(Left to right) Mackenzie Kroll, Martha Cashman, Stuart Felth, Silas Heisler, Gideon Heisler and Benjamin Gagliardi listen intently at a mock funeral while Lance Heisler (far right) gives a surreal sermon during one of the June 11-13 performances of “Mother Rabbit” at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Hudson. Members of the Gagliardi family—Martha, Benjamin and mother Barbara—all performed in the show and have a direct connection to the parish. (Photo credit: Spirit of Fire Theatre Company)
Jenny Snarski
Catholic Herald Staff
Spirit of Fire Theatre Company has been a work of the Spirit himself over years, fostered in friendship and faith.
Benjamin Gagliardi’s first experience acting, as a sophomore at Hudson High School, was under the direction of his now co-founder Rico Heisler.
“We just connected over the course of my high school years having a lot of success,” Gagliardi told the Catholic Herald. “I was performing, he was directing and we got along great.”
The friendship continued long-distance while Gagliardi was attending college at UW-Madison, partly “because we had similar interests and partly because we were both very grounded in Christianity and found theatre a very good outlet for expressing and experiencing our faith.”
Founding and first project
What grew out of this relationship was the desire to work together again. “We put our heads together to figure what that would look like,” settling on the central aspect of building a company around a first play project.
Heisler chimed in, recalling a visit from Benjamin and his younger sister, Esther: “I just asked him, ‘Would you be interested, when you finish school, to us joining forces and starting a theatre company of some sort?’”
The father of seven, who has a bachelor’s degree in Biblical and Theological Studies as well as Doctorate in Law, currently drives bus to help support his family as his wife, Kari, teaches music and choir at Hudson High School. The couple has directed the school’s plays for more than 20 years and Heisler has choreographed and worked in musical theatre in the Twin Cities for just as many.
A Baptist, Heisler’s wife, Kari, is Catholic. He and Gagliardi mentioned their shared “worldview and similar understanding of how faith should affect our approach to culture.
“We view theatre as a very important way of reclaiming culture,” Heisler affirmed. “So it was very important to us, first, that we would create our own art. Not that everything we do is going to be original,” he clarified, “although a lot of it is. We want to create art that speaks into the culture with truth,” as well as their shared sense of humor.
Humor, he said, is something they are very good at, “But we want it to be humor people can laugh with and engage in together without compromising their conscience or their core understanding of who they are and who God created them to be.”
Gagliardi, who graduated in 2024 with a computer science major and theatre minor, agrees that humor is a gift.
“We explain to our audiences that our mission is, of course, to tell stories that inspire, encourage and challenge people to see life by the light of Jesus Christ,” he added.
For their most recent performance—the company’s first—“Mother Rabbit” written by Gagliardi, he added, “This particular show is an opportunity for people to laugh together in community; both things that are God’s gifts. And to do so in a family-friendly environment.”
This dynamic establishes some common ground to speak the truth, but as Pope Francis so often encouraged, also emphasizes meeting people where they are at.
The pair considers Spirit of Fire’s official founding to be last fall, when they decided on the name and really worked at establishing their mission and first project.
“Mother Rabbit” opened in January 2026 at Big Blue Theatre in Woodbury, Minnesota.
In an Instagram post for the theatre, Heisler expounded on the gift of laughter offered in this first production.
“In ‘Mother Rabbit’ we have a funny, family-friendly story with dynamic, memorable characters, that we hope will bring audiences and actors together for a shared experience of laughter and relaxation.” In addition, he asserted that his job as the director is to understand and determine how to tell the story “to encourage and challenge people to see all of life and experience by the light of Jesus Christ,” in line with Spirit of Fire’s mission.
While the group partnered with Big Blue as the show’s producers, the June performances of “Mother Rabbit” at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Hudson was produced by Spirit of Fire independently.
Through pastor Fr. John Gerritts’ invitation, the church hosted the company and offered local advertising. Although the company had to purchase their own lighting equipment, it was a long-term investment for their future.
Both Gagliardi and Heisler were “very, very pleasantly surprised by grateful for the attendance,” significantly exceeding Big Blue’s expectations for the first run. They acknowledged feeling blessed to have “basically broken even” financially.
Over both run dates, the writer added, “it was gratifying to see how successful it was at bringing that much laughter and joy to people … It definitely set us up for success in the future … The audience reception so far has been really, really good,” and it has made the founders want to keep this as a “staple show of our company.”
Never having considered him a writer or writing as a primary pursuit, Gagliardi said he’s dabbled in monologues and comedy skits as a hobby and for classes in college. During his senior year, once the idea for Spirit of Fire was formulating, he wrote his first full-length drama, followed by the comedic work “Mother Rabbit.”
A theology of theatre
On the Spirit of Fire Theatre Company’s website (spiritoffire.org), one tab is titled “Theatology.”
It is defined, “Theatre is the expression of some truth about human nature. Truth is the conformity of the intellect with what the thing perceived actually is—the understanding of the objective reality of some existence. Inherently, the truth of something is its existence.”
Continuing the explanation, including the belief that “God is truth itself” and humans are created in his image, “Therefore, since Theatre is the expression of some truth about human nature, the acme of both truth and human nature being God, Theatre is also the pursuit of expressing the divine.”
If virtue then is found in divine nature, they posit, vice is “found in our dissent from the divine.
“In representing both Virtue and Vice, we represent the human condition with truth, and so the Theatre fulfills its purpose. The only thing left is the strength in which it fulfills that purpose—and that falls upon the methods of acting, designing and performing the show.”
In other words, Gagliardi said, “When we choose to act and perform in these plays, and put ourselves in positions where we’re trying to empathize with characters with new experiences and stories, we’re [expressing] certain aspects of humanity and reaching towards other aspects of God that have been given and reflected upon us.”
He shared his personal experience of theatre as “really moving, because when you’re performing and embodying a character, you feel that connection to God, to a sort of divine part of your human nature,” something the young man has observed in fellow actors but feels is lost on a lot of people nowadays.
His experience is that theatre confronts the actors, and the audience, with deeper truth and reality, whether they know how to express that verbally or conceptually.
Heisler added, “When we’re pursuing the truth of human nature, we’re pursuing this truth of God as well… I think we understand that every story ever told comes from some theological perspective; everybody is conveying some sort of theological understanding, whether they appreciate it or not.
“We want to make sure that we’re intentional in all the stories we tell, even in ones that are not overtly theological, in revealing a truthful understanding of who God is and who we are in him.”
Looking to the future, the company—which also includes Gagliardi’s sister-in-law Madeline as executive director and Heisler’s son Silas as creative consultant with director of marketing Stephanie Wilson—hopes to offer a mix of original and classical works. They look forward to collaborating with more writers and actors and expect the endeavor to have significant involvement of their immediate and extended families.
For Gagliardi, “finding a more regular pace” will be important with regularly scheduled performances.
Heisler, whose two sons performed in “Mother Rabbit,” commented, “We also want to make sure that we’re creating opportunities for Christian artists to have places to work and cultivate their art in a way that is honoring to God and who God has called them to be as artists.”
