Roger’s case of ALS was sudden and swift.

In the months before he was diagnosed, he ran two marathons. A few years earlier, after retiring from decades as a theater professor, he passed the Minnesota Bar exam and became a public defender. He died in May 2021, almost precisely one year after he and his wife, Christin Lindberg, learned he had the degenerative nervous system disease.

As Lindberg said during a story circle for the Wonderlust Productions play “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project,” caring for her dying husband was part of their love story.

“I told (Roger) along the way that I wanted him to have the first experience in his life of unconditional love,” Lindberg said. “And he was able to accept that, which was beautiful for me. To walk him home, as a caregiver.”

Based in Frogtown, Wonderlust Productions bridges community storytelling and professional theater. Every Wonderlust play starts as a series of gatherings called story circles, for which community members connected to a certain topic — adoption, incarceration, loss and resilience, the State Capitol, downtown St. Paul, as for the storytelling project Hidden Herald — are invited to share stories. Story circles for “Thank You For Holding” have been ongoing for about two years, and participants have included home caregivers like Lindberg, medical professionals, first responders and care recipients themselves, and also hairdressers, bartenders, doulas.

The result is a deeply moving portrait of the tenderness and grief and love and isolation of providing care to those who need it. “Thank You For Holding,” co-directed by Wonderlust leaders and Twin Cities theater scene vets Alan Berks and Leah Cooper, runs through Nov. 3 at 825 Arts, a 1910s-era silent film theater on University Avenue that reopened in September as a modern performing arts space. Tickets and showtimes are available at wlproductions.org/caregivers/.

For how much physical and emotional work goes into caregiving, whether as a professional or a family member, participants said, it feels like a topic that’s taboo to discuss: Caregivers worry others might find their stories too private, too depressing, too gross.

“It’s so complicated to have all this sometimes super intense stuff going on for hours and hours every day, and then you go home and are like, ‘Yeah, day was fine,” said Elizabeth Efteland, an actor in the play who also works as a personal care assistant. “Caregiving is not a public thing. It’s generally very intimate, and people don’t see it. To feel seen was mind-blowing.”

The final scene of “Thank You For Holding” contains the exact words Lindberg shared during story circles and in conversations with the play’s writers and directors. Lindberg, who is a member of the play’s cast, is on stage during the scene, but she’s playing a different character. (This is Lindberg’s first acting role; Wonderlust makes a point of casting story circle participants like Lindberg alongside professional actors in roles that do not correspond to or occasionally oppose their real-life experiences.)

Her real-life words are spoken by somebody else.

In a way, it actually feels better than saying them herself, she said; she feels less alone.

“There’s nothing quite like watching somebody watch their own story be acted out right in front of them,” Cooper said. “I don’t know how to describe it: Their eyes get really wide, they hold their breath and, when it’s done, a sigh comes out of them. They’re just standing in a new place with their experience.”

Wonderlust Productions co-director Leah Cooper, right, demonstrates a hug on Chris Lindberg for an actor as they rehearse a scene for “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project” at 825 Arts in St. Paul on Oct. 10, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

‘Stronger communities of care’

“Thank You For Holding” isn’t based on true stories. It is true stories.

Tell us about the moment you realized you were a caregiver, facilitators asked during story circles. Talk about a time when you faced something extra difficult to overcome; talk about a time when you changed because you overcame it. What are myths about caregivers that are commonly believed but simply not true? What was a transformative moment, a turning point moment, a milestone moment? What did that moment smell like? What did it sound like?

Each story circle is audio-recorded, transcribed and meticulously annotated and tagged by a team of writers including Berks, Cooper, Vinecia Coleman, Antonio Duke, Bradley Greenwald, Matt Guidry, Masanari Kawahara and Sarah Myers. For a scene in a psychiatric treatment facility, for example, a writer might start by pulling every story circle comment tagged “mental health” and assembling them into a narrative arc.

Characters in the final play are composites, to protect people’s privacy, but the story circle method means everything from plot to dialogue to set design are all authentic to participants’ lived experience. Throughout the writing process and even during rehearsals for the final production, the playwrights continue to refine scenes with public feedback and cast member input.

Actors Tseganesh Selameab, MD, center, and Michael Quadrozzi, right, rehearse a scene for “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project” at 825 Arts in St. Paul on Oct. 10, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

This co-production is why projects like “Thank You For Holding” work so well, said cast member Tseganesh Selameab, a primary care physician who also teaches at the University of Minnesota Medical School and is the associate director of its Center for the Art of Medicine. After being invited to participate in story circles, she auditioned for and was cast in the play.

“To tell a story with so many different angles in the room together is actually building community,” she said. “And then someone watches that, and there’s this massive community-building and connection that changes you, that changes communities. I often think it’s more powerful than the work I do as a doctor.”

Many of her patients are immigrants and war refugees, she said; at the clinic one recent morning, she pulled a cockroach out of a patient’s ear because the only housing they can afford is infested with bugs and rodents. It’s tangible treatment, to be sure, but she said that healing the deeper systemic problems her patients face requires cultural shifts like those that could arise from reflective projects like “Thank You For Holding.”

“I’ve helped you, I’m not minimizing my work,” she said. “But that’s a lot of what I do in medicine: I’m patching you up to send you out to war again, and hopefully you can find some peace and stability out there.”

The way the medical system is dramatized on TV, Berks said, simply does not square with the real-world fact that the actual bulk of coordinating or performing care work often falls on family and friends. For all the Covid-era clapping and pot-banging, doctors are not superheroes, Selameab said; they’re people, often up against the same bureaucratic barriers their patients face.

This, really, gets at the central theme of the play that arose during story circles: True caretaking, true healing, has to be a communal and societal effort, in a way that mainstream American culture seems unprepared or unwilling to recognize. We’re all worse off when we make an individual burden out of what should be a shared responsibility for one another’s well-being, the play seems to argue.

This became clearer than ever during the pandemic, Cooper said, as she saw quite starkly “that we needed stronger communities of care — and what it looked like when those communities came together and supported each other, and what it looked like when they didn’t.”

Actors, from left, Megan Kim, Mage Adams, Laurel Armstrong, Naomi Karstad and Chris Lindberg rehearse a scene for “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project” at 825 Arts in St. Paul on Oct. 10, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

‘Catharsis is a chain reaction’

It’s fairly well-documented that flying into outer space changes you. Not just physically, though perhaps that too, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually: People’s lives are fundamentally different after they’ve seen the Earth from above.

The phenomenon is called the overview effect.

Many astronauts, according to space philosopher Frank White, describe it as transcendence, an inescapable awareness of the interconnectedness of everything, like a glimpse into the meaning of life and our true purpose in living it.

So too, perhaps, is the experience of seeing your life, your world, stories that resonate with your own, played out before you on a stage.

With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Wonderlust has begun tracking its impact through a technique called ripple effect mapping. By inviting story circle participants, actors and even audience members from previous projects back for a new round of story circle-like research sessions, Cooper and Berks are able to better understand both how individuals have changed their behavior in response to the plays and how those changes have radiated outwards to others who weren’t involved in the plays.

“What’s been really powerful for us is hearing people say, this completely changed my life,” Cooper said. “Or, I formed this new community of friends, or I changed my career, or I started showing up into this community and contributing back to it; I got involved in advocacy or activism. It’s pretty humbling.”

The actual work here isn’t being done by Berks and Cooper, they both said: It’s participants and audience members who want to better understand themselves and their world. A person who participates in or attends a Wonderlust project already has a spark inside them, Cooper said, and she and Berks and the company’s writers and creative team are simply creating a container in which those sparks can bounce against one another.

One takeaway from the ripple effect mapping process, as Cooper phrased it, has been that catharsis is a chain reaction. One person’s emotional breakthrough triggers another. Collectively releasing those pent-up feelings isn’t about changing anyone’s mind, Berks said; it’s a step toward interacting with one another in ways that are more kind, more meaningful and, ultimately, more productive.

Wonderlust Productions co-director Alan Berks, right, talks about a scene with Chris Lindberg, facing, and other actors as they rehearse a scene for “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project’” at 825 Arts in St. Paul on Oct. 10, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“It’s not that I think it makes you some kind of better person, but it makes your life better to see more and experience more and be aware of more,” Berks said. “Empathy is not a thing you do because it’s morally appropriate — though it probably is — it’s a thing you do because it feels good.”

This has certainly been the case for Lindberg, she said. In just the past few months, seeing her world and hearing her stories from the outside has reoriented her.

“I feel much more expansive now than I have for years,” she said. “More open-hearted, towards other people, towards life. Understanding that my suffering isn’t unique to me, that everyone around me is suffering in their own way. I just feel more connected to life, with a capital L.”

“I started out wanting to honor (my husband) by doing this,” she continued. “But now I’m honoring myself.”

If You Go

What: “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project,” a play that draws from local community stories with a cast including both professional actors and caregivers
When: Showtimes through Nov. 3
Where: 825 Arts, a theater at 825 University Ave.
Tickets: Sliding scale $5-50, suggested $25; wlproductions.org/caregivers.

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