By DORIS RUBENSTEIN
Anyone who’s spent a full summer at a lake cabin knows the type: the guy who’s lived there year-round for decades and thinks he owns the place. He’s the “lake police guy” who feels it’s his job to enforce the unwritten rules and lets everyone know it. But, in some cases, he may be doing the right thing.
The plot of No Wake, directed by Isabella Anastasia Leigh, involves just such a person, Peter Michaels: a man with a bullhorn on a mission to save the loons of Lake Winnipesaukee, who are dying in record numbers. His summer expectations are thwarted by Sarah, a townie teenager hired to clean the house next door.
While the two initially grate on each other, they slowly forge a unique intergenerational bond, opening up one tentative moment at a time and encouraging each other to truly acknowledge their loneliness and loss.
Erica Berman wrote No Wake, playing through July 4 at Commonweal Theatre in Lanesboro, about just such a guy and his self-imposed mission to save the loons of Lake Winnipesaukee. Although her play No Wake takes place in New Hampshire, it could take place in Minnesota or Wisconsin or any place that the Minnesota state bird nests in the short summers of the north woods. Berman didn’t spend her childhood at such a cabin; her summers were spent at “theater camps” in the vicinity of her Manalapan, New Jersey, home.
She currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is director of education and community engagement at the Children’s Theater of Madison. While the Wisconsin capital is widely considered a hotbed of liberalism with only a small Jewish community, it is a substantial jump from Berman’s New Jersey roots.
As she describes Jersey, “while ethnically diverse, the community was ‘culturally Jewish.’” Berman did it all: The family belonged to a Conservative synagogue, Beth Shalom, where she attended Hebrew school through high school, became Bat Mitzva and was active in its USY chapter. While the Berman family, fortunately, had nobody who was imprisoned or killed during the Holocaust, she recently received her Austrian citizenship papers; these are issued to people who can prove that their families left Austria due to persecution by the Nazis — not unlike the citizenship offered to Sephardic Jews whose families fled Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition.New Jersey
Berman had visited the Twin Cities years ago and was impressed with the artistic atmosphere. She was even more impressed with tiny Lanesboro when she came for the opening night at Commonweal. “The ‘Driftless’ is so beautiful! Lanesboro amazed me with the many cultural opportunities there. … It’s rare for a small town to have such a rich cultural atmosphere.”
Lanesboro can thank another Jewish resident for helping to create that atmosphere: Hal Cropp, who has been in the community since 1992 and now is the theater’s producing artistic director.
In a 2025 interview with Voyage Minnesota, Cropp said, “In my 34 years … I am proudest of creating and maintaining a culture that has embraced community on a cellular level, that has encouraged growth both artistically and administratively with all of the individuals with whom I have had the pleasure to work, and that has highlighted the human experience in the stories we have chosen to tell.”
In his early days at the Commonweal, Cropp drew on some Twin Cities Jewish talent: John and Debbie Orenstein.
“[We] wrote our own songs … mainly for the annual live radio show in Lanesboro, Minnesota. There’s a story of how that happened. But we would go down and do like 10 to 15 minutes of their live radio broadcast,” John recalled in a 2019 interview with the Jewish World.
No Wake opened on April 4 but will be running at the Commonweal through July 4, giving readers ample time to drive down to Lanesboro for a performance. If you can’t make a matinee, Lanesboro’s economy is heavily into the bed and breakfast industry. It’s worth spending an overnight to take in the breathtaking scenery on the bike trails or while canoeing or kayaking on the lovely Root River.
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Performances of No Wake continue through July 4 at Commonweal Theatre Company, 208 Parkway Ave. N., Lanesboro, Minn. For information, call 800.657.7025 or go to: commonwealtheatre.org.
(American Jewish World, June 2026)
