Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre Edited by Norma Bowles and Daniel-Raymond Nadon (review)

Near the end of his foreword to Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre, theatre artist Bill Rauch says that “Staging Social Justice is useful. Can higher praise be given?” (xv). Rarely have I read a foreword that hits the nail quite so squarely on the head. This energetic anthology poses insights and hard-earned wisdom applicable to practitioners and scholars of theatre for social change, applied theatre, devising, and community-based theatre. The project gathers myriad perspectives on the work of Fringe Benefits (FB), a Los Angeles–based activist theatre company founded in 1991 and perhaps best-known for its book Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers. Unabashedly activist, FB holds social justice as its primary goal, although the Staging Social Justice contributors demonstrate that the company also prizes community-building, development of ally networks, and the visceral joys of theatre-making.

Edited by FB’s artistic director Norma Bowles and FB collaborator Daniel-Raymond Nadon, this anthology documents the company’s Theatre for Social Justice Institutes. An institute features three phases: planning, residency, and production. First, FB consults via telephone and e-mail with local organizers; next, its teaching artists travel to the host community to facilitate a whirlwind five-day devising residency, for which local planners gather as diverse a constituency as possible. Visiting artists and the local group undergo FB’s finely honed (and quirkily named) “Dramaturgical Quilting Bee” process. The Dramaturgical Quilting Bee combines “storytelling, discussion, brainstorming, improvisation, and collective dramaturgy to create a dialogue-promoting play about the discrimination issue selected by the group” (7). A majority of the residencies address heterosexism, although FB institutes have tackled other modes of structural, emotional, and physical violence, such as racism, classism, ableism, ageism, and so on. Each residency culminates in a script that local participants perform for a “target audience” after FB artists leave the scene. The hope is to shift audience consciousness toward anti-oppressive engagement, and the book offers helpful guidance on how to design measurable institute outcomes (even if it does not fully probe the reliability or accuracy of post-show surveys as evidence of those outcomes).

Staging Social Justice contains six thematic chapters, each housing a cluster of shorter essays. The twenty-nine contributors (in addition to Bowles and Nadon) have all been involved in at least one institute (in Australia, the UK, or the United States). Although each chapter coheres around specific questions, one chapter’s topics inevitably blur into the topics of another, generating a kaleidoscope of reflection, analysis, celebration, critique, and—best of all—refreshingly concrete details on how to do the work.

Chapter 1 voices varied takes on the Dramaturgical Quilting Bee and its regimented-yet-flexible structure. The authors discuss the sometimes competing imperatives of honoring a plurality of voices and getting things done. Chapter 2 considers institute efficacy through a variety of lenses, calling on anecdotal and statistical evidence. How might one build knowledge about any shifts in worldviews that these institutes accomplish? Chapter 3 encourages pushing for polyphony and creating plays that will communicate to audiences beyond those filled with like minds only. Safe space, a ubiquitous and ambiguous concept in the fields that this book considers, is the key term of chapter 4. The editors define safe spaces as contexts “in which everyone feels included, respected, and clear about the ‘rules of engagement,’” although only some of the contributors to this chapter (or the book) clearly define the phrase or their sense of how they know when it is achieved (154). Nonetheless, these discussions on safe spaces raise productive insights and beg the question of when such a space should be a goal. Chapter 5 asks how perceptions of (and priorities for) an institute process might change depending on one’s vantage point as local organizer, vocal coach, psychologist, marketing director, and so on. Finally, chapter 6 offers personal...