Director’s Statement

Roadside Theater's core activity is conceptualizing, writing, staging, and touring plays. Sometimes we do this solely from within our company; at other times by collaborating with other professional artists and national theater companies; and in still other instances in league with talented singers, musicians, storytellers, and dancers who don't make their living as artists.

We think of each new play as an experiment, not just in content, but in form. Our artistic process is one of taking chances and learning. While practicing our profession, we have made two collateral discoveries that we think are noteworthy: A proven way to help a community build bridges across divides of class, race, and ethnicity, and a method to engage all parts of a community in publicly telling its stories.

The impetus to build bridges over divisions of class, race, and ethnicity came from a play created with Junebug Productions, the African American company from New Orleans. Junebug/Jack is about the historical and present-day relationships between black and white working class southerners, so naturally we wanted black and white working-class people to attend. The problem is that black and white working-class people do not typically go out together (or separately, for that matter) to the professional theater.

Our solution was to ask the sponsors of Junebug/Jack, which is a musical, to pull together a group of singers from different quarters of their community - for example, from their white Methodist church, from their black AME Zion church, from their integrated high school, and from their women's choir. With their director, this new community chorus would rehearse the show's music over the course of several months, and then in final rehearsals, I, as the play's director, would stage them into the production. Junebug/Jack would swell from a cast of our six to say twenty-two.

Out of support for their family and friends, as well as curiosity about this new thing happening in their community, large numbers of people showed up for the performances who would not otherwise have attended. And not only did the community's talent make the play more exciting, the rehearsal process brought seemingly unlike people together around their common passion for singing. Relationships were formed, bringing with them insights into the universals that we share. Subsequently, if enough interest was expressed, which was often the case, we offered to help a community continue building these relationships. To accomplish this, we employed a second discovery, a methodology that helps a community raise and appreciate its voice.

After a decade of national touring, everyone at Roadside became conscious of the fact that our performances were better when a broad cross-section of the host community was present; such audience diversity, we noticed, raised the emotional thermometer and I.Q. in the auditorium. The key to sustaining this audience diversity was learning that people want to participate, not just watch.

In response, we developed a residency model that rests on four broad principles we call our pillars: Partnerships and collaborations with an inclusive range of community organizations; local leadership; engagement over the course of at least several years; and our flexibility to alternate between the role of teacher and student. Roadside's method can be represented as a circle that rests on these pillars, but the different points of activity on the circle don't necessarily occur as discreet events.

Here's how it works. The first point on the circle is when we come into a community and perform from our repertoire of original plays, like we did with Junebug/Jack. People see and evaluate what we do. In interactive workshops following the performances, we explain our history and our artistic process.

At the second point of a residency, we invite community people to come together to share their music and stories. In structured music and story circles, participants begin to hear and appreciate their own voices. We pick a theme for the circles - maybe some important incident in their local history or a current event. This becomes compelling, like fresh news, because participants often hear new information about a common experience. From these ongoing circles, a complex sense of a particular place begins to emerge.

The songs and stories, which are often recorded, become the basic ingredients for the community celebrations that end the second phase. We often have these festivities around community-wide potluck suppers. Onstage, people play music, sing, and tell the stories that they've by now started to craft. All such celebrations are composed of many voices, because throughout the residency we insist on keeping the door open for new people to participate.

In the third phase of our process, the community stories and songs become the natural resource for creating drama. Nascent and experienced community playwrights, producers, directors, actors, and designers use this body of material to conceptualize, write, and produce plays. (Of course, the material lends itself equally to other performing arts forms, such as dance.) We help as necessary, filling the gaps of information and inexperience.

The fourth point on the circle comes after the production is up and running. We suggest ways for residents to honor their local artists and leaders, and we help broker an infrastructure to establish their theater in the community. We introduce our new peers to the national network of artists and communities similarly engaged. Now the local community has a vehicle to continue exploring its story, and the theater field has a new member.

We now come to the curious part of our journey of discovery: Because both the community chorus and residency method work in just about any situation, in any community, we reasoned that there would be great interest in employing them. Certainly the rhetoric of local and national leaders in the philanthropic and public sectors suggested a concern about social divisions and the democratic social contract that these divisions threatened to cancel. And surely, we thought, the not-for-profit theater would not turn its back on the opportunity to have a larger and more diverse audience.

Reluctantly, we've had to conclude that we misunderstood. Presently our society does not have a firm commitment to the outcomes that our discoveries make possible; quick fixes that mask exclusion are preferred to the more arduous process of social change. The good thing, however, about such discoveries is that they remain ready to be enacted, like a promising play script.

—Dudley Cocke
Director, Roadside Theater

Aug. 2002 Statement
Oct. 2001 Statement