'You can change people through theater'

How Pink Umbrella uses the magic of theater to tell more inclusive stories

Katie Cummings is the founder and executive director of Pink Umbrella Theater, a Milwaukee theater company that hires and showcases the talents of people with physical, intellectual, and emotional disabilities.

Recently, Katie told me her theatrical origin story — which started “in a basement in Kenosha” where she and her brother acted out stories from their children’s encyclopedia when they were kids. When she grew up, Katie worked in theater education, both in schools and at the First Stage Children’s Theater academy.

It was there — when she worked with First Stage’s Next Steps program for autistic kids — that she experienced “something that changed the trajectory of what educational theater looked like” for her.

During one of the program’s acting classes, Katie was the teaching aide for a student named Nicholas. When the teacher presented an acting exercise to the class, asking the students to pretend there was cotton candy falling from the sky, Nicholas became upset, yelling that tha…