and a woman in the Shakopee Correctional Facility answered, "Oh no, baby, no," and I burst into tears. There was the invaluable experience of seeing Waiting for Godot become a play that was variously "about" being trapped (in prisons), being abandoned (juvenile detention center), growing old (nursing home), fighting to remember (retirement center) or finding a reason for being alive (homeless shelter), but seeing every audience laugh and cry at the humanity they recognized. There were the stereotypes exploded by two men in Hennepin County Men's Prison, one of whom was 20, blond, long-haired, white, had never seen a play and said he would take his son to one when he was released the next day; the other was a distinguished, middle aged South African black gentleman with a salt and pepper goatee who explained the theories he had discovered about Romeo and Juliet when he wrote his Doctoral thesis. You don't get stories like those working in a "real" theater. But I have, including Park Square, the Illusion, Mixed Blood, Gremlin, Starting Gate, Theatre l'Homme Dieu, Paul Bunyan Playhouse and Minnesota Orchestra. Those have been great, too, for many different reasons. But when I need to recharge my theatrical batteries, to remind myself why I got into this in the first place, I look to Ten Thousand Things. You should, too.