Will Weigler
Community-based Theatre
Collaborations
If you are working on a stage production of any kind I am available to offer coaching, collaboration in developing your project, and directing.
I recently collaborated with internationally renowned jazz musician Esperanza Spalding to stage her newest album Emily’s D+Evolution as a hybrid concert and theatre performance.
Listen to an interview with Esperanza about the project here.
My most recent play, Lovers, Lunatics, and Poets: Behind the Scenery of Clayoquot Sound, was commissioned by the Clayoquot Sound Community Theatre Association. Based on research and personal interviews, the one-hour play with music is about the people and history of the Tofino area on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The show will be professionally produced at the theatre in Tofino as an annual summer show for tourists and residents.
Based on interviews with people of the town of Darrington, Washington and at the nearby Sauk-Suiattle Reservation I wrote and then directed an original musical theatre production celebrating differences and shared values of settlers and First Nations people of the area. An inter-generational, intercultural cast of residents from both communities performed the show.
Watch the 8 minute documentary film:
The Making of Common Wealth: A Play about the People of Darrington and the Sauk-Suiattle
To read more about Common Wealth, click here
I was commissioned by the Victoria Reminiscence Theatre Festival to write a six-person play based on the reminiscences of an elderly Vancouver Island couple who lived through the Japanese occupation of their native Indonesia and later immigrated to Canada. I dedicated myself to writing a play that would tell their stories in a powerful way while neither re-traumatizing this couple and their families, nor using their lives as dramatic fodder for the audience’s entertainment. The play is called Rama and Shinta, you and me.
I collaborated with Registered Nurse Candace Campbell to support her writing her semi-autobiographical one-woman show called Full Frontal Nursing, and then directed the show.