Yellow Tree Theatre

Welcome to Yellow Tree Theatre!

Dear Yellow Tree Theatre Friends and Family, 

It is our sincere pleasure to present Yellow Tree Theatre’s 2025 Give to the Max Day fundraiser. 

Since 2008, Yellow Tree Theatre has called our theatre in Osseo home— a place where stories spark connection, laughter fills the air, and neighbors come together. This season, we face one of our biggest challenges yet: our lease is expiring, and rising costs make it difficult to stay in the space that has shaped so many memories. 

Your support this Give to the Max Day will help us strengthen our case for a new lease agreement and ensure that Yellow Tree remains rooted right here — where it belongs. This remains a strong challenge, but we are determined! 

Together, we can keep this space alive for artists, audiences, and future generations who deserve to experience the magic of live theatre close to home.

Now, it is our honor to invite you to hear directly from our Executive Artistic Director, Austene Van, in this important video message.

Help us stay home, help keep us going! 

Happy Give to the Max Day! 

Our Values

Excellence: We value artistic excellence and seek to produce high-quality professional productions by hiring actors, directors, and technicians who exhibit a high caliber of talent.

Diversity: We value being a welcoming and vibrant space where people of all backgrounds and communities can come together and experience stories that reflect the wide breadth of the human experience; reflecting on and celebrating the diverse communities we live in.

Relevance: We value being the home of relevant, sustaining, and innovative professional theatre in the suburbs of Minneapolis; producing cutting-edge classic and contemporary plays and musicals with top-notch regional and national artists.

Artist Support: We value the devotedness, commitment, and sacrifice that actors, directors, and technicians put forth, and so we strive to cultivate a theatre company where a diverse body of artists are artistically inspired and financially compensated with a competitive living wage in a safe, joyful environment.

Our Programming

What kind of plays do we do? Good ones! Old ones. New ones. Quirky ones. Plays that you may never have heard of. Plays where characters may be a little off-the-wall but their stories are amazing. We like to take chances. We want you to come to our plays and have a good chuckle or shed a few tears.

We want to see your Aunt Jevetta laugh so hard she gets the hiccups and disrupts the actors. We want to see your Uncle Al—the big burly truck driver in the third row—get out his hanky, wipe his eyes, and blame it on hay fever. We want to surprise you and inspire you and remind you about being human. We want our plays to stir up conversations between teenagers who wear hoodies and grandparents who wear dentures. We think telling a good story and telling it well can do all sorts of things, and we want you to join us in the great adventure we call theatre!

Our Roots

Yellow Tree Theatre was founded in 2008 by theatre artists and husband/wife team Jason Peterson and Jessica Lind Peterson, in response to the need for the arts in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis. Yellow Tree Theatre was born with the goal of creating a welcoming artistic venue, with live theatre as its backbone, which would also serve as a vibrant artistic hub for the community. Artist support, development, and well-being is also hugely important to Yellow Tree Theatre, and the organization seeks to cultivate a community where artists are creatively challenged, artistically inspired, and financially supported. 

Over the past 17 years, Yellow Tree Theatre has produced over 45 productions—including 10 world premieres—and served thousands of loyal patrons. Yellow Tree Theatre was awarded a 2016 National Theater Company Grant from the American Theater Wing, and is generously supported by the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board.