Women of the Year: Brooke Wood saved Lake City Playhouse. She also saved a safe space for Coeur d’Alene kids

Brooke Wood kept community theater alive in Coeur d’Alene by reopening Lake City Playhouse. But she also spent years giving the youth of her community a safe space to be themselves.

Wood grew up doing theater at Lake City Playhouse, which had always been a safe space for her, too.

“We all just loved on each other that summer,” she said of playhouse production of Grease in the late 1990s. “And I think that summer made me realize theater was what I was called to do.”

Like many young actors, Wood dreamed of being on Broadway, and for a time she moved away for school and to explore theater elsewhere. But soon she returned as a stay-at-home mom and reconnected with theater in Coeur d’Alene by volunteering to teach theater at her son’s elementary school.

Eventually, she joined the board of Lake City Playhouse and then became its interim artistic director. A few seasons into her tenure in 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the theater’s basement flooded.

The building began life as a place of worship for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but was converted into a theater in the 1960s and has remained a performance space since that time.

Along with her husband, Wood rallied the community to save the theater and raised over $100,000 for repairs. Lake City Playhouse reopened this summer after more than two years with a production of “Oliver!”

Wood said the opening night was an “out-of-body experience.”

“That was one of those life moments you will never forget,” she recalled.

Wood hopes to expand Lake City Playhouse by building a facility with classrooms, rehearsal space and storage on playhouse’s empty backlot.

“I want a place where kids can walk in and get to learn and be in theater, no questions asked,” she said.

Wood estimates that the expansion could take another five years.

A safe place

Kerry McGrath is a teacher in Coeur d’Alene who met Wood when her son started doing theater at Sorenson Elementary School. After many years of “being more like family” with Wood, McGrath joined the Lake City Playhouse board and started performing in their most recent production.

McGrath said she was “so impressed” to see Wood save the hometown theater and navigate repairing the flooded basement. But she nominated Wood for “Woman of the Year” because of her ability to create safe spaces for young people, especially queer kids.

“She lets them know that they matter, that they’re loved and cared for and that they have a space,” she said.

“What I can do is make sure you know the moment that you walk through that door that you are loved, you are needed and you are wanted,” Wood said.

That goes for a queer kid who feels out of place in North Idaho or a child from a conservative family who wants to explore theater.

“The playhouse can put people together that maybe wouldn’t have ever gotten to know each other. Everyone in a cast may not believe the same things, but they are on this stage performing together, and by the end of it, they are a family,” she said.

Wood added that many kids who started doing theater at the playhouse had permanently become members of her family.

“There are a lot of kids who call me mom,” she said.

Hunter Kennedy met Wood as a teenager through theater and was “just immediately adopted” into her family as difficulties mounted at home.

“I was trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, who I wanted to love,” he said. “I grew up in a very strict religious household where there wasn’t any room for that kind of conversation. But Brooke just opened her arms and loved me like I was one of her own kids.”

As Kennedy came into his queer identity, Wood and her husband gave him the support to find himself.

Oskar Owens also was welcomed into her family as a teenager, but stressed that story was not unique to him.

“She has always supported me in my life inside and outside the theater . But she is also supportive of everyone who comes through the playhouse. She creates a space where every individual feels comfortable, safe, seen and loved.”

Destanie Dunbar is a 16-year-old who only met Wood less than six months ago as assistant director of Lake City Playhouse’s production of “Oliver!”. Still, she credits Wood with being “one of the most influential people” in her life.

“She’s such a strong and independent woman, and I feel like I would not be where I am in my life without her,” she said.