A production at Children’s Theatre Company seems like the definition of a sensory overload. The theater produces big, loud and colorful shows full of over-the-top characters like the Grinch and the denizens of Oz. Its mission statement promises “extraordinary theater experiences that educate, challenge and inspire young people and their communities.”

And yet, for a decade now, CTC leadership has worked with Twin Cities mental health nonprofit Fraser to create special, sensory-friendly performances for kids on the autism spectrum and other neurodivergent people. For each production, the theater typically offers a pair of performances, a Friday evening show and Sunday matinee, designated as sensory-friendly. Two took place this week for “Go, Dog. Go!” and the company will stage them again for “Dinosaur World Live” and “The Wizard of Oz” later this spring.

“It’s definitely a delicate balance,” said Gina Brady, Fraser’s sensory supports and training program manager. “We don’t want it to feel like a watered-down performance or completely change the story or things like that. We still want people to have the authentic experience that they’re trying to get.”

Making theater comfortable

So how to they do it?

It’s about establishing a more relaxed attitude in the audience, Brady said. That means allowing audience members to move around and make more noise than is typically acceptable in a theater setting.

House lights usually stay up, some volumes are reduced and strobe lights and the like are skipped. A quiet room is available for the overstimulated in need of cooling down. CTC even offers theatergoers the opportunity to “meet your seat” prior to the production in order to reduce stress for those in unfamiliar territory.

The idea isn’t to change the audience members, but to make the experience more comfortable and relatable.

“It kind of puts the responsibility on the business to make the modifications, to make it as inclusive and accessible to many members of the community, rather than expecting that each member of the community fit themselves perfectly into this mold that society has told them that they have to fit into,” Brady said.

Sensory-friendly events are increasingly common

The concept of sensory-friendly performances began to take shape in Twin Cities arts organizations in the mid ’10s, said Brady, whose first experience with one was “The Lion King” at the Orpheum Theatre in 2016.

Today, such performances and other resources like sound-dampening headphones and sensory-friendly hours are common in organizations across the metro, including Minnesota Children’s Museum, Science Museum of Minnesota, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, Guthrie Theater, Walker Art Center and Minnesota Orchestra.

While people on the autism spectrum make up a large part of these audiences, Brady uses the umbrella term neurodivergent to describe those who attend.

“We talk about it as people experiencing sensory differences, because it includes the autism spectrum and most of the neurodiversity umbrella. But it also includes people who have had past traumatic experiences, maybe people who have migraines or neurologic surgical conditions. Sometimes it’s just people who benefit from a more relaxed theater atmosphere, or people who don’t feel like they can comfortably go to a standard theater performance.”

Gina Brady and a theatergoer at the Hennepin Arts sensory-friendly performance of “The Lion King” at the Orpheum Theater in 2024. (Courtesy of Fraser)

When preparing a sensory-friendly performance, Brady meets with staff at a theater to tour the space and get an idea of the challenges they face. For CTC’s “Go, Dog. Go!,” she went to a standard performance to get a feel for the show and then made recommendations for modifications.

“For example, there’s a character who is blowing their whistle through the performance,” Brady said. “So I recommended that either that’s completely eliminated or maybe changed to something like a kazoo that’s not quite that same high frequency. They had some strobe lighting, so (they) modified that. The Children’s Theatre is wonderful, they’ve been doing this for 10 seasons and they are very open to feedback.”

Parents love it

The sensory-friendly performances are a hit with parents, said Michael Winn, CTC’s associate artistic director and director of equity and community partnerships.

“Oh, they love it. They love it,” Winn said. “Parents are very concerned about their children, but they’re also concerned about the actions of their children and how they come across to the general population. Their child can be their full self in this particular environment and not worry about how anybody else in the audience is reacting. It gives their child a place to be themselves.”

Katie Najjar knows that power firsthand. She has three children, and her youngest is a seven-year-old who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2021.

“There are a couple of challenges,” Najjar said. “He’s still pretty young. Sometimes we don’t know if he’ll like something, and he may react to not liking it in a way that’s not typical. He might yell or scream or want to run around. He also might enjoy it, but the way he moves his body or vocalizes might not be what most people would expect during a theater performance.”

After her son was diagnosed, Najjar didn’t know much about the available resources and began to learn about all things autism. She started volunteering as a classroom parent at Fraser School, where her son attends. Her background is in events and so she also began helping out with fundraising. When a marketing and development position at the nonprofit opened up in 2024, she took the leap and took the full-time job. All the while, her son was a Fraser client.

A sensory guide for a Children’s Theatre Company sensory-friendly performance. (Courtesy of Fraser)

Najjar began taking her son to various Fraser events. Now a first grader, her son recently went on a field trip to Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins.

“They have a wonderful sensory program,” she said. “And we discovered he loves live theater; he got a great kick out of it. And it was something we had never done before. He loved it so much, we’re planning on doing some more events at the Children’s Theatre Company.

“As a parent, you know that you’re among a group of people who are in the same boat and are accepting when everybody’s making different movements or vocalizing differently. It’s just a more relaxed and supportive environment, which is great.”

A possible entry point

Experiencing the arts in general is beneficial for everyone, Brady said. And sensory-friendly performances allow people to get those benefits as a whole family. One of the biggest recurring pieces of feedback she hears from parents is that it serves as a great entry point.

“People tell us they got more familiar with the building, with the environment, with the flow of how things work. It gave them the confidence to come back during a standard performance. That’s not going to be the case for everyone. Some people are really going to need the additional support and relaxed environment. But for those who had some anxiety around going the first time, they now they have more opportunities to go back to the standard performance.”

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SAN DIEGO — Before we see elephants at Elephant Valley in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we come face to face with destruction, only the wreckage is beautiful. A long, winding path takes guests around and under felled trees. Aged gray tree hunks form arches, for instance, over bridges that tower over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.

The design is meant to reorient us, to take us on a trail walked not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and hunted for its cataclysmic-like ability to reshape land, and sometimes communities.

“It starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care for the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”

Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at the Escondido park, its aim to bring guests closer than ever to the zoo’s eight elephants, which range in age from 7 to 36, while more heavily focusing on conservation. The centerpiece of the 13-acre-plus parkland is a curved bridge overlooking a savanna, allowing elephants to walk under guests. But there are also nooks such as a cave that, while not previewed at a recent media event, will allow visitors to view elephants on their level.

In a shift from, say, the Safari Park’s popular tram tour, there are no fences and visible enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo’s herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are at once removed and don’t impede on the relative free-roaming ability of the animals by keeping guests largely elevated. As an example of just how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began flinging what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces up onto the bridge.

“Our guests are going to be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” Burtis says. “They can see their eyes. They can see the eyelashes. They can see how muscular their trunks are. It’s really going to be a different experience.”

The view from Elephant Valley’s Mkutano House, a two-story dining destination in the new space at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Elephant Valley, complete with a multistory lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, boasts a natural design that isn’t influenced by the elephant’s African home so much as it is in conversation with it. The goal isn’t to displace us, but to import communal artistry — Kenyan wood and beadwork can be found in the pathways, resting spaces and more — as a show of admiration rather than imitation.

“We’re not going to pretend that we’re taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive with Universal’s theme parks but previously a lead designer on Elephant Valley via her role as a chief development officer at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.

“That is a slippery slope of theming that can go wrong really fast,” she adds. “How do we recognize where we are right now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The story of coexistence is important. We’re not extracting from Africa, we’re learning. We’re not extracting from elephants, we’re sharing information.”

But designing a space that is elephant-first yet also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when the collaborating teams were aiming to construct multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, the staff worked to touch on themes related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.

“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they aren’t just this huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the lodge.”

That lodge, the Mkutano House — a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili — should provide opportunities for guests to linger, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who wish to dine in the space (there will also be a walk-up, to-go window). Menus have yet to be released, but the ground floor of the structure, boasting hut-like roofing designed to blend into the environment, features close views of the elephant grazing pool as well as an indoor space with a centerpiece tree beneath constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.

Throughout there are animal wood carvings and beadwork, the latter often hung from sculptures made of tree branches. The ceiling, outfitted with colorful, cloth tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between indoor and outdoor environments.

There are, of course, research and educational goals of the space as well. The Safari Park works, for instance, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill resolutions. Nonprofits and conservation groups estimate that there are today around 415,000 elephants in Africa, and the African savanna elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Studies of the zoo’s young elephants is shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in the hopes of delivering care to elephant youth to prevent orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has done extensive examination into the endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data that we collect from elephants here, you can’t simply get from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.

One of the two entrances to Elephant Valley is outfitted with bee boxes; bees are known to be a natural elephant deterrent and can help in preventing the animals from disrupting crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the plane is outfitted with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement throughout the acreage and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in hunting for resources. Water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make it easier for the elephants to navigate.

With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury — whatever that is — but not from a position of power, more as a cohabitor of the Earth, with as much natural elements as possible. It’s not to impose dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn’t feel like a man-made structure, which is an antiquated approach to any sort of safari experience where animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is the elephant’s home.”

And the resulting feel of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their house guests.

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Today is Sunday, Feb. 22, the 53rd day of 2026. There are 312 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Feb. 22, 2022, three white men were convicted of federal hate crimes in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging through their neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, when he was attacked in 2020. (The men are serving life sentences after being convicted of murder in state court.)

Also on this date:

In 1732, the first president of the United States, George Washington, was born in Westmoreland County in the Virginia Colony.

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In 1784, a U.S. merchant ship, the Empress of China, left New York for the first trade voyage of an American ship to China.

In 1819, a weakened Spain, facing revolutions in Latin America, signed a treaty ceding Florida to the United States.

In 1862, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated to a full six-year term as president of the Confederate States of America after his election the previous November. He previously served as the Confederacy’s provisional president.

In 1959, the inaugural Daytona 500 race was held; although Johnny Beauchamp was initially declared the winner, the victory was later awarded to Lee Petty.

In 1967, more than 25,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese troops launched Operation Junction City, aimed at smashing a Viet Cong stronghold near the Cambodian border.

In 1997, scientists in Scotland announced they had successfully cloned an adult mammal for the first time, a sheep they named “Dolly.”

In 1980, the “Miracle on Ice” took place at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, as the U.S. Olympic hockey team upset the Soviet Union, 4-3. (The U.S. team went on to win the gold medal two days later, 4-2, over Finland.)

In 2010, Najibullah Zazi, accused of buying products from beauty supply stores to make bombs for an attack on New York City subways, pleaded guilty to charges including conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. (He spent nearly a decade after his arrest helping the U.S. identify and prosecute terrorists and was given a 10-year sentence.)

In 2020, pioneering Black mathematician Katherine Johnson, who calculated rocket trajectories and Earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures,” died at the age of 101.

In 2024, a private lander built by Intuitive Machines made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years, but the spacecraft only managed a weak signal and spotty communications with flight controllers.

Today’s birthdays:

Actor Paul Dooley is 98.
Actor James Hong is 97.
Actor Julie Walters is 76.
Basketball Hall of Famer Julius Erving is 76.
Golf Hall of Famer Amy Alcott is 70.
Actor Kyle MacLachlan is 67.
Golf Hall of Famer Vijay Singh is 63.
Hockey Hall of Famer Pat LaFontaine is 61.
Actor Paul Lieberstein (TV: “The Office) is 59.
Actor Jeri Ryan is 58.
Actor-singer Lea Salonga is 55.
Tennis Hall of Famer Michael Chang is 54.
Singer James Blunt is 52.
Actor Drew Barrymore is 51.
Comedian Iliza Shlesinger is 43.
Dancer and singer Genneya Walton is 27.
Rapper Molly Brazy is 27.

The ceremony went on as scheduled Saturday night at Anderson Arena, with St. Thomas’ men’s hockey team honoring its nine seniors on the ice postgame.

What wasn’t part of the plan was for it to be done amid such a somber atmosphere.

The Tommies entered the weekend looking to take a stranglehold on the CCHA regular season title. Instead, they followed up a shootout loss to Augustana with a 4-0 loss on Saturday, which cost them a share of first place.

“We’ve got to right the ship,” Tommies coach Rico Blasi said. “We’ve got to get back to work. Maybe we didn’t work hard enough in practice last week. That’s on me.”

By taking five of a possible six points over the weekend, the Vikings take over first place in the CCHA, two points ahead of the Tommies and Michigan Tech. Minnesota State is four points back.

Augustana has completed its regular season, while the other three teams will finish up with a pair of games next weekend. The Tommies play at Bemidji State.

Asked about his team’s performance on Saturday, Blasi said, “I didn’t mind our game.”

Missing, however, was a spark that could have changed the outcome.

The Vikings led 1-0 midway through the third period before scoring twice in just over two minutes and capping things off with an empty-net goal. The second goal was a back-breaker,
with the Tommies turning the puck over at their own blue line and surrendering a breakaway goal.

The Tommies have had the most prolific offense in the conference this season, but the Vikings kept the clamps on them for most of the night.

“They played hard, they blocked shots,” Blasi said. “(Josh) Kotai is a premier goalie in the conference and probably in the country. I thought in the second period we had 15 scoring
chances. We didn’t get real good looks, we didn’t get a lot of second opportunities, so they did a really good job of that.”

The Tommies were 0-for-4 on the power play while working without one of its point men in Nick Williams, who was injured on Friday night.

“You’ve got to score on the power play,” Blasi said. “We weren’t clean on the power play. Willie being hurt and not being out there, that hurts us. Now we have to be comfortable with Willie not being around. That’s a big loss for our team.”

The Tommies are 1-3-1 in their last five games after having their 11-game winning streak snapped. The streak was snapped in a 4-3 loss at Michigan Tech. The Tommies then split a
series at Bowling Green.

Blasi said the results are not due to a dip in the team’s game down the stretch.

“The Tech series was pretty good, it could have gone either way both night’s,” he said. “I thought we played really well. We go up to Bowling Green, we win Friday, we played decent Saturday. It wasn’t a bad game, we just didn’t get the result. I thought we played pretty good (Friday) night until the end. Tonight was a 1-0 game until the turnover.”

Blasi said his team learned a hard lesson over the weekend.

“A this time of year you’ve got to play a little bit desperate,” he said. “You have to have a little controlled urgency, controlled desperation. Our guys know that, but I think now it’s sinking in a little bit. You saw a team in Augustana — this was their last two games and they were desperate and they played that way. We have to match that going forward.”

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