Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

278 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
Arbus regularly works at the Woodburne Correctional
Facility, two and a half hours outside of the city, both to
help the prisoners and further learn about Shakespeare’s
play and the theatrical process. And the scene of one of
modern drama’s most famous productions took place in
a prison: in 1957, a production of Waiting for Godot—
which had up until then puzzled critics and audiences
alike—found a rapturous and understanding crowd at
San Quentin Prison. The Marin Shakespeare Company
has kept up this practice to this day with its Shakespeare
for Social Justice program, which works with inmates at
San Quentin, Solano Prison, and with veteran populations
in the area. Shakespeare, in these productions, has the
potential to be more vital than in a traditional setting—
to become a way for everyone, even those overlooked by
most of society, to discover theatre’s essential humanity.
A prominent presence in the community-based theatre
movement is the Cornerstone Theater, founded in
1986 by Bill Rauch and Alison Carey and now headed by
Michael John Garcés. The Cornerstone’s goal has been to
engage with local cultural groups to create new theatrical
works (often based on classic dramas) adapted to each
group’s interests, fears, and aspirations. These works are
then performed—by the merged Cornerstone and community
groups—within the community, usually on a free
or pay-what-you-can basis. The response is usually electric:
not only are these plays heralded as absorbing and
entertaining, but they initiate new cultural discourse and
even social change in almost every community where they
have been engaged. Examples of Cornerstone’s work are
as varied as American culture itself: for example Tartoof,
adapted from Molière’s Tartuffe and portraying a disintegrating
farm family with a cast and crew of fifty-five
Kansans as performed in Norcatur, Kansas (population
215); Romeo & Juliet, performed by a racially integrated
cast in Port Gibson, Mississippi (population 2,371); and
more recently, company cofounder Alison Carey’s 2014–
2015 California: The Tempest, which reimagines Shakespeare’s
play The Tempest in California with casts drawn
from communities up and down the western coast.
Rauch and Carey’s vision was inspired by the influential
Theatre of the Oppressed, a movement started in Brazil
by Augusto Boal that focused on using theatre as a tool
for social good. The founders of Cornerstone, echoing one
of Boal’s famous mission statements, believed that their
theatre should be “a rehearsal for changing the world.”
In asserting this goal, Rauch reached back to the most
ancient role of theatre as the broadest possible community
forum—not merely an entertainment for an elite “theatergoing”
class but a “participatory ceremony involving
truth, fiction, struggle, and art, welded together into performance
and witnessing.” They have certainly achieved
this mission, and in many places around the country his
successors are clearly continuing in this tradition.
Blue Man Group, now running lavish and
apparently permanent productions in six cities
in the United States and Europe, began as
an unknown three-man percussion ensemble
performing in the streets and eventually in
a tiny off-Broadway theatre. Extraordinary
drumming, lighting, physical dexterity, and
the now-famous iridescent blue makeup have
characterized Group performers since the
beginning. © Geraint Lewis