I had a wonderful chat with Kato McNickle on Wednesday the 12th of February, 2025! We simultistreamed our Intuitive Public TV broadcast live to YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
It was an important conversation — as well as being great fun — and it included a lot of crucial touch points for helping us all navigate the kinds of prodigious challenges we’re encountering in the world right now.
Kato McNickle is a playwright, director, and the editor of Wolf Criers Club on Substack.
We talked extensively about theater, storytelling, and collaborative artistry as tools for recovery, building resilience, and social connectivity.
In our video broadcast, Kato shares insights from her lifelong journey in expressive arts and facilitating creative spaces. And she’s a wonderful storyteller.
Particularly, I wanted to learn more about a project Kato had previously mentioned — where her theater group was practicing not only creative expression, but also community care and adaptive support for group members navigating mental health challenges.
Theater is a powerful modality for healing, connection, and skill-building — especially for those often left out of traditional performance spaces and community activities.
Kato talked about the ways in which her group was practicing more than putting on plays; that they were redesigning theater from the ground up so that participation could be accessible to people with diverse experiences of trauma and hardship.
Whereas typical theater spaces expect participants to self-initiate and commit to rigid (often inaccessible) schedules, Kato and her colleagues created a different invitation process to remove social barriers and actively welcome more people in.
For me, it’s particularly meaningful hearing that their group prioritized coordinating transportation support for those without — directly controverting what can often be a painful situation of isolation for an individual who doesn’t have their own form of transportation available to them.
We packed a ton of great discussion into this 42 minutes — theater process, social confidence-building, trauma awareness and trust, sketch comedy, graphic arts and caricature work, storytelling, professional community collaborations and publishing platforms.
“That was how we would think about it.
It's not ‘the show must go on.’
It's that we must go on together.”
— Kato McNickle (12 February 2025)
Relearning how to navigate the world is a step by step process, and it’s much more powerful as a shared process. Breath by breath. Scene by scene.
This reclaiming of the right to be heard, known, and part of something bigger — really moves me.
Thank you so much to for spending this time with us! And to our Intuitive Public TV viewing and listening audience for tuning in, commenting joy, and sharing clips, links, and good energy from our broadcasts.
Please seek out Kato’s work and support it. Subscribe to Wolf Criers Club on Substack and visit Kato’s website at katoagogo.com.
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