A Unique Company
Our Mission: To enrich the common good through actor based story telling which is both transcendent and relevant.
Since 1989, the professional artists of the Commonweal have brought to life soulful stories told with honesty and creativity. Located in the heart of southeast Minnesota’s bluff country, Lanesboro (pop. 788) is home to the company’s new theatre in its historic downtown.
The heart of the Commonweal’s programming is the main stage season. This balanced yet challenging repertory is comprised of up to six plays with more than 200 performances, chosen from among the world’s finest classic, contemporary, and emerging playwrights. Because Lanesboro is located amidst a high concentration of Norwegian-American families, the Commonweal produces the works of Henrik Ibsen annually, and remains the only theatre company in North America with such a commitment. The company hosts a new play series which has yielded thirteen world premieres since its inception, and produces Over the Back Fence, a live, one-hour radio variety show broadcast weekly over a local radio station from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
The Commonweal boasts a rare organizational model, with resident company members (who have come from all over the country to make their home in the Lanesboro area) fulfilling the day-to-day artistic and operational needs of the company as artist/administrators.
A New Home
In July 2007, the new $3.5 million Commonweal facility opened to widespread acclaim. While offering patrons a welcoming, intimate experience in a 200-seat house, the exterior façade recreates three charming Lanesboro shop fronts, and the interior design focuses on the natural beauty and history of the region with barn doors acting as bathroom stalls, stone walls mirroring the surrounding bluffs, concrete floors reflecting the building’s prior life as a cheese factory, and seats reclaimed from the original Guthrie Theatre.
Focus on Education
The Commonweal Theatre maintains that each artist is most fully realized when engaged simultaneously in creating, teaching, and learning. Every year, we reach over 4,000 students of all ages through year-round educational outreach. Commonweal artists teach master classes at regional colleges and universities, offer student matinees and pre-show workshops for middle and high school students, provide week-long Exploritas programs to life-long learners (sponsored by Winona State University), and host a summer high school conservatory for young artists interested in exploring new means of self-expression through theatre. Commonweal’s apprenticeship program immerses new and recent graduates in the artistic and administrative operation of a professional theatre company.
