Citing “significant financial headwinds,” Minneapolis’ Jungle Theater is cancelling the remainder of its current season and pausing all its programming through at least mid-summer.
The theater is not shutting down permanently, artistic director Christina Baldwin and managing director Rachel Murch-D’Olimpio said in a joint statement. But the duo seemed to characterize the programming pause as a necessary precaution to avoid a total closure.
“This pause allows the organization to step back from production, assess our options, and plan for the future, rather than continue in ways that could compromise our mission or impact,” Baldwin and Murch-D’Olimpio wrote.
The remainder of the Jungle’s 2025–2026 season was slated to include South Korean family drama “Wolf Play,” the based-on-a-true-story adaptation “Letters From Max” and a workshop reading of the play “Sonia Flew” by Melinda Lopez, partially set in Minneapolis. Separately, a scheduled Jan. 19 reading of queer playwright Jayne Deely’s “I Never Asked For A GoFundMe” did not take place due to escalating immigration enforcement activity, the theater announced.
Ticketholders and season subscribers can expect to hear more shortly, Baldwin and Murch-D’Olimpio said in the statement.
In 2024, the most recent year the nonprofit theater’s financial disclosures were made public via ProPublica, the theater lost around $442,000, and also ended 2023 in the red by about $400,000. But the theater appears to have been profitable in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018 and 2017. Financial information for 2025 is not available, but many arts organizations, both locally and nationally, have struggled over the past year as they’ve grappled with the sudden termination of certain federal grant programs.
The 152-seat Jungle, which opened in the Lyn-Lake area of Minneapolis in 1991, has developed a reputation for creative stage productions and other programming, including improv nights and a theater criticism course.
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