Highlights of Roadside’s History

1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2001+

1976 Roadside scripts, produces, and begins touring regionally and nationally Red Fox/Second Hangin’, its first full length play. Red Fox premieres in Whitesburg, KY, and off-Broadway in New York City. Written from oral history and archival research, the play explores the coming of the first coal and timber industrialists to the mountains. Their arrival in 1891 on the Appalachian frontier was to be the watershed moment in the 20^th century history of the region.

• Red Fox/Second Hangin’ establishes the company’s authenticity and artistic reputation in its home community, and draws the attention of the national press to its work.

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1980 Roadside scripts, produces, and tours Pretty Polly, its first musical theater work. Roadside’s original musical compositions and harmony singing will become hallmarks of the ensemble’s performances. Pretty Polly is the first of the Pine Mountain Trilogy, a trio of plays that dramatize the history of six generations of an Appalachian family, 1840 to 1969.

• With the development of the Trilogy, Roadside builds a permanent ensemble of artists and managers.
• Touring the Trilogy helps Roadside build new, working class and economically poor theater audiences nationally, and brings the company recognition in the U.S. arts field as one of the nation’s few professional ensemble theaters.
• Roadside is the only rural theater selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its Ongoing Ensembles award.

1981 Roadside begins performing internationally with trips to Sweden and Denmark.

• In 1989, Roadside performs its Pine Mountain Trilogy at the London International Festival of Theatre, followed by a tour to the coalmining valleys of Wales.
• The Wales tour attracts international media attention as a result of the bitter strike then occurring in the Appalachian coalfields and the privatization of the Welsh mines.
• In 1993, Roadside is invited to perform in the Czech Republic and meets President (and playwright) Vaclav Havel, who attends a performance.
• In 1994, Roadside presents Junebug/Jack and RoadBug at the South Bank Centre’s "Festival of the American South" in London.

1988 In order to broaden and deepen interaction with working class and poor communities regionally and nationally, the company decides to risk its economically successful one and two day touring engagements by replacing them with long-term, often multi-year community residencies. The theater forms partnerships with diverse audiences and local organizations to uncover and celebrate the local life of the host community and to use this celebration as a basis to address their issues; to produce original, community-created plays; and to found new theaters.

• Based on six years of tracking by an independent research firm, Roadside’s national audience comes to look strikingly different from the typical upper-middle class professional theater audience: 73 percent earn less than $50,000 annually and 30 percent of those earn $20,000 or less annually. Forty-five percent are college graduates.
• Roadside’s new residency model builds the skills of the ensemble and increases new play production.

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1990 Roadside expands its efforts to focus attention on the rich history of grassroots theater in the United States by teaching in colleges and universities.

• A three-year (1990-1993) residency at Cornell University includes the design and teaching of a course, "Issues in Community Based Art," a national symposium on the grassroots theater movement from historical and contemporary perspectives, and a retrospective of Roadside's plays.
• Over the next eight years, Roadside hones its higher education methodology through teaching residencies at The College of William and Mary and Arizona State University.

1991 Roadside begins creating intercultural plays with other culturally specific, professional theaters.

• As the result of a 10-year cultural exchange and sharing of the stage with Junebug Productions, the New Orleans based African American theater company, Roadside and Junebug co-create and tour two musical plays, Junebug/Jack and RoadBug.
• The plays bring together working class black and white audiences to talk about their differences and celebrate what they hold in common.
• In 1996, Roadside celebrates the 11th year of a projected 20-year cultural exchange with traditional Native American artists of Pueblo Zuni in New Mexico with the co-creation and touring of the bi-lingual play, Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons.
• The success of the play leads to the founding of Idiwanan An Chawe, the first Zuni language theater.
• In 1998-2002, Teatro Pregones from the Bronx joins Roadside and Junebug to create and tour nationally a musical, Promise of a Love Song, which has a cast of six plus a six-member band.

1993-2000 Roadside Theater begins collaborating locally and nationally to create and tour plays that bring together on the stage professional, folk, and amateur artists.

• Interracial choirs assembled from different churches in the host community are incorporated into Junebug/Jack performances.
• The company works with a women’s shelter to create Voices from the Battlefront, a play with music that addresses abuse in Appalachia. The cast of Voices includes survivors of domestic violence, shelter staff, and Roadside actors.
• A cancer prevention program partners with Roadside to teach community groups to write and perform plays from their personal stories about cancer. Roadside’s professional actors participate in several of these productions.
• Roadside creates and tours New Ground Revival, a musical play written and performed with the Mullins Family Singers, three generations of Appalachian gospel singers who represent a 150-year family tradition.
• New Ground performances are part of a three-year exchange with the farming and ranching community of Choteau, Montana. A Choteau community theater also creates two plays from their traditions, one of which tours to Appalachian audiences.
• These collaborations and others like them deepen Roadside’s exploration of its Appalachian musical traditions. Two compact discs, Wings to Fly and Journeys Home, feature the theater’s original music and the talent of its collaborators in Zuni and Appalachia.

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2001-2002 Roadside mentors community groups eager to find a public voice for their own stories. The company releases the music CD Wings To Fly (Copper Creek Records) and the book/spoken word CD set, Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni/Appalachia Collaboration (Zuni A:shiwi Press) and premieres its original musical, Music From Home.

• Roadside facilitates a year-long storytelling/playmaking residency with community members in Patapsco, Maryland. The residency results in the creation of a community theater and the premieres of five original performances: Weaving the Thread of Community, Varying the Pattern, A Winter's Feast, Inside the Memory Box, and A Completely Different World.
• Roadside's Dudley Cocke co-creates and co-directs Why the Cowboy Sings, which previews at the 18th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, and premieres at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City.
• Roadside, with the East Bay Center as its organizational partner, works with Mien, Laotian, African American, and Mexican American communities in the Iron Triangle area outside of San Francisco, CA to create Stranger at the Table, which is presented to full houses in each community.
• Roadside, Junebug Productions, and Pregones Theater present Promise of a Love Song and facilitate storytelling workshops and music jams as a part of the cross-cultural Tamejavi Festival in Fresno, California.
• Roadside teaches its grassroots theater course at the University of Akron in Ohio, which results in a student production, Circle Stories.
• Roadside produces Cumberland Mountain Memories, a six-part radio series based on the company's first original play, Red Fox/Second Hangin'. The show originally aired in November 2002 on WMMT-FM, Community Radio, which broadcasts across eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southern West Virginia and streams live on the internet.

2003 Roadside and Idiwanan An Chawe premiere Zuni Meets Appalachia, a performance for children and families, at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City and at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. Roadside and Idiwanan's book, Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni--Appalachia Collaboration is awarded the Silver Addy for Excellence by the American Advertising Federation.

2004 Nashville Jazz Workshop presents a workshop peformance of Betsy, a collaboration between Roadside and jazz pianist Beegie Adair. Betsy explores the intersection of jazz and bluegrass music and how the two musical traditions continue to shape our American identity.

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