Twenty Years In, Stoop Storytelling Still Sets the Stage for Baltimoreans

Jessica Henkin and Laura Wexler are sitting at a sun-soaked table in Wexler’s Roland Park dining room on a Sunday afternoon, a binder stuffed with 20 years’ worth of memorabilia scattered around them from Stoop Storytelling.

There are programs, postcards, photographs, articles (including one from The Washington Post, when they hosted all of the Baltimore’s mayoral candidates), and even a neatly folded branded T-shirt that looks like it’s never been worn.

There’s also a thick folder full of consent forms—all storytellers need to sign them. Wexler reaches in, pulls a page out at random, immediately recognizes the name, and remembers the exact story they told. And then she does it again, and again.

That’s especially impressive considering that more than 4,000 people have told a seven-minute, purportedly true tale at one of Stoop’s live shows or workshops, according to Henkin, pictured left above. “Don’t you think that number is low?” presses Wexler, right.

One day, perhaps, they’ll do an official count. So far, though, themes have ranged from “My Nemesis” to “The Seven Deadly Sins” to “Cool Cruel High School” to “Parenthood” and one of Wexler’s most memorable—“Abortion is Autonomy: Stories About Freedom, Challenge, Care, and Joy” in August 2022.

Their very first show took place at the Creative Alliance in February 2006. “We picked the theme ‘failure’ because we thought that would be clever if it was a failure,” jokes Wexler. But they enlisted a stellar group of storytellers, including writer Laura Lippman, TV personality Marty Bass, filmmaker Charles Cohen, and Valerie Perez-Shere, founder of the water-ballet troupe Fluid Movement.

“We sold out that first show by begging people to come,” says Wexler. But it was a hit—even with their first musical guest playing a “man drum” (yes, he played drums on his own body) and providing a really jarring thunderclap sound as an audible cue for storytellers who went over their allotted story time (now they use a bell).

Music has always been an important part of the night, too—they had Caleb Stine & The Brakemen as their house band for years—because “we wanted it to be a show and not a talk or a presentation,” says Wexler. “It was supposed to be a night out. We definitely wanted alcohol. We wanted it just to be a full buffet of things.”

In the years since, they’ve taken the show to Center Stage, the Senator Theatre, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (their biggest crowd ever), and smaller incubators like hospitals, synagogues, board rooms, art spaces—even to the airways with a podcast on WYPR.

Wexler has stepped down as part of the live shows, and Henkin, a specialist with Baltimore County Public School’s Birth to Five Services, has carried on without missing a beat, often tapping her husband, Aaron Henkin, a longtime WYPR producer, as co-host. Wexler, who wrote for season three of Apple TV’s The Morning Show and is now finishing a play about an infamous 1925 annulment case, has taken on the role of Stoop education director, presenting storytelling workshops and collaborating with researchers to investigate how first-person storytelling can be applied in the medical field.

Their 20th year will kick off with two days of shows next month at the Creative Alliance, their old stomping ground—yes, Caleb will be back, too—and it’s brought about lots of reflection on where they’ve been and what’s next.

For now, though, Henkin is mostly just amazed that Stoop continues to exist in the very best way.

“It has been an incredibly loving act to produce this show in Baltimore,” says Henkin. “I am very grateful. And that is what I continue to be—grateful that people still come out for it, that I am still surprised by stories, that I’m still incredibly moved by stories. I definitely think it has made me a better human being.”