Roger’s case of ALS was sudden and swift.

Within the months before he was diagnosed, he ran two marathons. Just a few years earlier, after retiring from many years as a theater professor, he passed the Minnesota Bar exam and have become a public defender. He died in May 2021, almost precisely one yr 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 a part of their love story.

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

Based in Frogtown, Wonderlust Productions bridges community storytelling and skilled 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 in addition hairdressers, bartenders, doulas.

The result’s a deeply moving portrait of the tenderness and grief and love and isolation of providing care to those that 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 contemporary performing arts space. Tickets and showtimes can be found at wlproductions.org/caregivers/.

For a way much physical and emotional work goes into caregiving, whether as knowledgeable or a member of the family, participants said, it looks like a subject that’s taboo to debate: 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 happening for hours and hours day by day, and then you definitely go home and are like, ‘Yeah, day was superb,” said Elizabeth Efteland, an actor within the play who also works as a private care assistant. “Caregiving will not be a public thing. It’s generally very intimate, and folks don’t see it. To feel seen was mind-blowing.”

The ultimate scene of “Thank You For Holding” comprises the precise words Lindberg shared during story circles and in conversations with the play’s writers and directors. Lindberg, who’s a member of the play’s solid, is on stage in the course of the scene, but she’s playing a distinct character. (That is Lindberg’s first acting role; Wonderlust makes a degree of casting story circle participants like Lindberg alongside skilled actors in roles that don’t correspond to or occasionally oppose their real-life experiences.)

Her real-life words are spoken by any individual else.

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

“There’s nothing quite like watching any individual watch their very own story be acted out right in front of them,” Cooper said. “I don’t know tips on 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 brand new place with their experience.”

‘Stronger communities of care’

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

Tell us concerning the moment you realized you were a caregiver, facilitators asked during story circles. Discuss a time once you faced something extra difficult to beat; discuss a time once you modified since you overcame it. What are myths about caregivers which 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 instance, a author might start by pulling every story circle comment tagged “mental health” and assembling them right into a narrative arc.

Characters in the ultimate play are composites, to guard people’s privacy, however the story circle method means all the pieces from plot to dialogue to set design are all authentic to participants’ lived experience. Throughout the writing process and even during rehearsals for the ultimate production, the playwrights proceed to refine scenes with public feedback and solid member input.

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

“To inform a story with so many various angles within the room together is definitely constructing community,” she said. “After which 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 health care provider.”

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

“I’ve helped you, I’m not minimizing my work,” she said. “But that’s quite a lot of what I do in medicine: I’m patching you as much as send you out to war again, and hopefully you could find some peace and stability on the market.”

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

This, really, gets on the central theme of the play that arose during story circles: True caretaking, true healing, must be a communal and societal effort, in a way that mainstream American culture seems unprepared or unwilling to acknowledge. We’re all worse off once we make a person burden out of what must be a shared responsibility for each other’s well-being, the play seems to argue.

This became clearer than ever in the course of the pandemic, Cooper said, as she saw quite starkly “that we would have liked stronger communities of care — and what it looked like when those communities got here together and supported one another, and what it looked like once they didn’t.”

‘Catharsis is a series response’

It’s fairly well-documented that flying into outer space changes you. Not only 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 named the overview effect.

Many astronauts, in line with space philosopher Frank White, describe it as transcendence, an inescapable awareness of the interconnectedness of all the pieces, 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 along 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 method called ripple effect mapping. By inviting story circle participants, actors and even audience members from previous projects back for a brand new round of story circle-like research sessions, Cooper and Berks are capable of higher understand each how individuals have modified their behavior in response to the plays and the way those changes have radiated outwards to others who weren’t involved within the plays.

“What’s been really powerful for us is hearing people say, this completely modified my life,” Cooper said. “Or, I formed this recent community of friends, or I modified my profession, or I began 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 each said: It’s participants and audience members who want to raised understand themselves and their world. A one that participates in or attends a Wonderlust project already has a spark inside them, Cooper said, and he or she and Berks and the corporate’s writers and artistic team are simply making a container by which those sparks can bounce against each other.

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

“It’s not that I feel it makes you some type of higher person, but it surely makes your life higher to see more and experience more and concentrate on more,” Berks said. “Empathy will not be a thing you do since it’s morally appropriate — though it probably is — it’s a thing you do since it feels good.”

This has actually been the case for Lindberg, she said. In only the past few months, seeing her world and hearing her stories from the skin has reoriented her.

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

“I started off 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 attracts from area people stories with a solid including each skilled 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.