Today we’d like to introduce you to Leah Cooper & Alan Berks, Wonderlust Productions
Hi Leah Cooper &, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Alan is a playwright from Chicago and Leah is a director from Los Angeles. They met in 2003 when Leah was running the Minnesota Fringe Festival and Alan was brought here for a fellowship at the Playwrights Center. They have been partnering on a variety of endeavors ever since, including creating MinnesotaPlaylist.com, a trade journal for the performing arts, and most recently co-founding Wonderlust Productions, a a professional ensemble of theater artists that believes community engagement is the path to transformative art.
A typical Wonderlust project unfolds over 2-3 years, and at any time we have 3-4 projects in development. We always start by picking a community of Minnesotans whose experience is central to who we all are but whose stories are often unheard or misunderstood. We develop partnerships with organizations engaging these communities, and convene dozens of storytelling circles, gathering hundreds of stories across a wide range of experience. We host creative workshops in which community members work directly with artists to help develop the script. Workshops transition to script readings, and eventually culminate in a fully staged productions where the cast is a mix of professional artists and members of the community the play is about performing together.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Theater is an ephemeral kind of art. Our plays often perform to sold out audiences, and after the show is done many people – especially from the community each play is about – ask us, “When will you do it again? How can I get more people to see this and learn from it?” Remounting plays as epic as ours isn’t really feasible. So we’ve started finding ways to adapt our plays into other formats that can be shared more widel over time, including a graphic novel version of our Adoption Play, a podcast version of our Captiol Play, and filmed versions of our Incarceration and Caregiver Plays. There is growing demand for our work to be used as a tool for education and catalyst for conversation, so now our current challenge is how to grow big enough fast enough to support the distribution of past work alongside the making of new work. We have two new positions we are hiring for right now.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Some of our past projects include The Veterans Play at Fort Snelling, about military service; In My Heart: The Adoption Play about people affected by adoption (also adapted into a graphic novel); Our House: The Capitol Play about state workers and activists performed all over the State Capitol building (adapted into a podcast); The Labyrinth and the Minotaur: The Incarceration Play, based on the stories of people affected by Minnesota’s system of incarceration; Hidden Herald, a series of QR-code based audio plays embedded all over downtown Saint Paul; and most recently Thank you for Holding: The Caregivers Play about caregivers of all kinds. Our next big project is The Values Play, focusing on our nation’s culture wars: story circles for that will take place this summer.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
Leah’s first memory of theater was attending an outdoor summer production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. The play began with a processional walk to the performance arena led by the performers. The actress playing Titania, the fairy queen, dressed fantastically in a streaming blue gown, looked me right in the eye and smiled. I was hooked on theater forever after. Alan’s strongest memory of theater was a production he saw that was so delightful, so devastating, and so transformative, the audience forgot to clap. The actors came out and the audience just sat there in stunned silence. After a long moment looking at each other, taking in the power of the work, the audience burst into thunderous applause. Our work at Wonderlust attempts to recreate these experiences again and again with as wide a cross-section of Minnesotans as possible, especially those who haven’t experienced theater before and haven’t had their experience illuminated on stage.
Pricing:
- All of our work is pay-what-you-can
Contact Info:
- Website: http://wlproductions.org
