Director’s Statement

Asking Questions--Pursuing Answers

In 1975, Roadside asked itself: Can a theater that taps local life as its source appeal to a wide cross section of people at home and away? How would such a theater fare against the increasingly strong waves of homogenization generated by commercial art and its ally mass advertising? How would such a theater do at home in the face of the large investment in a single story about the region promulgated by the absentee energy conglomerates that have controlled the coalfield economy for the past 100 years?

Our first full-length play, Red Fox/Second Hangin', went right at these questions as it pitted the official written history of the region's first coal boom against the people's oral history.

For the first year or so, when Red Fox toured to Appalachian community centers or was performed in the theater's revival tent pitched on a wide place in a small mountain community, it was not unusual for members of the audience to interrupt the performance with a new historical fact or a relevant story. Tough on the actors, it made for good drama. When Red Fox eventually went off-Broadway and then on to tour the United States, the chance to experience a people's history was what unfailingly attracted a crowd.

Roadside has continued to create homegrown plays about Appalachia and to tour them nationally. We also wanted to put our region's story in play with the stories of other places and people, so we set about creating dramas with professional African American artists in Louisiana and Mississippi, Puerto Rican and Dominican actors and musicians in the Bronx, Mexican and Mien artists in Richmond, California, and Native American storytellers, singers, and dancers in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico.

All in all, we have created fifty-one plays and worked in 43 states. And in multi-year cultural development residencies, we have helped hundreds of communities across the country create public performances that shine a light on their own history and local life.

As a special project, over the next four years we plan to organize our extensive archive, which includes play scripts; audio and video recordings of performances, rehearsals, and interviews; electronic files of our national audience demographics; and much more.

Using the archive as a base of information, we will publish an anthology of selected Roadside plays (the first such Appalachian plays extant) and a companion volume of commissioned essays by a range of scholars and practitioners that address the question: What will be the critical questions for activist theater artists in the next 40 years?

If you have an interest in this question for the future, we are eager to hear from you. Email us at roadsidetheater@verizon.net.

—Dudley Cocke
Director, Roadside Theater

Mar. 2004 Statement
Aug. 2002 Statement
Oct. 2001 Statement