Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater by Sonja Kuftinec (review)

REVIEWS pack of people haunting our theatre, a younger group sure to kick some life and love back into its sorry ass" (2 15). The response to the problem that I find most persuasive is Matthew Maguire's, whose "Heat Bath" is one of my favourite essays in a very strong collection: "Yes, prime advances in tools like the wheel and the printing press altered human perception, but they didn 't supplant essential rituals like performance, and never will.l ... 1 Technology will change us as has everyone of our tools, but we will eventually subsume it. That has been the historical pattern: a new tool dominates consciousness until the novelty of its utility is overshadowed by the new idea it enables; then it becomes background" (205). This is versatile, open-minded, processoriented thought, and it is characteristic of the strengths of Thealre ill Crisis? Crisis can be healthy, L1uis Pasqual points out in the book 's afterword , but only as long as we see crisis as a springboard into creativity and resist transforming crisis into "a frozen gesture" (255). Crisis should be confronted and responded to with decisions and actions. While the subtitle of the book promises performance manifestos, and there are, indeed, some pieces of writing here resembling those classic products of artistic modernism in its various manifestations, what strikes me as most important about this book is less the pieces of performative writing than the more transparent attempts to communicate about the nature of theatre. I remain more affected by the impassioned attempts to argue clearly for the importance of theatrical performance than by the pieces that, however energetically , court ambiguity through style and obscurity (Erik Ehn, Shelley Berc, Ruth Margraf!), even if their Artaudian intentions are admirable. Yet, at the same time, I think that Thealre in Crisis? would be a lesser volume had it not included these pieces of playful rhetoric that ask us to stop, re-read, and ruminate, that remind us not to be so hasty in our assumptions of mastery. I find myself haunted by the intensely personal voices that come into dialogue throughout this book. They are powerful because, in each voice, we hear the sound of total commitment to theatre and to humanity. These are valuable contributions to the long, ongoing heritage of the theatrical manifesto, and Delgado and Svich have assembled a collection that will be of great use to and (perhaps more importantly) inspiration to academics and practitioners alike. SONJA KUFTINEC. Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater. Theater in America Series. Carbondale: Southern lIIinois University Press, 2003. Pp. 272, illustraled. US$45.00 (Hb). Reviewed hy Sarah Gorman, University ofSurrey RoehampfOlI Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater provides a comprehensive overview of the shifting methodologies employed by Corner- Reviews stone Theater Company, initially a peripatetic community company and now based in Los Angeles. Founded in 1986, Cornerstone originally travelled to rural towns, adapling canonical play texIS such as Romeo and Juliet and The Love of the Nightingale to bring out Ihemes and issues pertinent to each local community. Up until 1994, when the company decided to revise its working methods, "community" had largely been defined by geographical boundaries. From 1994 onwards, however, the company began 10 work with nongeographically defined communities, visiling gay communities, Arab communities , Latin American communities, in order to consider how they might celebrate cohesion while resisting representations of homogeneity or essentialism . Kuftinec maintains an impressive degree of self-reflexivity throughout the book, employing Iheories borrowed from social anlhropology (Victor Turner and Ronald Cohen), historiography (Michel Foucault), and performance studies (Richard Schechner) 10 frame her analysis. Interestingly, the tone of her critique appears sharper and more rigorous in the last two chaplers of the book, as we read through the lens of her personal participation in specific projects. She intends her representation of the company's work 10 be "polyphonic " (2), and, indeed, her documenlation of the company's "consensus" policy ( 131-32) and use of participant evaluation reports enables her to draw insightful, and often highly crilical, responses from a range of perspectives and positions of power. Kuftinec carefully mapsout "the terrain" of community theory and practice. drawing attention to the mutual...