The Orchard 2024 Season

The Orchard wants to re-imagine how the stories of the past can apply to a changing world. Along the way, they hope to help build a community that thinks deeper, laughs longer, and experiences fresh voices telling familiar stories.

We began as five friends studying acting together in the University of Minnesota's Guthrie Actor Training Program. The Orchard Theater Collective was born out our shared desire to explore new ways to tell old stories. 

We love creating theater that is a truly unique and immersive holistic experience for our audiences. We strive for entertaining and thought provoking theater that gets people talking and hearts changing.  

In 2023 we produced two plays. First we presented The Upper Room: A Good Friday Play, featuring Damian Leverett and directed by Craig Johnson. In addition to a five show tour, we held a public showing on Selby Avenue, partnering with Great Harvest Bakery and Solo Vino, a local wine shop, to tell the story of the Last Supper with an immersive twist. 

We also did Village Wooing by George Bernard Shaw this past August and enjoyed a nearly sold out run. We partnered with The Germanic American Institute, a beautiful Summit Avenue mansion. The first half of the show took place outside, with a shift at intermission to the basement tavern where the audience enjoyed tasty snacks and laughed along to a classic rom-com story. 

We want to keep using theater to start conversations and touch hearts! Our future holds a lot of exciting possibilities and we have so many ideas for work we want to do and stories we want to tell. Your donations to this project will directly support the artists hired to tell these important stories. The Orchard Theater Collective believes that compensating artists should be a priority and seeks to grow in the hopes of supporting more artists with the creation of new work! This is only possible through donors like you. We are incredibly grateful for any and all donations. Through the fiscal sponsorship of Springboard for the Arts, every donation to this project will be tax-deductible!

Thank you for your continued giving, engagement,and encouragement! 

Founding members: 

Damian and Anna Leverett

Ben and Mackenzie Shaw