What Happened?: A conversation between Robbie McCauley and Bill Rauch

Robbie McCauley is an actor and writer who devises solo and collaborative performance pieces, often addressing issues of race in contemporary American society. Her works include My Father and the Wars, Indian Blood, and Sally's Rape. A teacher of acting, McCauley says that she seeks an organic relationship between charged content and experimental form in work that is personal, political, educational, and beautiful. At Cornerstone Theater, cofounder and artistic director Bill Rauch uses classical plays to mirror contemporary realities and to build bridges between and within diverse communities. The company's work has included adaptations of Aeschylus in a Native American reservation, of Shakespeare in a segregated Mississippi town, and of Molière in the farmlands of Kansas, as well as productions in urban workplaces and shopping malls. Through different forms, McCauley's and Rauch's work fosters dialogue on race and other often taboo subjects among theater makers and audiences. Theater asked them to compare notes.

 

ROBBIE MCCAULEY In making theater for social change, you start with classic adaptations in communities and involving communities, and I go almost full circle the other way. I started in the 1980s, doing my own performance pieces based on what I call my "family story." But I hook into the history of black people as survivors--and also into something that's become such a dirty word now: as victims. I was responding to the view, especially during the eighties, of black people as the victimizers in terms of crime. How terrifying black people were in the mind of the media--I was just mortified because as I remembered, growing up, the white people were the scary ones. My visceral impulse was to get the story straight. That was what was roaring inside of me, that the image of black people is so wrong.

So I started to tell stories about my family, who are so regular, but suffered dramas, in terms of racism, and then I started thinking--duh--not just my family. So I chose different areas of the country where I wanted to find out people's family stories. Marie Cierie, who produced the work, and I traveled to three places and collected many stories and did a really large piece . . .

BILL RAUCH Where were the places?

MCCAULEY Jackson, Mississippi, and western Mississippi--

RAUCH Port Gibson? Cornerstone did Romeo and Juliet there in 1989!

MCCAULEY I wanted to know about that, because Port Gibson is majority black--or all black, right?

RAUCH Majority. There was a private military academy across the street from the public school, and the reason we did Romeo and Juliet there was that all the white kids with two exceptions went to the private military academy, and--

MCCAULEY Yeah. We found out that was the response, often, to school integration in Mississippi.

RAUCH Absolutely. When enforced desegregation happened, the white parents panicked and put their kids into a private military academy. There was one black kid at the military academy when we first arrived, and there was a cross burned on the lawn in front of his dorm window, and he left the first week of our residency there.

MCCAULEY And these are stories that people don't know in this country, because people look at history here so simply: So there was slavery, and then that's over, and then there was segregation . . .

RAUCH And aren't we over it?

MCCAULEY Yeah, and aren't we over that? And now, oy, now there's multiculturalism and can't we all get over it? Is this the irony of all times? George W. Bush? The jokes are funny--you know, he's the only one in the cabinet who's really a set-aside job--but the reality is . . .

RAUCH Painful.

MCCAULEY I'm doing a project in Hartford [Connecticut] now on safety. It's about the community and the police, but I'm thinking now about the kind of safety that the...