Quick Facts about Roadside Theater

• Mission
• Place and Date of Founding
• Brief Description
• Touring Statistics
• Who is Roadside's Audience?
• Selected Chronological List of Prizes, Grants, Honors, Residencies, Tours
• More Information

Mission

Roadside Theater is creating a body of drama based on the history and lives of Appalachian people and collaborating with others nationally who are dramatizing their local life.

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Place and Date of Founding

Roadside Theater was founded in 1975 in Whitesburg, Kentucky, as a part of Appalshop. Appalshop, founded in 1969, is a multi-disciplinary, rural arts and education center which, for the past 34 years, has been producing and distributing (nationally and internationally) film, video, audio recordings, radio, and theater that celebrates the culture and voices the concerns of the 20 million people living in the 13 state Appalachian region.

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Brief Description

Roadside Theater is a professional ensemble theater located in the heart of the Appalachian Mountain coalfields of rural eastern Kentucky. Since 1975, the company has been writing, performing in its home theater, and touring nationally (and occasionally internationally) original plays drawn from the history and rich culture of its mountain home.

It is the character of Roadside’s relationship with its audiences that defines its work. Roadside’s audiences are a broad cross-section of the American public, including a significant number of habitual theatergoers as well as many attending professional theater for the first time.

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Touring Statistics

Roadside Theater :

• has toured to 43 states. (See Map)
• has been in residence at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Theater for the New City, and Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City.
• has performed at Lincoln Center.
• has represented the United States at international theater festivals in London, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia.
• from 2000 through 2004, conducted 451 performances and workshops in 140 communities in 30 states.
  

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Who Is Roadside's Audience?

Based on six years of tracking (1991-1997) by the AMS Planning and Research Corporation in Connecticut, 70% of Roadside Theater's national audience live in rural communities and 33% are people of color.

43% of Roadside's national audience earn between $25,000 and $50,000 annually; 30% earn less than $24,000 a year.

In 1999, the median income for people 18 years and older in the U.S. was $21,250. 15% of the population earned $50,000 a year or more.

According to several sets of data, the typical not-for-profit professional theater draws 80% of its audience from the top 15% of the U.S. population, measured by income. In contrast, Roadside Theater draws 73% of its audience from 85% of the population, measured by income.

Research findings show a close correlation between an individual's earnings and educational level.

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Selected Chronological List of Prizes, Grants, Honors, Residencies, Tours

1976-1977 "Urban Appalachian Tour," theater and film tour to major Midwestern cities with large Appalachian populations.

1977 Co-founder of Alternate ROOTS, a coalition of grassroots performing artists in the southeastern United States.

1978 Residency at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City.

1981 "The Other America" Festivals, Sweden, Denmark.

1982 San Francisco Peoples Theater Festival.

1983 "Tell Me A Story, Sing Me A Song" festival with Junebug Productions and A Traveling Jewish Theater, Anniston, Alabama, and Whitesburg, Kentucky; 30-minute video documentary is distributed nationally.

1984 Co-founder of the American Festival Project, a national coalition of performing artists collaborating with communities to make conversations about issues of race, class, and injustice an exciting part of the community’s life.

1984 Ongoing Ensembles Award, National Endowment for the Arts (eight awards granted nationally).

1987 Los Angeles International Theater Festival.

1988 Statewide North Dakota Tour, connecting the stories of participating communities through daily reporting of the tour on public radio.

1989 London International Festival of Theatre, Pine Mountain Trilogy. Subsequent tour to the coalmining valleys of Wales, attracting international media attention as a result of a bitter coal strike taking place back home in southwest Virginia.

1990-1993 Three-year residency at Cornell University.

1992 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund five-year grant for the theater’s leadership in diversifying American theater audiences.

1993 United States and Czech Republic performance exchange with theaters in Prague and Brno. Roadside meets President (and playwright) Vaclav Havel, who attends a performance.

1993-1996 Residency in Dayton, Ohio involving more than 100 community story circles, the creation of a Dayton stories archive, and the creation of two popular and critically acclaimed Dayton plays.

1996 Residency at The College of William and Mary. Roadside member Dudley Cocke is named Eminent Professor of Theater.

1996-1999 Three-year residency at Arizona State University involving 35 campus and community partners as well as Idiwanan An Chawe from Zuni, New Mexico.

2000 - 2001 Two-year residency in Patapsco, Maryland involving an oral history collection project and the creation and presentation of five community performances.

2001 Roadside Theater appears on Kentucky Public Television's In Performance at the Governor's Mansion

2002 Roadside member Dudley Cocke co-creates and co-directs Why the Cowboy Sings for the Salt Lake City Olympics.

2002 Eighth Annual Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities (Shared Ideas Realized) awarded to Roadside member Dudley Cocke.

2002 Roadside Theater, in partnership with Appalshop's Voices from Home project, conducts a six-month community-building residency with the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in San Francisco's Iron Triangle. The residency results in the creation and presentation of Stranger at the Table, four different site-based community performances of the same name featuring the stories and music of three diverse cultures--Mien, Mexican-American, and African-American.

2002 Roadside, Pregones Theater, and Junebug Productions perform Promise of a Love Song and conduct workshops as a part of The First Annual Tamejavi Festival.

2002 Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of Virginia's College at Wise presented to Roadside member Ron Short.

2003 Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni--Appalachia Collaboration receives the Silver Addy of Excellence from the American Advertising Federation

2003 Roadside and Idiwanan An Chawe premiere Zuni Meets Appalachia in New York City and Washington, DC.

2003-04 Roadside produces two workshop performances of Betsy, a collaboration with jazz musician Beegie Adair, at the Nashville Jazz Workshop in Tennessee

2004 Roadside playwright/composer Ron Short collaborates with community members, students, and faculty at the University of Virginia's College at Wise to compose the score for Miners and Millhands, a musical; a part of the Continental Harmonies project

2005 Roadside receives the Paul Green New Play Award for its musical Betsy, a collaboration with Beegie Adair

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More Information

For resources from and about Roadside Theater, check out the Store.

For articles by and about Roadside Theater and related subjects, check out the Reading Room.

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