Plays That Incorporate Professional, Folk, and Amateur Artists

In the 1990’s, as the result of its extensive community residency work, Roadside Theater began collaborating locally and nationally to create and tour plays that bring together professional, folk, and amateur artists.

• Interracial choirs assembled from different churches in the host community are incorporated into Junebug/Jack performances, increasing the cast size from six to 20 or more.
• Roadside 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 Revival performances are part of a three-year exchange with a farming and ranching community of Choteau, Montana that created two plays from their own traditions, one of which toured to Appalachian audiences.

Read the Voices from the Battlefront play script