Nina Wise’s
What Just Happened?
The Marsh Berkeley Theater
May 2 – 16, 2026
Saturdays at 8pm
Written & Performed by Nina Wise
Ticket Information
Tickets: $25 – $35 General Seating | $50 & $100 Reserved Seating
60 minutes | No Intermission | Ages 12+
(Please do not bring infants to the show)
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance.
Additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
Special Livestream May 2
Show Description
In What Just Happened, Nina Wise in her signature style builds an improvised performance from the personal and political events which have transpired over the previous 24 hours. Nina originally performed this piece at The Marsh in San Francisco in 2009 and The Marsh Berkeley in 2010 to a sold out audience and received standing ovations and has gone on to perform WJH worldwide. Nina’s work is extremely funny, inspiring comparisons to Lily Tomlin and Feiffer’s cartoons, and also surprisingly poignant. Audiences repeatedly report that they are at one instant laughing so hard they are falling off their seats and the next moment, moved to tears.
Artist Biography
Nina Wise, Theatre Artist and Creator of Motion Theatre
A metaphysical vaudevillian for the new millennium
—Bob Morris, N.Y. Times columnist
Lovingkindness abounds in her work.
—The Village Voice
To experience Nina Wise in performance is to celebrate the gamut of being human. Woven of physical movement, expressive voice, and eloquent narrative, her Motion Theatre is a surprising form of autobiographical performance. The work is warm and compassionate, yet the intellect is never sacrificed.
Originally a performer with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Wise soon set out on her own to create art that incorporated language as well as movement. In 1990, she developed Motion Theatre, a unique improvisational form replaces the bells and whistles of staging and technology with the raw elements universally available to an actor: body, voice, and insight. Motion Theatre draws on Wise’s skills as writer/storyteller, dancer, and intellectual.
Nina Wise has appeared at prestigious venues here and abroad. She has performed at SFMOMA, The Magic Theatre, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Theatre for a New City, Franklin Furnace, Highways, the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, and Intersection for the Arts. She is an artist who finds no venue or subject out of bounds. Her audiences have included think tanks, medical institutions, international conferences, and spiritual centers, her subjects: the environment, death and dying, healing, Jewish identity, Buddhism…even golf.
Nina Wise’s performances have garnered seven Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Awards, and she has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four from the Marin Arts Council. Her stories and articles have appeared widely; her book, A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life, was published in 2002 by Broadway Books. In addition to performing, Wise teaches and lectures. She has been a guest at numerous universities, including the University of Southern California, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, and the University of Wisconsin. She has a substantial following of private students, across the county, and regularly offers courses at Esalen Institute. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, she is a teaching affiliate of Spirit Rock Mediation Center.
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