CTA veteran Lisa Wagner brings healing theatre arts to world audiences

Like God, Lisa Wagner, a leading member of CTA's touring theatre troupe in the 1980s, is everywhere. She gave several performances of "Haunted by God," the play on the life of Dorothy Day, before large audiences at the Parliament of World Religions meeting last December in Johannesburg, South Africa. Wagner estimates that she has now performed that one-person drama some 500 times throughout the U.S. and in tours of Canada, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and Holland. She recently created an eight-week workshop to teach theatre and drama to women inmates at the federal correctional center in downtown Chicago. She is a major promoter of the L'Arche communities for the mentally disabled in the U.S. And she will be on tour this spring performing "Points of Arrival," a play she researched on the life of Jean Donovan, one of the four El Salvador martyrs. The tour is sponsored by a grant from the Sisters of Mercy. Wagner said one of "the most rewarding moments" in her career occurred when she visited a small town in South Africa and helped create theatre pieces on reconciliation for a group of black and white youths attempting to make racial integration a reality in their community. "To be a part in some small way of something so historic was tremendously moving," said Wagner. "It makes all the things we do worthwhile."

You can contact Lisa Wagner and her colleagues at Still Point Theatre Collective, 1337 W. Ohio, Chicago, IL 60622. 312 226-0352