Last year, a tornado ate one of Hannah Nies' performances.
She was staging "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the barn at Schumacher Farm County Park, the kind of DIY venue you use when you don't have a theater and you're not waiting around for one to appear. The weather that summer was brutal on rehearsals and worse on show nights. One performance disappeared entirely. That's the version of Groundlings Theater most of Waunakee first heard about: a homegrown troupe running Shakespeare out of a county park barn, funded by bake sales and whatever cash the director could scrape together.
This August, that same company incorporated as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In October, its founder's own adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel opens as part of a statewide new-work festival. The distance between those two facts, a tornado-interrupted barn show and a slot in a juried Wisconsin theater festival, is the story worth understanding if you live here, because it isn't really about theater. It's about how fast a village this size can build something that lasts.
The Twenty-Year Gap
Waunakee has tried this before. In the early 2000s, a nonprofit called the Waunakee Actors Guild staged dinner theater productions around town before disbanding around 2006. After that, the village went without a home-grown theater company for close to two decades. People who moved here in the years since had no reason to know Waunakee ever had one.
Hannah Nies grew up in Waunakee, went east to Wellesley College for a double major in English and theater, and came home during the pandemic hiring freeze that stalled a lot of theater careers before they started. "I majored in English and theater, so I'm twice as unemployable," she told the Cap Times, only half joking. Instead of waiting for a job in the field to open up, she started one. In 2024, at 27, she founded Groundlings, named for the 17th-century audience members who paid a penny to stand in the pit below the stage, the ones who couldn't afford seats but showed up anyway. "So, I made my own sandbox," she said.
That gap between 2006 and 2024 matters because it's the baseline. Groundlings isn't competing with an established local theater scene. It's rebuilding one from a standing start, and the barn at Schumacher Farm was where that rebuild actually began.
From a Barn to a Church
The early shows ran on borrowed furniture, volunteer labor, and whatever weather cooperated. Groundlings leaned on the Verona Area Community Theater's prop warehouse and put out group emails asking if anyone had a chaise longue lying around. Within its first year, the company caught the attention of Create Waunakee, the village's arts and culture nonprofit, and joined its roster of initiatives alongside programs like the Waunakee Artisan Market.
That relationship gave Groundlings something the barn never could: an indoor stage. Create Waunakee secured office, gallery, and performance space at Peace Lutheran Church on South Century Avenue, and Groundlings started staging full productions there instead of hoping for dry weather. "The Importance of Being Earnest" ran there in July 2025. A staged reading of "It's a Wonderful Life," featuring two fellow Wellesley College graduates in the cast, followed that December. This past July, "Pride & Prejudice" ran a ten-day stretch at the same church, July 17 through 26.
Jennifer Norback, Create Waunakee's development director, has watched the company grow from the inside. "One of the best surprises to come out of Waunakee's creative scene," she called it, adding that what strikes her most is how the shows pull in the whole village, not just the actors and the audience. The funding model still looks scrappy even now: ticket sales, donations, silent auctions, bake sales, and money Nies has put in herself. What changed is that the shows stopped depending on the sky cooperating.
Going Independent
This August's incorporation as its own nonprofit is a different kind of milestone than a new venue or a new script. It means Groundlings now has its own board, its own tax status, and its own fundraising apparatus separate from Create Waunakee's umbrella. Practically, that gives Nies more room to grow the company on its own terms rather than as one initiative among several. It also signals that donors and grant-makers can now support Groundlings directly, which matters for an organization that has spent two years running on bake-sale money and Nies' own wallet.
Nonprofits don't graduate out of an incubator unless the founder believes the thing can stand on its own after that support goes away. That's a bet Nies is making in public, and it's the kind of institution-building that doesn't show up in a listing of village amenities but changes what a town can offer the people already living in it.
What's Coming to the Stage This Fall
The clearest evidence that the bet is paying off is what's scheduled next. Groundlings will present "Murder at the Vicarage," Nies' own stage adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel, October 29 through November 1. It's being staged as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, a statewide festival that showcases new plays and musicals across Wisconsin theaters. A company that started in a county park barn now has a script written by its own founder getting a slot alongside new work from theaters across the state.
If you want to see for yourself what a village-scale theater company sounds like two years in, Groundlings Theater's website carries ticket and donation information, and shows have consistently run at Peace Lutheran Church, 701 S. Century Ave. Ticket sales and donations are how the company keeps its lights on, so showing up matters more here than it would at a larger venue with a bigger budget cushion.
Why This Is Worth Noticing
None of this happened in a vacuum. Create Waunakee itself moved from a village committee to its own independent nonprofit around the same stretch of time, brought on a development director, and reported doubling its market revenue while launching an apprenticeship program staffed by Waunakee High School students that has already generated more than $11,000 in revenue. Groundlings going independent isn't an isolated event. It's one piece of a village that's been quietly building its own cultural infrastructure rather than importing it from Madison, and doing it fast enough that most residents haven't caught up with how much has changed since that tornado took out a barn show two summers ago.
Waunakee went eighteen years without a theater company that outlasted its founding. It now has one with its own building relationship, its own nonprofit status, and its own playwright headed to a statewide festival. That's a different kind of local milestone than a new restaurant opening or a road project finishing on schedule, but it says just as much about what it's like to actually live here.
If you're already calling Waunakee home and want more of these stories as they happen, or if you're weighing what life here actually looks like beyond the listings, Beth Baty covers the Waunakee area closely and would love to connect. Let's Connect.
