Ask someone strolling down a picturesque country road in Wendell if this quaint little town of roughly 900 people has any community staples and they might just mention Deja Brew Cafe & Pub at 57 Lockes Village Road.
In keeping with Wendell’s affinity for quirkiness and eccentricity, the locally-owned small business’ motto is “It’s just a stone’s throw from reality!” It was with this in mind that the town’s latest venture was given its name.
Stonesthrow Theater launched this year as an entity of the Wendell Meetinghouse and soon developed a packed 2026-27 season. It started with a showing of “What I Learned in Therapy … If Anything,” a one-person original cabaret performance created and performed by composer/pianist/singer Rene Pfister in late September.
“It was really very touching,” said Court Dorsey, one of Stonesthrow Theater’s founding members and its artistic director.
On the horizon, co-founder and Managing Director Joe Laur’s one-person show “The Burning Reed: An Evening with Jalaladdin Mohammed Rumi” will be held in January, having been postponed from October due to a medical issue.
“Think, ‘An Evening with Mark Twain,'” Laur said, likening his work to the popular one-man stage play devised by legendary actor Hal Holbrook.
Rumi was a 13th-century Persian cleric and, thanks to free-verse translations and adaptations by Coleman Barks, the bestselling English-language poet in the United States.
“I got exposed to Rumi about 35 years ago, mostly through the work of Coleman Barks,” Laur said. “I always thought it would make an interesting one-person show. I knew the poem I wanted to open with and the poem I wanted to close with but … it was just an idea. It sat in the back of my mind for about 30 years.”
Then, like Stonesthrow Theater itself, Laur’s one-person show came to fruition a year ago following the success of “Swamped,” a new four-person play Dorsey wrote and directed about a widowed and grouchy Vietnam War veteran and his transgender personal care assistant.
Stage Manager Jan Mankowsky and Creative Director Tim Holcomb round out the theater company’s co-founders. Mankowsky joined after Dorsey recruited her to handle the lighting for “Swamped.”
“There’s a beautiful new lighting system, and he knew I was interested in theater, because I have a job at Berklee [College of Music], where I do theater stuff down there,” she said. Referencing the Wendell Meetinghouse, Mankowsky added, “It’s such a little jewel of a building and a space. … How can anything not work in that room?”
Mankowsky said Dorsey’s play went swimmingly during its run, and that the cast and crew melded together perfectly.
“I fell in love with the folks that we were working with,” she said — and she means that literally. Mankowsky and Holcomb are now a romantic couple, having reconnected during the production of “Swamped” after falling out of touch for about 20 years.
“It was magnetic,” Holcomb explained, adding that he moved into Mankowsky’s Wendell home, a three-minute walk from the meetinghouse, at the beginning of September. “I’m thrilled to live in Wendell, a stone’s throw from reality.”
Holcomb met Mankowsky during a 1999 production of “Thomas of Woodstock” by the Hampshire Shakespeare Co., which he founded with Brian Marsh a decade earlier.
Holcomb served as the set designer for “Swamped.”
“I’d always wanted to work with Court, and I knew Joe through my work with The ManKind Project,” he mentioned. “That’s an organization that helps men of all ages find their center, their sense of personal integrity, and helps them with supporting healthy relationships with other men and, perhaps more importantly, the women in their lives.”
Echoing Mankowsky’s sentiments, Holcomb praised the Wendell Meetinghouse as an artistic venue.
“It’s a lovely, lovely space. It’s preserved the original rustic nature of the old meetinghouse, with wide floorboards and wainscoted pews,” he said. “It also has a state-of-the-art lighting system and sound system. It’s a real community gem.”
For more information about Stonesthrow Theater, visit stonesthrowtheater.com.
