Sandbox Theatre

Many voices coming together to create a community and tell our stories.

2025 marks 20 years of Sandbox practicing a new way to play. 

Sandbox is a collective of multidisciplinary artists who, along with an ever-expanding circle of collaborators, are driven to create new plays from scratch, and to lift up our communities by creating the worlds we want to see.

We hold space for a playground because we believe collaborative play is part of wellness. We want to invite more people to play, because it matters when stories are not controlled by one voice but are an overflow of all of us.

We practice wellness through play;

We practice collaboration;

We practice trusting your gut;

We practice full body listening;

We practice vulnerability;

We practice telling more than one story - together.

Up next. 

Guilty Treasures and Well-meaning Monsters - Maybe Everything is Just Everything before it kills you. 

We all have our little obsessions, delicious lower-case “v” vices. Cultish flirtations. Bouncing between menacing, mundane, and marvelous. They give shape and meaning to our lives. But remember: everything is everything. Beauty is ordinary, is desperate, is poetry. Work is our singing the cosmos into being, is our cage, is our uninteresting rambling at cocktail hour in our ill-fitting shoes and off-brand blazer while everyone’s eyes glaze over. Guilty Treasures and Well-meaning Monsters is a story told in the Sandbox’s characteristic style- exploring the entire stage: horizontal and vertical. Blending acrobatic movement and text, masks and puppetry, projections and song. The stuff that you love will ultimately consume you, but maybe you’ll be ok with that…because you’re a monster now.

This upcoming show will be lead by our newest company member, Chasya Hill, in 2026! 

The Trans Voices Cabaret: Minneapolis Edition 2026 lead by Sandbox Company Member, Hal Sansone. Join us this December for a musical theatre cabaret of trans and gender expansive artists on the stage of Mixed Blood Theatre!

The Trans Voices Cabaret was started in NYC back in 2017, by transgender performer Donnie Cianciotto (he/him). Cianciotto saw a lack of transgender voices in the theater world and wanted to create a space to not only celebrate transgender talent, but to highlight and showcase it for the world to see. This production has expanded across the country, and we are thrilled to continue to bring it to Minneapolis for our 4th year. Our approach to the songs is original and uplifts voices typically left out of musical theatre practices. This project also serves an important health and wellness need for the involved artists and audiences because it invites trans and gender expansive people to gather together, counter external realities and internal feelings of isolation, and lift one another up. Further, this event is entirely, and proudly, trans run and operated. Come out to celebrate and support trans community and joy!

 

2024 TVC Audience member comments:

“Thank you for the joyful and healing experience!”

“This was so powerful and impactful. I believe bringing this to the wider community helps humanize our community and combat the narrative that conservative pundits would have you believe about trans folks.”

“This show fills my heart and makes me feel seen! I truly feel in my community here when I see art made by and for people like me. This show is really special and I've been looking forward to it since last year's trans cabaret.” 

Your giving makes these practices sustainable.

Part of our new way to play is dedication to making our playground as accessible and robust as possible. From free aerial theater classes (so artists can cross gravity off their list of barriers), to intentional joy-filled trans-focused spaces, to creating economic access to both the people making this work and receiving it.

When you support us you support us continuing these practices:

• Aerial insurance so we can keep making aerial theater (it’s expensive!) and aerial workshops

• Creating trans-focused work: sustaining arts-focused community space and paying artists as funding for this sort of work becomes increasingly precarious

• Accessibility Funding

  • Childcare

  • Hourly pay

  • ASL interpretation / live caption

  • Working in accessible spaces

  • Removing transportation barriers

  • Economic accessibility for audiences