Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre

Moving beyond the Comfort Zone: The Quest for Theatre for Social Justice Impact

55 Moving beyond the Comfort Zone: The Quest for Theatre for Social Justice Impact David K aye In the fall of 2004, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) joined forces with Seacoast Outright, an LGBT youth support organization that serves the Southern Maine/New Hampshire Seacoast region, to host a Theatre for Social Justice Institute (TSJI). UNH has had a student Theatre for Social Justice troupe, WildActs, since 1999. Though the group had been very active since its inception, the ability for WildActs to have a meaningful impact on issues related to social justice had always been in question. The experience of working with the TSJI brought this critical matter into sharp focus. What became the short play Caught in the Middle and the overall program “Drawing a Bigger Circle” was the result of a powerful process that forced all those who took part to create theatre that would have a measurable impact on sociopolitical change. Developing Issues Nearly two years passed between receiving word that the TSJI would be coming to UNH and the actual arrival of the Institute’s facilitators , Norma Bowles and Natalya Brusilovsky. The political landscape changed a great deal during that time. Our initial proposal was to focus the TSJI on the collaborative creation of a play addressing the issue of discrimination against LGBT individuals. As the time arrived to actually begin the workshop, the subject of marriage equality surfaced as a major issue in New Hampshire. The struggle for marriage equality came to the forefront in New England with the enactment of Vermont’s civil union legislation in 2000. The issue became more heated when, in November 2003, the David Kaye 56 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that barring same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional. The court confirmed that “segregating same-sex unions from opposite-sex unions cannot possibly be held rationally to advance or preserve the governmental aim of encouraging stable adult relationships for the good of the individual and of the community, especially its children.”1 As a result, the state of Massachusetts began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in May 2004. Despite these legislative victories, there was defiant opposition. In Vermont in 2000, a “Take Back Vermont” campaign sought to remove all legislators who voted in favor of the civil union law. Though the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling was a major victory in the fight for marriage equality, the step from the concept of “civil union” to “marriage” brought about intense, unabashed opposition throughout the nation. As reported in a 2003 Slate Magazine article, Gary Bauer, the former presidential candidate and leader of the conservative Family Research Council, declared that the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling had taken the “cultural wars nuclear.” In the same piece, Brian Fahling of the American Family Association said it was “on an order of magnitude that is beyond the capacity of words. The court has tampered with society’s DNA, and the consequent mutation will reap unimaginable consequences for Massachusetts and our nation.”2 These statements, and many similar, stoked the fires of irrational fear and overt intolerance toward the LGBT community. In New Hampshire, the push to defeat any attempt to establish marriage equality or even civil unions was quickly underway following the Massachusetts ruling. New Hampshire Republican governor Craig Benson established a special commission to seek out statewide opinions concerning “gay marriage.” Benson filled the committee with mostly conservative opponents of marriage equality. It was against this backdrop that the stakeholders in the UNH Institute met and decided that marriage equality would be the subject of our work. We soon discovered, however, how much had to be done before we really knew where we were going. Learning to Ask the Tough Questions Through my own experience as a cofounder of WildActs, I have come to realize just how often we neglect to address two simple yet crucial questions: Moving beyond the Comfort Zone 57 • For whom specifically are we creating this theatrical work? • Exactly what do we want to happen as a result of performing this piece? During the planning stages, we thought we had addressed these two points. The Institute facilitators, however, through probing and prodding , revealed that we really had not. What we had done was to fall into models of past projects and performances that were known and comfortable for us. We had created plays, sketches, and interactive theatre models for numerous topics, from sexual...