The funeral home apprentice who brings history to life at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant

DESMET, S.D. — It was not exactly perfect timing, when leaders of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant asked Nicole Berg to take on the job of co-director this past summer. But she was, in many ways, the perfect choice.

The 22-year-old grew up performing in the pageant, an annual outdoor theater event that draws an audience from around the world to this small town where Ingalls Wilder once lived. Each summer, local actors perform scenes from her books on the same windswept prairie the author once roamed.

Berg has come to feel a sense of ownership in the 50-year pageant tradition. “When you grow up here,” she said, “either you don’t care about it at all, or you feel a little possessive of it.”

But as the pageant’s board of directors tried and failed last spring to find someone to take the reins, Berg was on the cusp of a new career. She had just finished her studies in funeral service and mortuary science; while preparing to take three high-stakes licensing exams, she was also working at a local funeral home as an apprentice. It was hard to imagine finding time to run the pageant, too: casting actors, overseeing the intricacies of costumes and lighting, and managing three-hour rehearsals.

Berg was daunted, but the alternative was unthinkable. “I was like, ‘We can’t not have a pageant,’” she recalled, sitting in a cool autumn breeze one morning in September on the porch of the Ingalls Homestead, a re-creation of the farm where the family settled in the 1880s. “When you see how happy it makes people — people who say they wanted to come for years, and finally made it — you know you were a part of that for them.”

Produced every year since 1971, the pageant has helped make DeSmet a place of pilgrimage for Laura Ingalls Wilder disciples. They travel to the shows — staged at dusk on nine nights in July — from dozens of states and nearly as many countries, including China, Turkey, Brazil, and Switzerland. Between the pageant and other historic sites, including a school Laura attended and the cemetery where most of the family is buried, DeSmet draws some 30,000 visitors each year.

For the young actors who take on the roles of the four Ingalls sisters every summer — often aging up from Grace to Carrie to Laura to Mary — a sense of responsibility grows with them. “You want to get it right, for the people who would know the difference,” said Clara Carstensen, a 14-year-old who played Carrie in 2021 and Mary this year.

Still, for most 21st-century teenagers, the tales of settlers’ hardships have limited appeal. Despite a general lack of things for local kids to do — lounging on the high-jump mats at the school track was a prime activity in her youth, said Berg — few of her classmates joined her in the pageant cast.

“DeSmet’s a sports town,” she explained succinctly.

The daughter of a local doctor and a mom who immigrated from the Philippines, Berg was perhaps destined to be different. When her eighth-grade science class dissected a fetal pig, and Berg faced the task with aplomb, some students joked she would make a good mortician. Rather than being embarrassed, she gave the idea serious consideration, and warmed to it.

The skills she taps at the local funeral home — listening closely to each grieving family, and striving to give them what they need most — mirror what makes her a good director. “You have to quickly figure out each actor’s learning style, and how to give them feedback,” she said. “Do they need praise, or specific instructions?”

Berg admits she hasn’t read all the “Little House” books. She didn’t have a TV growing up, so she never saw the TV version with Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon (locals look down on it anyhow). At times, when tourists marvel at the beauty of the prairie, “We don’t really get it,” she said, “because we’re here, and to us, this is normal.”

But there are moments when she stops and notices.

“The way the books describe it, people think it’s romanticized,” she said. “But in the summer, when the plants are in their prime, it’s hard not to romanticize, it’s all so pretty. . . . When you’re out here then, you really feel it.”

This summer’s production went smoothly — until a COVID outbreak in the cast wreaked havoc. Sick herself and quarantined at home, Berg and her co-director had only days to find replacements for key roles, including Ma Ingalls. (Carstensen’s mom bravely volunteered, and memorized most of her lines in a matter of days.)

By the end of the pageant run, weary and covered with mosquito bites, Berg was ready for a break. But as always, it did not take long for her to start thinking about next year: the friendships that would take root backstage; the young actors who would come into their own, the same way she once had, emerging from shyness to boldly hold their own under the lights.

One day, Berg thinks, she may venture forth to a bigger place, to see what life is like in a city. But she suspects she will come back to DeSmet to settle down and raise her own kids “in a place where they’ll be nice and bored.”

Gazing out across the prairie from the homestead porch, her hair in a long, dark braid down her back, Berg pondered the enduring appeal of the world described in the “Little House” books.

“Little things mattered,” she said. “People love that.”

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