Community in Motion: Theatre for Development in Africa, and: Grassroots Theatre: A Search for Regional Arts in America (review)

Community in Motion: Theatre for Development in Africa. By L. Dale Byam. Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey, 1999; pp. 240. $59.95.

Grassroots Theatre: A Search for Regional Arts in America. By Robert Gard. Madison: University of Wisconsin Presas, 1999; pp. 263. $14.95.

At first blush the subjects of these two books could not be more dissimilar: one looks at 1990s Africa and the other 1930s Midwestern America. And yet both writers seek the same beating heart of a theatre that could be called grassroots, community-based, or people's theatre. What ultimately separates them, however, is not time, place, or custom, but language�not the language of the different theatre makers but language of the respective authors, one open and enthusiastic, the other stilted and dense.

Reading Robert Gard's book, reissued seven years after the author's death and thirty-�ve years after its original publication, is like opening a time capsule. Gard offers a snapshot of rural life in the 1920s and 1930s, a way of life that no longer exists. Born in 1910 on the plains of Kansas, Gard pursued a full theatrical life that never came within a hundred miles of Broadway. In Kansas, upstate New York, the Canadian prairie province of Alberta, and, �nally, Wisconsin, Gard collected stories, wrote plays, and encouraged other playwrights in the most unlikely places. His was a life-long quest for a people's theatre and an unbroken commitment to let as many folk as possible into the process of theatrical creation. "The true 'people's theatre, as I see it, will be the creation for the community of a drama in which the whole community may participate . . ." (xviii). Gard reminds us of a time when Professor George Pierce Baker taught playwriting at Harvard, in�uencing not only Eugene O'Neill, but other students like Alexander Drummond, who went on to found the Cornell Dramatic Club, and Frederick Koch, who pioneered The Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina.

Gard grounded his work away from the cities, because for him "a feeling for place . . . seems basic to the creative process . . ." (141). Sometimes when he went out searching for authors and stories he found himself on a farm at evening milking the cows. He and Drummond sent out letters soliciting playwrights. One enthusiastic response appended this postscript: "What shall I write about?" (43). But others had ideas and plays poured in. The transition from page to stage was even harder, and Gard, traveling from one small, stageless town hall to another, had to adapt to circumstances, demonstrating theatre in the round to those who imagined all stages were proscenium.

Invited to teach in Madison, Gard adapted the "Wisconsin Idea" of reformers like Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette to the theatre. Meant to democratize society, the "Wisconsin Idea" embraced adult education and university extension programs and thus Gard founded The Wisconsin Idea Theatre. Combining the �rst theatre lab on the campus of the University of Wisconsin with annual three-day statewide theatre conferences, Gard also reached out to found both the Wisconsin Rural Writers Association and The Rural Art Project, which brought traveling exhibitions into the smallest towns.

Pre�guring Augusto Boal and his Forum Theatre, Gard improvised plays to tackle contemporary controversies, often pressing audience members into actors on the spot. The result was hundreds of grassroots plays written and produced on stage and radio. One Wisconsin playwright, Zona Gale, waived royalties to her play "The Neighbors" for "any country theatre which will use part of the funds so raised . . . to plant at least one long-lived shade tree in the community . . . furthermore it is understood that the producers, cast, and the audience at such a performance shall all be neighbors to everyone, as long as they live" (15-16). If that sounds a...