Do I err on the side of excessive ambition when I
say that if New Haven can be captured onstage, we will have created a
theatrical document which may have much to say about the future of the
American city?
1
--Doug Hughes, Artistic Director Long Wharf Theatre
In 1997 Long Wharf Theatre's newly appointed Artistic Director, Doug
Hughes, arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, driven to discover his adopted
city's "center of civic energy."
2
This energy seemed absent from a site whose diverse neighborhoods
appeared disconnected from each other and from a cohesive sense of
urban identity. Theatre, he believed, could draw together the urban
community and allow the city to look at itself.
3
Yet, Hughes understood that the historical relationship between New
Haven and its professional resident theatres had been as fraught and
disconnected as the urban terrain seemed to be. Both the Yale Repertory
and the Long Wharf theatres focused their energies on producing classical
texts and new works, unreflective of New Haven, and cast mainly
with New York actors. In order to begin revising the relationship
between the theatre and the city, Hughes decided he needed not only to
reflect New Haven via a representational narrative and semiotically
resonant production, but also by inviting the city onstage, casting
local residents alongside professional actors. And he knew just the
company to work with: Cornerstone Theater.
[End Page 197]
Since 1986 Cornerstone Theater has been producing plays adapted and cast
to represent local communities, variously defined by geography,
age, ethnicity, workplace, and birthday, to name only a few. From
1986-1991 the company traveled the United States working mainly
with small rural towns. Illustrative productions include a wild west
Hamlet in Marmarth, North Dakota, a mixed race Romeo and
Juliet in Port Gibson, Mississippi, and an adaptation of the
Oresteia with a Native American reservation in Schurz, Nevada.
4
Cornerstone's urban work in Los Angeles, from 1992 to the present,
includes residencies with Arab Americans citywide (Ghurba),
a multi-lingual senior center (The Toy Truck), and urban postal
workers, librarians, and police officers (Candude).
5
In 1993, Cornerstone collaborated with the Arena Stage and the
[End Page 198]
East of the Anacostia River residents of Washington D.C. to adapt
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, retitled A Community
Carol. Hughes had seen and admired a number of Cornerstone's rural
projects, and had heard of the Arena project. Based on these experiences,
or "pilgrimages" as he referred to them, Hughes contacted co-founders
Alison Carey, the company's most prolific play adapter, and Bill
Rauch, Cornerstone's Artistic Director. Intermittently between the
summer of 1997 and June 2000, Long Wharf, Cornerstone, various civic
organizations, neighborhoods, and residents of New Haven worked together
to produce The Good Person of New Haven. This adaptation of Bertolt
Brecht's The Good Person of Szechuan, set in New Haven and cast
with local residents, manifested, celebrated, and critiqued the city.
6
At the same time, the production process raises questions about what it
means to bring together and stage the city, while helping to reassess
the function of contemporary regional theatre, and the role of the
critic in community-based theatre-making.
With roots in early twentieth-century pageantry, the Little Theatre
Movement, and grassroots performance, community-based theatre has
emerged over the past several decades as a vital aesthetic and social
practice. Many of the scholars associated with the field are,
like myself, also practitioners.
7
While some practitioners ask important questions about the relationship
of academia to the field,
8
and some scholars remain critical of the work's radical potential,
9
moving between the experiential and the analytic can enhance
both the practice and process(ing) of community-based theatre. The
scholar-practitioner can work in partnership with artists to investigate
more deeply the meaning-making potential of the community-based
production process. I began working with Cornerstone Theater in 1994
as a dramaturg and ethnographic observer in Watts, Los Angeles. My
field work resulted in a dissertation, several articles, and a
forthcoming book, as well as initiating my practical work in former
Yugoslavia, creating theatre with youth across ethno-religious borders.
10
It is with this
[End Page 199]
experiential and scholarly background that I begin to investigate the
production process of The Good Person of New Haven. This saga of
institutions, ideals, and individuals requires both the more distanced
stance of the analytic observer and the subjective involvement of the
community-based practitioner. To explore the performance-making process in
terms of location, representation, and reception, this essay borrows from
urban geography, sociology, and performance studies, examining how the
city is staged and not staged in The Good Person of New Haven. I
begin, in the spirit of Michel De Certeau, with a walk through the city.
11
Walking Through New Haven: The City and Cultural
Geography
My understanding of New Haven had been defined through memory and
mediation before I arrived in March 2000 to observe the first read
through of the newly revised Good Person of New Haven script. As
a college student at Dartmouth, and later as a graduate theatre student
at Stanford, I had traveled occasionally through the Yale campus and its
perimeters, careful not to stray too far into what was reported to be
a dangerous and poverty-stricken city. My experience of New Haven was
thus restricted by my perceptions. Urban geographers Leslie King and
Reginald Golledge propose that perceptions, or cognitive structures,
directly influence the individual's understanding of the city.
12
A mental map of a place overlays its physical layout, so that we "see"
a city through mediated accounts. I therefore saw New Haven from the
point of view of the Yale campus as a vaguely undefined surrounding
space of potential danger. But subjective reorientation to the urban
terrain can alter perceptions, shift cognitive structures, and redraw
the mental map.
Years after my initial encounter with the city, having worked with
Cornerstone and written of how memory (re)constructs space,
13
I arrive at the New Haven train station and decide to walk to the Long
Wharf Theatre. I feel my way haptically, without a map, becoming a
somewhat purposeful flâneur.
14
I get lost in the city. I wander under a highway bridge, through a
junkyard, past weathered convenience stores, newly built corporate
structures and an area post-office, before arriving finally
at the theatre, flanked by a vast parking lot and wedged between
a meat-packing plant and an Italian take-out diner. This spatial
isolation seems to visibly challenge Hughes' hope for the theatre
as urban center. The geography of this urban landscape, so different
from the Yale campus, from Hughes' vision, and from the terrain of my
imaginings, begins to reconstruct the city. One layer of New Haven's
genealogy unearths itself: the city as urban space.
[End Page 200]
Cultural geographers such as Henri LeFebvre and Edward Soja have argued
that space is not neutral.
15
The city is a social space inscribed by individual relationships,
determined by and determining the most basic unit of the urban
panorama, the neighborhood--an area that maintains both a physical and
psychological presence among residents. Negotiation among neighborhoods
and community organizations marked the Long Wharf/Cornerstone
collaboration almost from its inception. Although initiated by Hughes'
desire to stage the city, the New Haven Project developed through a grant
encouraging cooperation among arts and neighborhood social organizations.
16
In 1997 Long Wharf's Development Director, Pamela Tatge, came across the
Arts Partnership for Stronger Communities Program, established by the
Connecticut Commission on the Arts. The New Haven Project or The City
Comes Onstage (working project titles from 1997) evolved through the
grant-writing process. An early grant narrative summarizes basic tenets
of the proposed project, as well as situating some of the challenges that
would arise in attempting to spatially and psychically locate New Haven's
civic center: "While New Haven can justifiably define itself
as Connecticut's cultural capital, it has had great difficulty in
defining itself as a community, one united in celebration of its
history, its diversity, and its considerable cultural treasures."
17
Perhaps one of the reasons New Haven had such difficulties
"defining itself as a community" might be the inherent
difficulty of defining anything as a community. Raymond Williams
identifies the term as a keyword, noting both its importance
to cultural studies, and its problematic, positively-inflected,
connotative vagueness.
18
In a well-known study in the 1950s, which has continued to frustrate
sociologists, George A. Hillery Jr. described ninety-four use
definitions of "community" with very little in common among them.
19
In the Arts Partnerships proposal, Long Wharf's use of "community"
suggests the connotative vagueness articulated by Williams, while
illuminating the inherent paradox of attempting to establish this
community across difference. According to the grant narrative, a New
Haven community established through the Arts Partnerships project
would include both commonality (celebration of history and culture)
and diversity. The conundrum of how to both celebrate commonality and
pay homage to difference and cultural exchange recurred throughout the
process of planning, audition, adaptation, and performance of the New
Haven/City Comes Onstage Project. Throughout the project's development,
Long Wharf relied on Cornerstone's experience to balance inclusion and
celebration with selection (and implicit erasure).
[End Page 201]
Cornerstone seemed an ideal partner for an enterprise of the scope
Hughes had begun to imagine. Backed by fifteen years of experience
producing community-based plays, including the Arena Stage co-production,
Cornerstone identified the need to establish local advisory boards
and partnerships and to set up a process that remained open--inviting
ongoing commentary from participants (a process that had deeply frustrated
some Arena Stage staff).
20
Cornerstone also had a reputation for creating imaginative,
well-received, community-specific adaptations. Critical reception
to Community Carol was generally positive and Arena Stage had
sold-out houses for almost the entire run of the show. Cornerstone also
believed in follow-through. Community Carol participant Toni
White-Richardson served on Cornerstone's board and now sits on the
company's National Advisory Circle, while another Community Carol participant, Teeko Parran, is a Cornerstone ensemble member.
Thus, following initial conversations with Carey and Rauch, and spurred
on by the Arts Partnerships grant, Long Wharf established relationships
with various community organizations. Eventually renewed over the
three years of the project's development, the grant included the Ethnic
Heritage Center, Project LEAP [Leadership, Education and Athletics], and
Centro San Jose (later transferred to Pequenas Ligas de New Haven when
Executive Director, Peter Noble, left the first organization for
the second). The community partners believed that the New Haven Project
would further their various missions of cultural expression, dialogue,
and opportunity. The selection of these partners also established an
ethnically and somewhat geographically diverse representation of New
Haven. Centro San Jose and Pequenas focus their attention on New Haven's
Hispanic population, Project LEAP works mainly with African Americans,
and the Ethnic Heritage Center brings together African American, Italian,
Jewish, Ukranian, Polish, and Irish residents.
Early in the process, the project moved from a mainly ethnic
representation of the city's differences, marked by the collaborating
partnerships, to a representation based in the more physical and
psychologically grounded terrain of the neighborhood. During the
summer of 1998, the participating partners determined that to be more
inclusive, the workshops should be held in five sites embracing
a range of geographic, demographic and ethnic differences. The sites
chosen--The Hill, Newhallville, Westville/Beaver Hills, Wooster Square
and Fair Haven--did indeed represent a diverse cross-section of New
Haven. According to several media reports, and Long Wharf and Cornerstone
records, ongoing workshops at the five sites and sixteen additional
"one shot" workshops held in the fall of 1998 included New Haven residents
embodying a range of ages, ethnic backgrounds, and residence locations
within the city. That diversity, according to participants, was in itself
exciting. Dana Fripp, who appeared in both the workshop and final
productions of Good Person, comments on her spring 1999 audition,
"I got a call from [site coordinator] Michelle Sepulveda, who was worried
about getting enough auditioners to the school. Well,
[End Page 202]
they had nothing to worry about. When I got there it looked like about
75-80 people at one junior high. There was such a buzz! All ages
and races, fantastic!"
21
The workshops resulted in a Fall 1998 presentation, focused on oral
history and story-telling representing a wide variety of experiences
in the city.
Yet, the foregrounding of diversity in age and race, and the assumption
that a geographic cross-section of the city's neighborhoods would result
in an accurately embodied representation of the city, elides some of
the complexities of urban representation, particularly when the project
moved from oral history to adaptation. Fripp further illuminates some
of these complications:
It's interesting for me where I live in Westville,
you're so close to the Hill [a lower income area], where it looks so
different. When black people started moving in here, you got a different
sense of the city just by crossing the street. That would have been a
very interesting thing to address [in the play]. Just by waiting for
the light to change you leave an area that was predominantly Jewish,
that became a Jewish African American mix . . . then right across the
street you see boarded up buildings.
Fripp's commentary points towards the relationship between neighborhood
and culture as more than a simple mapping of race and ethnicity onto
space. Fluid borders and migration patterns impact the physical and
psychological character of the neighborhood.
King and Golledge cite studies that conservatively estimate intra-urban
mobility at 15%-20% of the city population.
22
Migration factors often center on available housing and economic
opportunity, and are perceived differently dependent upon class and
race. This perceptual difference became a point of contention in the
adaptation process. In an early scene in The Good Person of New
Haven, angels who have come to earth in search of a good person
discover New Haven history books in the local library. They read from
them throughout the first half of the play, providing a selective
historical context for New Haven's present enunciation of itself in
performance.
Angel 2: [reading from book] "Richard Lee, then mayor of
our fair city, went into the tenements on Oak Street in the 1950's. He
was so horrified by what he saw--no heat, no running water, no
electricity--that he went outside, sat down on the curb and put his head
in his hands. He promised himself then and there he'd do something about
it, and thus was Urban Renewal born."
Angel 3: Except I met some lovely older ladies who lived here when he
came. Those tenements were their homes. They scrubbed them spotless every
Saturday. They loved their homes on Oak Street, and Dick Lee tore them
down. It's been 30 years, and they still HATE him. They HATE him.
[33-34]
The third angel's response complicates the mythology of urban renewal and
migration patterns. Dialectic engagement between the angels illuminates
how subjective perceptions impact interpretation of an event through
its historical and experientially mediated context. Space is not neutral.
Varying perceptual understandings of migration patterns and living
conditions were also expressed at the first read through of the
revised Good Person script, which I
[End Page 203]
attended following my initial wanderings. In a discussion following
the read through, Michael Gaetano, a fourteen-year-old from Hamden (a
suburb adjoining New Haven), commented on the difference between his
town and the depressed Newhallville neighborhood he passed each day in
his mother's car on the way to school. A photo of Gaetano in front of
his mother's house in the Hamden Journal depicts a comfortable
two-story Colonial structure with a manicured lawn.
23
"It's just down the hill," he explained about Newhallville, "but there's
trash on the lawns, and nothing seems taken care of. How could they
let life slip away like that?" At the read-through, an older African
American cast member, Horace Little, responded to Gaetano somewhat
shortly: "People don't always let themselves slip away. A lot
of times they started there." Little repeats the story, with a more
conciliatory tone, in an article in New Haven's Advocate,
"He hadn't lived there, so he didn't know."
24
The performance-making process, with numerous opportunities for
input from participants throughout script selection, adaptation, and
performance, encouraged this kind of exchange: an exchange that enabled
relationships across neighborhoods, ethnicity, and class, and expanded
perceptions about the relationship between space and culture. At the
same time, the process revealed complications that were not represented
in performance--migration patterns in Westville and the Hill, and
the more structural socio-economic factors impacting the aesthetic
differences between Hamden and Newhallville. Negotiations between
individual relationships, social roles, and structural circumstances
grounds ongoing discourse in social theory.
The City as Socio-structural and Interpersonal
Landscape
In his 1985 book, The Symbolic Construction of Community, sociologist Anthony Cohen summarizes an understanding of the city
in terms of social roles and urban infrastructure. According to Cohen,
early twentieth-century urban theorists depicted society as constituted by
individuals whose differences become the foundation for urban integration
and solidarity.
25
This understanding of society manifests itself in mediated accounts of
the New Haven Project, and assumptions expressed by both Cornerstone
and Long Wharf. Cornerstone states as its mission to "build bridges
between and within diverse communities [believing that] society can
flourish only when its members know and respect one another." In
accordance with early twentieth-century social theory, the company
believes that a healthy society progresses through a coming together
of diverse individuals. In Cornerstone's specific articulation,
theatre can facilitate this social mediation, offering a site in which
social roles can be reimagined and differences bridged, while individuals
retain cultural distinctions. It is a delicate balancing act, at once
echoed and troubled by an article in the New Haven Register.
"'A Little Melting Pot'" (the title is based on a quote from cast
member Adelaida Nuñez) begins by defining several community
participants via their ethnic identity, age, and social roles: "A
20-something African-American drama teacher who does his own one-man
show. A 30-year-old Puerto Rican mother of two who once did a
[End Page 204]
Metropolitan Transit Authority commercial. An 82-year-old Italian
American great-grandfather and GOP leader who has been Santa Claus for
55 Christmases."
26
Like Cornerstone, the article celebrates distinctions among cast
members, implying that the New Haven Project allows for interaction
across difference. Yet, instead of maintaining these distinctions,
the article later elides individual differences in an almost utopic
narrative of community: "[The show's] cast members look and sound a
lot like you and me. That's because they are our friends and relatives,
our neighbors and teachers."
27
On their own, the statements only simplify the negotiation of difference
and unity in the performance process. The statements are further
complicated, however, by the fact that the writer had perceived a
distinction that did not actually exist. Aaron Jafferis, the "African
American drama teacher," looks and defines himself as white. While
it is difficult to establish why the writer misperceived Jafferis'
racial identity, one factor could be that Jafferis, a hip-hop poet,
better fit the racial category of "black" than "white" in terms of
the practice of his social role. The rehearsal process, in contrast,
offers a site for a more subtle negotiation and reconception of
individuals beyond their typed social roles.
As cited in Long Wharf's publicity literature--a format which does not
generally invite complex critical discourse--comments from participants
involved in the process can seem simple and selective. The History of
the New Haven Project pamphlet quotes several cast members' response
to the project, including those of Michael Gaetano ("It's been a great
opportunity to get to know other people in this area!") and Gloria
Richardson ("We've become a family"). The process of theatre-making
as a medium for individual exchange, and the renegotiation of social
perceptions, is more complexly related by Dana Fripp. I quote at length
her account of perceptual shifts in her relationship with two cast
members, Michelle Masa and Adelaida Nuñez, to indicate the subtlety
of social transactions that can arise through the rehearsal process:
One of the most important things [about the process] was
being up in the [dressing room] trailer with the other women. I remember
the first time I saw Michele Masa, who played Mrs. Cash. I told
her this week, "I looked at you and I said, that is a beautiful woman,
she will never talk to me." I had all these preconceived notions about
who people are, what they were going to be like to work with, and all
of that just melted away. Michele and I got so close, I feel like it's
just been orchestrated by God.
I didn't know what to make of Addy [Adelaida Nuñez]
the first time through. I blame myself in part--maybe you're not
always meant to jive with everybody--but being in that trailer with her
and watching her with her daughters and watching her work so hard on
every line and everything, her level of commitment, how beautiful her
daughters are, it's a credit to her, that she's here every single day,
covering another role [Eddie's Mother]. Just sitting with her and hearing
about her life and what she has been through, and in the midst of this
she graduates with her GED. I can not tell you the level of respect I
have for this girl--this woman now.
You know something, I could have missed this, I could
have been left with this one-time assessment of her . . . . It's a
small picture of what it should be like out there beyond the trailer,
as far as the way we support one another in the city. We don't all grow
up in the same way, but if you are a stranger with animosity trying to
pick on one of us in this very diverse trailer, you'd be better off in
an alley with junk yard dogs. It was just a--a lot of people describe
it as spiritual. It became more than just a project.
[End Page 205]
Fripp's comments illustrate how the day to day interactions engaged
within the performance process remapped her initial perceptions of
individuals. Her assessment of the situation illuminates both the
potential for the performance-making process as a model for inclusive
relationships in the city ("it's a small picture of what it should be
like out there"), and a suggestion of how new symbolic boundaries in
fact depend upon exclusion ("if you are a stranger with animosity trying
to pick on one of us . . . you'd be better off in an alley with junk
yard dogs"). The complexity of perceptual negotiations of belonging
and boundaries is reflected not only in the relationships among
project participants, but also in the relationship between participants
and the Long Wharf Theatre. As the process developed, the theatre became
situated variously as an elitist institution, a central mediator, and
a catalyst for staging the city.
Theatre and Urban Mediation
After making my way to the Long Wharf's lobby, the most striking
spatial aspect of the theatre to me was the familiarity of its interior
design. The blown-up black and white production photographs, posted
media reviews, headshots of the acting company, and encouragements to
become a subscribing member, reminded me of any number of professional
regional theatres. These familiar signs can be stabilizing to some,
while off-putting and unreadable to others. Whatever the reception,
the intention of the regional or resident theatre movement had always
been to develop an inviting local performance space. In working on the
New Haven project to strengthen its urban connection, the Long Wharf
discovered that certain marketing strategies and cultural perceptions
of theatre tended to privilege a non-local audience base.
In part, this audience base derives from the Long Wharf's regional
theatre origins.Jon Jory and Harlan Kleiman founded the company in
1965, at a time of theatrical decentralization, when newly formed
resident and regional theatres were burgeoning. Many of these theatres
were established initially to present a more local and aesthetically
experimental alternative to New York's Broadway theatres. The Long Wharf
still defines itself as "cultivating audiences that reflect
the state of Connecticut and the diversity of its cities as well as its
rural and suburban areas."
28
Like many regional theatres, however, the Long Wharf depends upon a
subscriber base that does not match this inclusive and diversified,
yet locally selective description. According to the company's own
statistics, 20% of its 11,000 member subscriber base resides outside
Connecticut, and 40% resides outside of New Haven county.
29
Doug Hughes himself observed to me that the Long Wharf's 125,000 member
seasonal audience includes mainly older white suburban viewers with an
income base between $50,000-$75,000.
Long Wharf understands the difficulty of serving its more local
audience constituency. The 1997 Arts Partnerships grant narrative
indicates that in contrast to what is reflected in its subscriber
base, New Haven ranks 167th of 169 Connecticut towns in terms of wealth,
and that 21.3% of New Haven's population resides below the poverty line,
compared with 6.8% of Connecticut as a whole.
30
Former Development Director, Pamela Tatge, acknowledges that "the
perception of Long Wharf is that it is a theatre
[End Page 206]
for New York. The prior administration [before Doug Hughes' tenure]
didn't know or care much about the [New Haven] community."
31
Bronx-born Adelaida Nuñez affirms Tatge's assumptions,
noting that she felt initially put off by Long Wharf, and theatre
in general: "I was not raised to like the theatre . . . . It's kind
of like the division of class. There's a certain kind of person who
goes to the theatre. There's a certain kind of person who doesn't go
to the theatre. Then there's a person who doesn't even know about the
theatre. I was the one who didn't even know."
32
The Long Wharf is certainly not alone in reflecting perceptions
that regional theatres serve mainly middle-class audiences. Community
Carol participant Toni White-Richardson had expressed a similar
vision of the Arena Stage prior to Cornerstone's collaborative project
there with the East of the Anacostia River communities. In a January 1996
phone interview, White-Richardson commented that "the Arena is not some
place [Anacostia residents] visit often." She cited as reasons "cost and
the nature of the place . . . . It's not universal enough. Sometimes the
plays seem geared towards--uh, how can I say this--an audience that is not
from Anacostia." While White-Richardson cited the benefits of Arena's
school outreach programs, conceding, "I don't want to take anything from
them," she also definitively stated that, prior to the Community
Carol project, Southeast Washington residents did not perceive of
Arena as reaching out to or including the adults in the community.
33
Adelaida Nuñez suggests one possible reason for the improved
relationship between Long Wharf and New Haven participants: "It's not
just another show about a bunch of white people. It's about all kinds
of people."
34
White-Richardson and Nuñez both articulate the importance of
initial perceptions--that regional theatre is culturally elite--as well
as suggesting that inclusion and involvement can, at least temporarily,
redefine the relationship between a more local audience constituency
and a regional theatre. Arena project coordinator, Tamara Sibley,
suggests that this representational inclusion became a deciding factor
in shifting the relationship between the Arena and the Anacostia
community: "Everywhere people wanted to be involved, the response was
overwhelming. People want an outlet. They were excited about the idea
that they could perform things that they recognized, their own community,
at the Arena. It was a coming together, a bridge to the community and
people were willing to cross that bridge."
35
At the Long Wharf, Doug Hughes also understood and acknowledged
that inclusive storytelling and mutual involvement could improve
the relationship between the theatre and New Haven residents. In
his November 1998 letter to Executive Director of the Connecticut
Commission on the Arts, John Ostrout, Hughes references the diverse,
local audience in attendance at the Fall 1998 neighborhood workshops
presentation at Long Wharf: "New Haven citizens who would never have
looked to Long Wharf as a community center were inside the building
responding favorably to a project defined by the hopes and dreams,
disappointments and defeats of their daily lives."
36[End Page 207]
The process of inviting the community to represent themselves, rather than
to receive what many regional theatres term "outreach performances,"
allowed for increased engagement with the local constituency. Yet,
improved relationships also required a spatial and perceptual shift on
the part of Long Wharf and its staff. While Doug Hughes initially hoped
to make Long Wharf the city's civic center, two years later this notion
changed. Long Wharf now referenced the company's efforts to reverse
the traditional flow of the public-theatre relationship, forming
transactual bonds with the community, rather than serving as the central
agent of cultural engagement.
37
According to Pamela Tatge, one key moment that shifted the relationship
between Long Wharf and the New Haven Project participants from suspicion,
to mediation, to catalyzation, occurred in October 1999 when the Arts
Partnerships grant awarded $100,000 to the Project: "At that point,
the [New Haven] Project didn't belong to the Long Wharf. It belonged
to the community."
Who is the Community?:
Representation and Revision in The Good Person of New Haven
Tatge's sentiments, and others I have elected to cite, offer evidence for
the relative success of the New Haven Project in engaging a diverse group
of community participants in a project that reflected and ultimately
staged the city. But the performance-making process, textual adaptation,
and production reception, as well as my own documentation, all depend
as crucially upon selection as inclusion, upon forgetting as much as
remembering, and upon symbolic agreement as much as acknowledged dissent.
Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner offers the most oft-cited
explications of how a community reflects or expresses itself
through performance. In The Ritual Process, Turner suggests
that this expression is achieved through polyphonic coding including
language, gesture and social gathering that culminates with a moment
of communitas, in which the audience experiences a sense of
togetherness through communal witnessing.
38
Such an understanding of theatre's function is evident in how Doug
Hughes contrasts the community-specific New Haven project with
the Long Wharf's recent Broadway transfer of Wit: "This piece
could never transfer anywhere; it is not work for export, but for
the polis to look at itself." Hughes had expanded on the notion of
the city staging itself in a letter written several years earlier to
the Connecticut Commission on the Arts where he commented on the need
for the city to "come together to witness a theatrical work which grew
from research and from interviews." Yet, this reliance upon interviews,
diverse participation and social transactions perhaps elides another
essential aspect of performance: forgetting. In Cities of the Dead, Joe Roach complicates the meaning-making process established through
performance, noting that the process is marked as much by reinvention as
transmission, "memory is a process that depends crucially on forgetting."
39
In order to stage the city--to invite the city onstage, to provide the
opportunity for the polis to look at itself, to create relationships
with diverse populations--selections had to be made. The representation
of certain aspects of the city required the forgetting of others.
[End Page 208]
I raise questions here not about the possibility of forging relationships
and building bridges in the theatre-making process, but about the
ease with which the process is sometimes implied to proceed. Dissent
is often forgotten in order to remember a more enclosed understanding
of "community." This dissent emerges within undefined symbolic
discourse, such as the notion of goodness. Community participant Aaron
Jafferis explains that the notion of a "good neighborhood" shifts
depending on the individual.
40
Cohen proposes that this disagreement about symbolic terms such as
"good," more accurately represents how communities are imagined. Symbols
are effective in forging this understanding of community because they
are imprecise.
41
While the performance-making process can indeed bring people together,
and engage individual relationships, the process of community formation
remains dependent upon not defining the symbols that bring
together the community.
In Long Creek, Oregon, a logging town where Cornerstone had previously
produced The Good Person of Long Creek in 1988,
42
residents of the small town, with a population of 230 residents, had
also disagreed about the notion of "goodness." Half the town believed
that the lead character of Brecht's play, and Cornerstone's adaptation,
could not be "good" because, in one version of the play, she has a
child out of wedlock. The tension between the need to elide differences
in symbolic understandings, and the production of a Brecht play which
seems to depend upon dialectical engagement, forms yet another terrain
for the complex investigation of urban representation.
As with most phases of the New Haven Project, community participants
were invited to contribute their input in choosing the source text to be
adapted for eventual production on Long Wharf's main stage. In August
1998, New Haven Project Coordinator Shana Waterman, working with Arts
Partners, Centro San Jose, Project LEAP, and the Ethnic Heritage Center,
brought together a group of 150 community respondents. The participants
heard summaries of five plays and read aloud lengthy excerpts. They
commented on whether the concerns of the plays seemed to reflect
for them the concerns of the city, assuming that a production would
be adapted and set in contemporary New Haven. According to Cornerstone
adapter Alison Carey, the results of the reading were clear: "I've never
had the experience where people from all over the city, from all walks
of life, felt so overwhelmingly connected to a play."
43
Participants responded to the difficulty of negotiating goodness,
to the resemblance of the central characters' concerns with their
own, and to the tensions between idealism and materialism expressed
in Brecht's story. They felt that these concerns and tensions could be
easily adapted to resonate within a specifically New Haven context,
particularly with ongoing representation and commentary from residents.
[End Page 209]
The goal of the New Haven Project's initial workshop phase was to give
theatrical voice to New Haven's daily lives and to allow the experiences
of the workshop participants to shape the final results. In the
fall of 1998, Carey, Rauch and community artist, Gracy Brown, conducted
a series of workshops in the five neighborhood communities selected
for the project. The workshops, culminating in a November presentation at
Long Wharf, provided Carey with direct community input that she mediated
through the adapted text.
Over the winter, Carey drafted a script that became the basis for a June
1999 workshop presentation, part of New Haven's International Festival
of Arts & Ideas. The eventual goal would be to "greet the millenium
with a celebration of New Haven, its people, and its history."
44
But this focus on celebration and inclusion challenged the
representational process at the levels of both textual adaptation
and casting. Many responses did affirm the goals of the project,
"I like the diversity of the cast, it reflects the city."
45
Yet, other responses suggested gaps in the representational strategies
at work. Bill Rauch explained that some white audience members felt
underrepresented: "I think they imagined that the play would be a more
historical focus on the 'city proper'. I remember one asking 'Where
are the Italians?'"
46
Cornerstone actor Christopher Moore recalls a few audience members
stating emphatically, "'That's not my New Haven, it's not about us.'"
47
According to Rauch, the cast itself was split between reflecting
the city's diversity and reflecting Brecht's story, set in a poor
neighborhood that would be mostly black and Latino.
48
Rauch and Carey also struggled with the depiction of the Angels who
come to earth in search of a good person. In the initial workshop, Rauch
had cast the three angels to reflect the multi-cultural diversity
of New Haven, with Latino, deaf African American, and Italian American
actors. For Rauch, this casting seemed vital to the project of placing
"the city onstage." But in discussions with Doug Hughes, Rauch and Carey
realized that the casting did not effectively help to tell the story,
which depended finally on the angels as "clueless white tourists,
which better represented the somewhat exaggerated version of patriarchal
control in the adaptation."
49
The difficulty of resituating Brecht's story, adequately representing
the concerns of New Haven Project participants, and including symbolic
aspects of New Haven that would locally ground the text and the
production, proved challenging to say the least. In a press release
announcing the production in 1998, Doug Hughes had spoken of Brecht's
original play as "realistically harsh and hopeful, both serious and funny"
and of its potential to represent the "specific hopes and concerns
of New Haven."
50
Carey's adaptation did offer numerous specific references to the
hopes and concerns of New Haven as well as to its architecture, history,
folklore and political structure.
[End Page 210]
In Brecht's original play, a waterseller narrates the tale of three
gods who visit Szechuan in search of a good person. The prostitute
Shen Te harbors the gods, and in return they offer her money which
she uses to purchase a tobacco shop. Shen Te soon discovers that the
city's residents, including the former owner of the shop and a Family of
Nine, take advantage of her goodness and endanger her ownership of the
shop. So Shen Te invents a cousin, Shui Ta, a hard-nosed businessman who
maintains the shop through his lack of generosity. Meanwhile, Shen Te
meets a would-be pilot, Sun, who seduces and impregnates her. Worried
that Sun will reject her if he knows of the baby, and hoping to gain
financial stability for the safety of the child, Shen Te takes on
the character of Shui Ta, who increases the profitability of the
shop through exploitative labor practices. With growing suspicion at
Shen Te's absence, Sun accuses Shui Ta of doing away with Shen Te. The
play ends with Shen Te's revelation of her necessary deception implying
the ambiguities and tensions of balancing goodness with social survival.
In the New Haven adaptation, a homeless can collector, Quinn (played by
Cornerstone actor Christopher Moore) narrates the tale. Shen Te becomes
Tyesha Shore, portrayed by the African American actor, Patrice Johnson,
who purchases a mini-mart with her gift from the angels. The Family
of Nine transforms into an ever-growing multi-cultural mix of in-laws,
portrayed by various New Haven community participants. The aspiring train
engineer, Eddie, replaces Sun, and Tyesha's invented cousin becomes
Taiwo Highwater, a businessman from Greenwich who transforms the Mini
Mart into a factory producing "New Haven Goods" driven by the slogan
"New Haven's Good!" Other characters include a slightly sleazy but
good-natured urban black minister, the Korean former Mini-Mart owner,
and a couple who owns a furniture store (with one member of the couple,
Pat, played on alternate nights as male or female by New Haven performers
William Graustein and Edi Jackson).
The adaptation and production resounded with New Haven participants on
a number of levels. "The homeless people, the prostitution, and people
constantly struggling," explains Gracy Brown, "that hit home with a lot
of people in the New Haven area."
51
The text also referenced the problems of single motherhood, lack of
job opportunities, and working conditions for the urban poor. "It has
little bits of . . . no it has everything of New Haven!" exclaimed
sixteen-year old cast member, Leididiana Castro.
52
Like most Cornerstone productions, The Good Person of New Haven
also included original songs and choreography, additionally resonating
with its New Haven locality. Aaron Jafferis notes enthusiastically,
"The more the play has developed the more it's become like New Haven,
particularly in the music."
53
Yet, for all its inclusions, adaptations, and references, the play could
not embrace or fully represent the city. "New Haven is hard to catch
in two hours and thirty minutes," explains Dana Fripp. She continues,
"I think we may have missed some of the things we struggled with. At
the workshop I thought, "I'm missing my city, where's my city?" It's
more than about a mention of organizations and local landmarks, you know,
[End Page 211]
there's so much more that we're dealing with. It's never going to get it
so balanced that everybody's satisfied, it's just not possible." The
inherent lack of balance in the city's representation, actually enlivened
the rehearsal process, particularly in the read through I attended in
late March 2000. Bill Rauch asked the cast to comment on the textual
revisions added in response to audience feedback from the 1999 workshop
production. Stephen Papa, an eighty-three year old who represented
some more conservative aspects of the city, said he was worried about
how the adaptation erased "the true New Haven." Rauch asked whether he
could identify specific concerns, and Papa immediately responded,
"pages 8, 14, 20, 24, and 25." Papa found particularly offensive negative
references to Mayor Dick Lee (quoted above). The cast exchanged a variety
of opinions about the Mayor, his intentions, and the results of those
intentions. Cast member William Graustein reflects positively on the
experience: "What I heard was not only the connection between the town
and the play but also people from all different parts of New Haven talking
about politics in a way that was really respectful of one another."
54[End Page 212]
The staging of this dissent would seem to reflect some of the
Brechtian dialectical strategies of the play, as well as the community's
expressed interest in a text that was both "realistically harsh and
hopeful," or "kind of deep and ugly as well as entertaining."
55
However, the difficulty in representing dissent lay in the tendency
to view and represent this dissent as even-handed. At a symposium
in May, featuring Henry Fernandez of the Livable City Initiative,
Fernandez praised the production for its "balance." He summed up the
message of the play as, "There are so many good people and they come
in all shapes and sizes."
56
Brecht's play and Carey's textual adaptation both suggest more
complexity. Towards the end of the adaptation, a Godlike Woman In White
character, played by Dana Fripp, appears. The advice she offers to the
young prostitute, Tyesha, seems knowingly problematic. "You'll manage,
just be good and everything will turn out all right!" (69). Yet,
the notion of "goodness" is foundationally at stake in The Good
Person of New Haven. As in Brecht's original, the main character,
a prostitute, must divide herself by inventing a harsh male cousin,
Taiwo, better at surviving in the context of capitalism. At the end of
the play, after receiving the troubling advice of the Woman in White,
Tyesha reprimands the angels.
Your order to me
To be good and to live
Tore me into two halves.
I couldn't be good at the same time
To others and to myself
It was too hard.
[71]
In an earlier segment of the play, the homeless can collector, Quinn,
tries to explain to the naive angels the challenge of progressing towards
goodness. He had been reminiscing with the angels about his youth on the
Yale green attending a Black Panther rally with his mother. The angel
responds enthusiastically:
Angel 2: Yale and Black Panthers (to the other ANGELS)
See? Not just good people, but good groups of people working
together to make the world a better place . . . When's the next rally
for Yale and the Black Panthers? I want to be there!
Baffled, Quinn tries to explain, "They don't . . . . Well, they never
really . . . . It was such a time, all of it. Sometimes good intentions
don't work out the way you want them to . . . . Things aren't always
that simple" (47-48). While the text thus tries to establish the
complexity of goodness, and the tension between ethics and capitalism,
Carey also foregrounds the organizations that are striving to do good
in New Haven, in response to audience feedback.
As outsiders to the city, Cornerstone members felt a particular
responsibility to create a responsive representation of New Haven.
57
The high point of the show for
[End Page 213]
local audience members arrived with Quinn's monologue naming over
fifty New Haven organizations working to improve the city, including,
of course, Long Wharf's Arts Partners. In local reception to this piece,
the adaptation became less of a dialectic about the nature of goodness,
and more of a reflective recognition, again complicated by the
disparities between onstage and offstage manifestations of the city.
The play's epilogue, spoken by Cornerstone actor Christopher Moore,
evokes this tension between the representative and the real, and of
conceptions of goodness complicated in the play:
Our New Haven, as we hope you understand
In which one can't survive and still be good,
Was just a play, and it will disappear.
But something else remains extremely clear:
The real New Haven, the one outside that exit,
Might be too much like this one that reflects it.
Dear audience, if you care about this town,
Make sure it's changed before it gets you down.
Earth has no happiness that can compare
With freedom to do good while you are there.
[71]
Spoken by Moore (who resides in Los Angeles), the "Our" in the opening
phrase slips into the "our" of the ensemble which had created the play,
including, but not exclusive to the residents of New Haven. The epilogue
additionally evokes the staged New Haven city "in which one can't survive
and still be good," in relation to the "real," a space of potential
freedom to do good. The realm of the utopic is rhetorically reversed,
from the staged city to its external counterpart. At the same time, the
notion of "goodness," complicated throughout the play, and the rehearsal
process, becomes potentially simplified in the play's final
line, as something knowable, that requires only effort.
The potential collapse of the Brechtian dialectic in the play's
final line, and expressed friction between the representational
and the real, is situated in relation to the embodied representations
of New Haven. Twenty-four New Haven residents acted in the production
with ten equity actors. Participant Aaron Jafferis comments, "I think
the most special thing about the play is the people who are in it. The
individuals who are in the play bring New Haven with them."
58
The "realness" of these actors' presence seems to defy the more distanced
character quotations Brecht advocated by provoking intellectual
rather than seductive emotional engagement. Defamiliarizing the
familiar became less essential in this production than familiarizing
the unfamiliar. Small moments of conscious estrangement--Mrs. Shin,
the former shop owner, drops her Asian accent to underline a point
about putting on an act to achieve various ends, and Moore removes his
homeless character wig before speaking the epilogue--pale next to the
familiarized presence of the amateur actors on stage. Yet, Brecht himself
[End Page 214]
suggests that this presence may in fact contribute to a more politically
aware rendering of events.
In "One or Two Points About Proletarian Actors," Brecht proposes that
non-professional actors tend to play "from a specific outlook and a
specific context . . . shed[ding] a surprising light on the complex
and baffling relationships between the people of our time."
59
By remaining simple in their performance, by not trying too hard
to not be themselves, community actors draw attention to
their specific concerns, to the context of contemporary New
Haven. The bodies of the actors, a mix of African American, Latino/a,
European American and Asian American, also draw attention to the ethnic
make-up of the New Haven community. Yet, this very presence, along with
specific strategies of depicting New Haven's "hopes and concerns,"
the aesthetic enactment of "joyful" musical theatre that Cornerstone
strives to engage (mission), and the fact that this production was, as
Adelaida Nuñez put it, "not just another show about a bunch of
white people," did not quite reach a number of Long Wharf's non-local
subscribers.
The Good Person's Reception
For a theatre whose older, white and suburban audience
is accustomed to seeing its own lives reflected onstage, [The Good
Person of New Haven] is a serious, and quite conscious, deviation from
business as usual.
60
--Laura Collins-Hughes
We have not yet established adequate modes of questioning
for the definition of different theatre audiences.
61
--Roland Barthes
Pre-production coverage of the New Haven Project in local newspapers
maintained a high profile for the event, contextualizing the process,
and creating what reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss terms a "horizon
of expectations."
62
These expectations, presented through media coverage, program notes,
and advertising, oriented audience members with reading strategies
for performance. Media coverage from initial city workshops through
final performance provided a reading of the Project as staging
the city.
63
Program notes emphasized "the creation of the elusive and desirable
phenomenon of 'community,'"
64
and offered a vividly illustrated history of the Project over its three
years of development. Program biographies emphasized the personal
[End Page 215]
concerns of New Haven performers. In interviews, Doug Hughes framed the
hoped- for critical reception to the production: "I would ask those [who
question the aesthetic standards of the work] to remember that there are
times when aesthetic standards are not the only standards--that there
are other standards, standards of citizenship, standards of hospitality."
65
But Long Wharf's subscriber audience, 40% of whom were not local to New
Haven and were therefore unlikely to have read these media accounts,
carried with them their own horizon of expectations, determined in part
by their subscription to the Long Wharf.
66
Long Wharf's subscriber brochure for the 2001 season emphasizes aesthetic
standards, and the comfortable context of theatrical experience, rather
than standards of either, what Doug Hughes had termed, "citizenship or
hospitality." Quotations from the New York Times, the New Haven
Register, and the Hartford Courant praise the "mastery,"
"daringness," and "entertainment" values of Long Wharf productions,
while also signaling by their selection the targeted suburban subscriber
audience base. Doug Hughes' note to subscribers stresses the "rediscovery
of timeless classics" and
[End Page 216]
new works. The brochure also touts the benefits of free parking,
flexible ticket exchange policies, ticket access prior to
public sale (emphasis brochure's), and restaurant discounts. The
subscriber is thus figured as a commuter, out for a night of relaxed
entertainment supplemented by a fine dining experience, and an
individual privileged over the public. Like many audience members for
The Good Person of New Haven, I drove to the performance from New
York City on Highway 95. In low traffic the drive takes just over two
hours. About 20% of Long Wharf's subscriber audience enters the theatrical
space along this route from New York. With an exit located only a few
hundred yards from the theatre, one could have attended The Good Person
of New Haven without ever passing through the city of New Haven.
"Before Doug Hughes arrived," remarked Alison Carey in an interview,
"the Long Wharf didn't take its identity from New Haven. The Theatre
took its identity from being two hours from New York. But the subscriber
base doesn't change that quickly, and they were not fully prepared for
the show. They came in with a set of expectations more appropriate for
[Long Wharf's second stage production of] Hedda Gabler."
67
As Carey elucidates, while Long Wharf's collaboration on the New
Haven Project changed "business as usual," the subscribers were not
necessarily prepared for this shift. "I could assess the audience by
the first minute of the play," comments Dana Fripp, "depending on
whether they got the New Haven-esque jokes. If they laughed when [model]
churches [on the Green] came down, then we've got them, if they didn't,
they're from out of town." "Most of the response was positive," observes
Long Wharf General Manager Deb Clapp, "but a few people didn't feel
represented. Some of the more middle-class audience members saw only
black people on stage [despite the fact that the Carpenter, the Husband,
and Furniture Store Owner were played by white actors], and found the
prostitute's story uninteresting."
68
Bill Rauch adds, "a lot of people felt like 'It's not about us. We
can't relate to this.' I overheard one woman on opening night say,
'my Grandmother struggled like that, but not me. And everyone knows
socialism doesn't work.' Some audience members were also offended by
a show about people of color, and saw this as a personal affront. They
disliked the cartoonish aesthetics and what they termed the 'pageantry'
of the show."
69
Dana Fripp builds on Rauch's statement, critiquing this kind of audience
response:
One lady said it was a "pageant," which I don't quite
understand how she makes the distinction of what is theatre. But she had
her little cheering section saying, "yeah, we want to see theatre for
theatre's sake." I heard a lot of the subscribers say that. I thought,
"I hope you don't like opera because Mozart never wrote something just
to write something, because the Marriage of Figaro ticked people
off." It's as though, "Because I lay my dollars down, I can say what's
theatre and what's not."
Fripp's comments suggest ideological expectations maintained by some
audience members, and promoted in part by Long Wharf's subscriber
brochure. This "art for art's sake" mentality resists Doug Hughes' call
for standards of citizenship as opposed to aesthetics. But subscriber
audiences cannot be homogenized. While some subscribers resisted the
production, others responded with standing ovations. "It's easy to talk
[End Page 217]
about the subscription base, but I think that's too pat," critiques
Christopher Moore.
70
Still, local "Pay What You Can" audiences tended to be more receptive to
the production. "They make house management crazy, but those audiences
are our best nights," remarks Stage Manager Alison Lee. She further
notes, "I used to think they were too difficult, they don't behave
the way an audience should. Now they're our favorites."
71
While many audience members were not prepared to transform their
expectations and aesthetic standards, Lee's comments illustrate a
transformation of expectations about audiences. Her standards
of appropriate audience behavior and response shifted in part due to
the contrast between well-behaved but less receptive audiences.
The audience difference can feel palpable. On May 21, 2000, I returned
for a second showing of The Good Personof New Haven. I planned to
see the evening performance, but arrived early for a symposium following
that day's matinee. I stood at the door before the audience let out,
and heard tepid applause before a more traditional, older, white theatre
audience began streaming out to the lobby. About fifty audience
members remained for the symposium. Before beginning the discussion,
Henry Fernandez asked how many resided in New Haven. Three people raised
their hands. He opened up the question to include the surrounding
suburbs. One additional person added her hand. Ninety percent of
the remaining audience members resided in other counties, many in New
York. Fernandez and Connecticut State Senator, Martin Loomis, proceeded
to urge suburban residents to "look beyond their narrow self-interest
and embrace the city." At this, many of the audience members around me
noisily departed, with barely concealed murmurs of "this is awful."
Despite Hughes' urging, it was not so easy to change some audience
members' expectations and standards. Future community-based collaborations
with regional theatres may need to think further about orienting
audience members to the experience. Long Wharf staff initially had a
difficult time as well, with early resistance to the project's size
and perceived "invasion" by community participants. Over time, however,
and with attention, this pattern was disrupted. "Cornerstone doesn't do
theatre the way that many regional professional theatres do. And maybe
we need to rethink our assumptions about professionalism," proposes
Alison Lee. She adds, "This production reminded me what theatre is
supposed to be about. I've done a lot of big commercial stuff, now I'm
not sure whether I can go back." "We are stronger as an institution,"
comments Long Wharf Production Manager Jean Routt. "We have learned to
do theatre better--in many senses of the word."
72[End Page 218]
What Remains
If we can only do this city-wide, statewide,
nationwide--this is the way you get rid of the racial tension, with
things like this. We have black and white and Spanish-speaking people
and they're all friends and we get along wonderfully. Maybe it's a small
example, but you start small.
73
--Stephen J. Papa, resident of New Haven and cast member Good Person of New Haven
What remains from this collaboration? Thousands of ticket stubs, a sense
of exhaustion, exhilaration, loss, and hope among participants, the Legacy
of New Haven Project, New Haven graffitti artist B*Wak's temporary
hiring at Long Wharf, and later work as a paid fellow at Cornerstone,
community actor Gracy Brown's hiring at Cornerstone as an ensemble member,
utopic fantasies of togetherness from cast participants, skepticism about
those fantasies, and seven single-spaced pages of unused notes. To write
this article, to create the Good Person of New Haven, an enormous
amount of information and numerous people's experiences had to be at
least temporarily forgotten.
While documenting and assessing the New Haven Project, this essay's own
selective erasure illuminates essential questions about the relationship
between the scholar and community-based performance. How should the
engaged critic appraise the process and performance? Which creative and
structural elements should be foregrounded (and which forgotten)? How
is success to be measured? The deeply intertwined mix of the social and
aesthetic in community-based performance requires ongoing re-assessment
of its evaluative paradigm--assessment dependent upon raising questions
as well as establishing principles. Evaluation of the production in
and of itself has not been a focus of this essay. I propose instead an
assessment that examines theatrical collaboration, social (re)formation,
and production reception, with additional queries about the ethical
relationship between the critic and the artistic process.
Since community-based performance has often arisen in reaction to the
perceptively narrower concerns of regional theatre, a collaboration
between these two distinct performance-making conventions and the local
"community" raises questions about the artistic and social changes
affected by the process. According to accounts from numerous staff
members, the Long Wharf has at least temporarily reimagined what it
means to do "good" theatre.
74
Among community members, relationships have been forged across racial,
ethnic and class borders. Between the Long Wharf and New Haven residents,
issues of access have been understood as a combination of cultural and
material factors. Long Wharf has recognized that New Haven residents
need to feel welcomed, while often requiring transportation.
75
Additionally, the Long Wharf
[End Page 219]
has reexamined its position as the "center of civic culture,"
and understood mediation as an ongoing, mutually engaged social
transaction. The Legacy of New Haven Project, mentioned above, offers a
site for these engagements between the theatre and its local constituency
to continue.
76
Other aspects of the collaboration suggest that some civic structures
and theatrical strategies remain as challenges to the Project.
The economic and racial factors contributing to the maintenance of
ghettoized neighborhoods in New Haven require transformation at a deeper
socio-structural level than the New Haven Project is able to offer. At
the same time, Long Wharf's commitment to produce "vigorous classics" may
be perceived as more shows "about a bunch of white people" by its local
constituency. A mentality among some subscribers that community-based
theatre is not for them or about them, and represents a kind of social
service pageantry that is destroying the experience of "theatre for
theatre's sake" also complicates the relationship between Long Wharf
and its expanding audience constituency.
It remains difficult to discern the success of the New Haven Project
at the socio-structural and aesthetic level. Yet, while challenging
to both practitioners and critics, efforts to evaluate and situate the
process within cultural theory remain vital to the field's growth.
77
Essential questions about the role of the scholar in relation to
community-based performance arise in Jan Cohen-Cruz's recent articles,
78
while an essay by Sara Brady in TDR raises evaluative as well
as ethical questions through its critical strategies. Brady's "Welded
to the Ladle: Steelbound and Non-Radicality in Community-Based
Theatre" critiques the process of collaboration between Cornerstone,
Touchstone, and the community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania--a process in
which she participated.
79
In her detailed assessment, Brady questions the inclusion of Bethlehem
Steel in the performance-making process and the resultant censorship
of voices and issues. She suggests that an evaluative approach of
community-based work should center on the admission of "failed radicality
of the work without sentimental discussion" (67), proposing a thorough
abandonment of the conflation of community-based theatre with
theatre for social change (52). Yet, Brady assumes this conflation
in order to refute it, while concurrently critiquing the process for
its failed radicality.
80[End Page 220]
The impact of funding and ideology on the community-based production
narrative remains a rich terrain to explore in future analysis of the
field. While provocative in relation to its evaluative strategies,
Brady's essay also raises important ethical concerns. As a participant
in the process, who for various reasons voiced most of her criticism
after the fact, Brady seriously undermines the article's effectiveness
as community-based scholarship.
81
As a scholar, I feel called upon to question, to authorize, to
critically summarize and situate gaps, to theoretically contextualize
the performance-making process, to expertly document this moment in
theatre history. As a community-based practitioner, however, I feel
a responsibility to express my less cynical responses to the project
participants' expressed hopes, to evoke what participant Brian Olivieri
termed "the beauty and dignity and passion" of the process, as well as
its gaps and contradictions.
82
The performance process and my documentation are marked by remains and
indeterminacy, and do not adequately address the cultural and economic
structures within which the work exists. Yet, throughout my investigation
and witnessing, I have been struck by the capacity of New Haven cast
members to celebrate and critique their own experience. While these
expressions often remain within the realm of the utopic and imaginative,
they are essential to the twin projects of asserting the importance
of individual experiences as complements to critiques of structural
change, and of allowing those voices to be heard along with those of the
critic. I conclude this essay then with Dana Fripp's thoughts about the
individual possibilities of changing the city, which she has only been
able to provisionally represent, in concert with Cornerstone, Long Wharf,
numerous New Haven residents, organizations, and journalists. While
The Good Person of New Haven may not document the future of the
American city, as Doug Hughes had hoped, the process may say something
to us about the future of American theatre, community-based criticism,
and the possibilities of social interaction and change through the
process of theatre making:
[End Page 221]
If something is going to change in this city, it's up to
us. We have to be the hands, feet, mouth of God in this community. We
have to hear each other out. We have to respect differences, but sit
down and realize our agendas are the same, though semantically they
may sound different. We have to fight for our children. Look at
the legacy that we want to leave our kids and fight so that we can
give birth to the good things in this community, every day. But there's
going to be some labor pains, I know that.
Perhaps as critics, we too must hear each other out, respect our
differences, and fight for ongoing change in the evaluation of
community-based performance. And there's going to be some labor pains. I
know that.
Sonja Kuftinec is an Assistant Professor at the
University of Minnesota, who also works as a professional dramaturg
and director creating theatre with youth in former Yugoslavia. She has
published numerous articles on Cornerstone Theater and is currently
writing a book on the company, Staging America: Cornerstone and
Community-Based Theater, to be published by Southern Illinois
University Press.
Notes
I would like to acknowledge the Long Wharf Theatre staff, Cornerstone
ensemble members, and participants in the New Haven Theatre Project for
their generous assistance and commentary in writing this article. My
colleague Tamara Underiner provided advice, support, and feedback at
virtually every step of this essay's process. Jan Cohen-Cruz offered
stimulating conversations, provocative insights, and invaluable comments
on later drafts. Theatre Journal editors, Susan Bennett and
David Román, extended ongoing support and swift and sturdy
editorial suggestions. This essay relies upon a community of critical
and participatory voices.
1.
Hughes, Doug. Letter to John Ostrout, Executive Director of the
Connecticut Commission on the Arts, 17 November 1997. Arts Partnership
for Stronger Communities Program 1998 Grant Application.
3.
Hughes, Doug. Interview with author, 7 June 2000. All subsequent
quotations from this interview unless otherwise indicated.
4.
Productions include Hamlet adapted by Cornerstone Theater from
William Shakespeare, 1986; Romeo and Juliet adapted by Cornerstone
Theater from William Shakespeare, 1988; The House on Walker River
adapted by Cornerstone Theater from The Oresteia by Aeschylus.
5.
Productions respectively include Ghurba, by Shishir Kurup, 1993;
The Toy Truck, adapted by Cornerstone Theater from The Clay
Cart Sanskrit epic, 1992; and Candude, adapted by Tracy Young
from Candide, by Voltaire, 1997.
6.
The Good Person of New Haven, adapted by Alison Carey from The
Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht and translated by Ralph
Manheim. All textual references refer to 21 March 2000 script. Subsequent
textual references will be included parenthetically in the text. [There
is a performance review of The Good Person of New Haven in this
issue of Theatre Journal. See 318-20--Ed.]
7.
For further critical reading on community-based theatre, see Bruce
McConachie "Approaching the 'Structure of Feeling' in Grassroots Theatre,"
Theatre Topics 8.1 (1998): 33-53; Ann Elizabeth Armstrong,
"Paradoxes in Community-Based Pedagogy: Decentering Students Through Oral
History Performance," Theatre Topics 10.2 (2000): 113-28; Doug
Paterson, "To For With: Some Observations on Community-Based Theater,"
in Mark O'Brien and Craig Little, eds., ReImaging America: The Arts of
Social Change (Santa Cruz: New Society Publishers, 1990), 237-43;
and Jan Cohen-Cruz, "A Hyphenated Field: Community-Based Theatre in the
USA," New Theatre Quarterly 16.4 (2000): 364-78.
8.
In "A Hyphenated Field," Jan Cohen-Cruz details conversations with a
variety of community-based theatre practitioners, some of whom feel that
outside critics "appropriate or skew the field's internal values,"
(373) as well as potentially competing for scarce arts funding.
9.
See in particular Sara Brady's recent article, "Welded to the Ladle:
Steelbound and Non-Radicality in Community-Based Theatre,"
TDR 44.3 (2000): 51-74, which critiques Steelbound,
Cornerstone and Touchstone theatres' 1999 collaboration with Bethlehem
Steel and the citizens of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, adapted from
Prometheus Bound.
10.
For further writing on Cornerstone and community-based theatre, see
my (De)Constructing the American Cabin: Cornerstone Theater and
Transactions of Community, diss., Stanford University, 1996; "A
Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theatre," Theatre Topics
(1996): 91-104; "Cornerstone's Community Chalk Circle,"
Brecht Yearbook 22 (1997): 238-51; and a performance review of
Cornerstone's Broken Hearts: A BH Mystery, Theatre Journal
(2000): 397-99.
11.
See Michel De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
12.
Leslie J. King and Reginald G. Golledge, Cities, Space, and Behavior:
The Elements of Urban Geography (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1978), 4-5.
13.
For additional information on urban space, performance, and memory see
my "[Walking Through a] Ghostown: Cultural Hauntologie in Mostar,
Bosnia-Hercegovina," Text and Performance Quarterly 18.2
(1998): 81-95.
14.
I refer here to Walter Benjamin's meditation on Baudelaire's depiction
of the flâneur, or urban stroller, in quest of
something new. See his "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," trans. Harry
Zohn, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1968).
15.
For further explication of social aspects of space, see Edward Soja's
Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Culture and Social
Theory (New York: Verso, 1989) and Henri Lefebvre's The Production
of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991).
16.
Hughes had actually initiated conversations with Alison Carey and Bill
Rauch prior to learning of the Arts Partnership Grant. The Grant did,
however, provide incentive and structure for the project's development.
17.
1998 Arts Partnerships Grant proposal narrative, 6.
18.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(London: Fontana, 1976), 66.
19.
Quoted in Colin Bell and Howard Newby, Community Studies: An
Introduction to the Sociology of the Local Community (London: Allen,
1989), 27.
20.
Bill Rauch related several incidents to me in a personal interview (17
January 1996). Alison Carey had encouraged community members to add
their voice to the adaptation at an early script read through. Arena
Literary Manager Laurence Maslon exploded, feeling that this invitation
violated the rigors of theatrical writing. Maslon later asserted to
me in a personal interview (2 February 1996) that the politics of
inclusiveness ran up against the practicalities of producing theatre:
"Trying to include the community contributed to personal pains."
21.
Interview with author, 7 June 2000. All subsequent Fripp quotations from
this interview.
22.
King and Golledge, Cities, Space and Behavior, 313.
23.
"Teen's Goal is Broadway," Hamden Journal 10 May 2000, 1.
24.
Quoted in Christopher Arnott, "Streets on Stage," New Haven
Advocate, 11 May 2000, 2.
25.
Anthoy Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (New York:
Tavistock, 1985), 25-26.
26.
Mark Zaretsky, "'A Little Melting Pot,'" New Haven Register,
27 June 1999: D1.
40.
"For many people, a 'bad' neighborhood could be a neighborhood where a
white person driving through, for whatever reason, feels unsafe," said
Jafferis, who is black [sic]. But for many others, a 'bad' neighborhood
is Yale, where everything is locked down" Jafferis quoted in Zaretsky,
"'A Little Melting Pot,'" D4.
42.
The Good Person of Long Creek. Adapted by Cornerstone Theatre
Company from The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht
(translated by Ralph Manheim) and directed by Bill Rauch, Long Creek,
Oregon, 1988.
43.
Quoted in Francesco Fiondella, "New Haven: The Play," New Haven
Advocate, 12 November 1998, 8.
55.
Aaron Jafferis quoted in Zaretsky, "'A Little Melting Pot,'" D4.
56.
Good Person of New Haven Symposium, Long Wharf Theatre, 21
May 2000.
57.
Christopher Arnott, writing in the New Haven Advocate during
the rehearsal process ("Streets on Stage," 11 May 2000, 2-3), took
particular pains to point towards the problematic notion of "outsiders"
mediating a representation of New Haven. The producers felt vindicated
when Arnott's review of Good Person ("The People Triumph," The
New Haven Advocate, 18 May 2000), led him to assert the importance
and effectiveness of Cornerstone's mediation. "Does New Haven need a
Cornerstone Theater Co.? OK, I'll shut up now. I wasn't alone in being
apprehensive about this project . . . . Well, I was wrong . . . The
Good Person of New Haven is a show that is grander, deeper and richer
for this exchange of views," 6.
59.
"One or Two Points about Proletarian Actors," translated by John Willett
in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964), 148-49.
61.
"The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism," in Roland Barthes, "Barthes on
Theatre," Theatre Quarterly 9, 27, quoted in Susan Bennett,
Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 61.
62.
Quoted in Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 11.
63.
Newspaper headlines implied a performance of city as much as
play. Examples include Fiondella, "New Haven: The Play," and "Long Wharf,
City Getting their Act Together," New Haven Register 22 October,
1998, A1.
65.
Quoted in Collins-Hughes, "Idealism in Action," F2.
66.
In Theatre Audiences, Susan Bennett offers a complex analysis of
reception to the theatrical event. In discussing the subscriber audience,
she notes that while the subscriber may be able to plan ahead for the
performance by reading reviews and articles, "the remoteness of the
decision to attend from the actual experience of the event might well
add an element of unresponsiveness," 124.
74.
As Jan Cohen-Cruz pointed out, tensions between Doug Hughes' efforts to
be a "good" citizen of New Haven, and to succeed financially as
a theatrical producer, parallel some of the dilemmas in Brecht's play
(Personal E-mail 15 January 2001).
75.
In our personal interview, Jean Routt noted that the Long Wharf learned
to ask of local residents and groups, "What do we need to do to help
you to come?" If transportation was an issue, they were able to respond,
"We're coming to get you," 14 June 2000.
76.
The Legacy Project focuses on ways of continuing relationships established
among participating partners in the New Haven Project. Focus groups set
the agenda for future initiatives, such as play readings, community
festivals, and ongoing orientation and transportation for community
members to Long Wharf's mainstage productions.
77.
Articles by Bruce McConachie and Ann Elizabeth Armstrong are cited
above (footnote 7). See also Anne Ellis "The Art of Community
Conversation," Theatre Topics 10.2 (2000): 91-111,
which looks at post-production dialogue, and David Román,
"Visa Denied," in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders,
and Generations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000),
350-61. Román's essay examines the relationship between
queerness and diaspora in Chay Yew's A Beautiful Country,
a collaboration with Cornerstone and Los Angeles' Chinatown community.
78.
"When the Gown Goes to Town: The Reciprocal Rewards of Fieldwork for
Artists" forthcoming in Theatre Topics 11.1, and "A Hyphenated
Field."
79.
Sara Brady, "Welded to the Ladle," 51-74. All subsequent references
to this article will be indicated in parentheses within the body of
the essay.
80.
While Brady does not explicitly define "radicality," the article
expresses concerns about the influence of the corporate institution
on the production narrative, positing that "community-based companies and
big-budget projects of late have operated less by the principles of the
company and more by the demands of governmental funding agendas" (52). In
an as yet unpublished letter to the editor of TDR, Bill Rauch
responds that "[this] notion is as odd and comical as the implication
that Cornerstone collaborates with largely low-income communities, and
raises 90% of its operating budget through contributed sources, in order
to 'get grants'" (Personal E-mail 10 January 2001). Brady remains hopeful
that her article will vitalize discussions about community-based theatre
and its critique, challenging the field to move beyond assumptions
of radicality and social change (Personal
E-mail 15 January 2001).
81.
Brady's article critiques the Cornerstone/Touchstone collaboration
in a way that has provoked bemused responses from both theatres. In
a personal e-mail to me (6 November 2000), Bill Rauch expressed his
point of view about the article: "There's so much inaccuracy, and such a
narrow point of view, that it's hard not to want to sit down with every
reader of TDR and give the other side of the story. Mostly, I
am angry and sad that Sara [a former Touchstone intern and performer in
the production] didn't feel the safety and the responsibility to share
these views during the process, never mind the safety and responsibility
to get my perspectives on the issues while writing the article." Brady
responds that early efforts to voice concerns about ticket prices to
Touchstone were rebuffed. She felt that she and others in the process
were not treated as a major players, and therefore not given the
opportunity to voice concerns, despite rhetorical encouragement to do
so. "I did not feel integral to (or effective upon) the decision-making
process, and this lesson was learned early on (during the argument over
ticket prices). Part of my frustration here is that I think it's one of
Cornerstone's flaws--they make explicit that 'everyone is part of
the process,' and, as you cited in your dissertation, and as I found out
for myself while making Steelbound, this is not always the reality"
(Personal E-mail 15 January 2001).
82.
Quoted in Collins-Hughes, "Idealism in Action," F7.
Sixth row: Armando Molina, Michele Massa. Camera shy:
Joshua Harper, Edi Jackson, Aaron Jafferis, Daniel John Kelly, Adelaida
Nuñez, Leididiana Castro Ortega, Maritza Rosa.
Figure 2. From left to right: Horace Little of Guilford (Grandfather),
Cornerstone company member Christopher Liam Moore (Quinn), Rodney Moore
of West Haven (Brother) and Carol A. Honda (Mrs. Shin) in The Good
Person of New Haven. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
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