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xi Foreword Bill R auch When I first encountered Fringe Benefits over twenty years ago, I was delighted to find both camaraderie and inspiration. I had just moved to Southern California with Cornerstone Theater Company, and so it was especially heartening to discover a fellow theatre that shares many of Cornerstone’s and my core beliefs. A belief in the power of collaborative, community-based theatre. A belief that through theatre, we can air our differences and collectively shape a new set of images of how the world does and doesn’t function. A belief that theatre can be a rehearsal for changing the world. In its early years, Cornerstone, the theatre company that I cofounded with Alison Carey in 1986, traveled around the country, collaborating with people in isolated rural communities to adapt classic plays to reflect the realities of their lives. Up to fifty of the cast members in each project we produced were local men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom had never acted before. In 1992, we settled in Los Angeles in order to expand our work to include original and oral history–based plays in a series of collaborations with urban communities , each sequence of which would culminate in what we called a bridge show, designed to bring people together across as well as within community boundaries. During my years at Cornerstone, in both rural and urban settings, I learned that every community contains painful divisions. Sometimes these divisions are self-evident, in terms of socioeconomics or race. Other times, the divisions are less visible, and all the more insidious for their invisibility. A seemingly homogeneous, all-white community in the Pacific Northwest was the most sharply divided town in which Cornerstone worked during our early years. Half the Bill Rauch xii community gathered for song and drink in a bar on Saturday nights, while the other half worshiped in a fundamentalist Christian church on Sunday mornings. There was simply no way to step into the bar and then into the church the next day. As outsiders, though, we were able to cast both parts of the community, making it possible for them to participate together in the cooperative venture of our play, a play that took on the question of how to live a moral life. As always happens in Cornerstone’s work, lives were changed, including those of us who were temporary interlopers. In every project, every community, we always found surprisingly courageous individuals willing to cross borders, especially the hardest of all to cross: the internal ones that exist in our own hearts. One of the most profound lessons I learned from my time with Cornerstone involved how to measure the effectiveness of our work. In our early years, we measured our success in terms of whether or not the community continued to do plays after we moved on (we always left behind some of the pay-what-you-can box office proceeds for the community to continue to produce theatre). In Port Gibson, Mississippi, we had produced a biracial adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, filling seats in the town’s movie theatre beyond capacity and landing our company on the cover of American Theatre magazine and in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times. After we left town, however, the community produced only one biracial play, and I carried this fact as a knot of shame in my stomach. We had failed this community while increasing our own reputation. A few years later, when Cornerstone returned to Mississippi, both African American and European American community members pulled us aside excitedly to tell the same story again and again. Port Gibson had become a Main Street, USA, town, designated so by a federally funded program for small towns to revitalize their main streets. Moreover, they had recently been honored, out of a field of over four hundred Main Street towns, for having the most racially integrated board in the United States. “It was because of the play,” was the constant refrain. “We all met and learned to trust each other through the play.” We realized that social change created through artistic projects is not always immediately apparent and that we had to redefine our own tools of evaluation. This is a subject that Staging Social Justice tackles with terrific clarity. The book is bursting with inspiring examples of the transformative impact of similar community-based endeavors [3.147.103.8] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 06...

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