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VERONA, MISSISSIPPI

Cornerstone reinvents 'community theatre' in America.

The rest of America dont mean jackshit. You in Mississippi now. - The Sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi Burning

O n Main Street in old Port Gibson, Miss. (pop. 2,3 71 )-"the town too beautiful to burn," Ulysses S. Grant called it-the neon-lit marquee of the Trace Theater glows in the mist like shelter from

a threatening sky. Angry gray-black storm clouds, thunder and light­ning are rolling east across the Mississippi River and the mighty nuclear power station at Grand Gulf, through the mossy pine forests and hilly pastures of Claiborne County midway between Natchez and Vicksburg, and into town, enveloping the copper-covered roof of the antebellum county courthouse and Confederate War Memorial three blocks north. Outside the Trace, a steady stream of local actors, singers and musicians-a school music teacher, a town election com­missioner, a surgical nurse, a nuclear-power information officer, a Shakespeare professor from nearby Alcorn State University, a physical therapist, a lawyer, a housewife, a few dozen students-pass under the deco marquee and the scrutiny of the good ol' boys at the half-century­old gas station on a side street. Just a week ago, on Valentine's Day, a white woman hugged a black teenager outside the theatre. "That's shitty," one of the men said later. "White girl, blackboy. I don't know where you folks are from, but I hope nobody gets hurt."

Tonight, Monday, is the first run-through before the opening three days away, and for many participants, hopes run high. For most of the past three months, an ensemble of 11 young professional theatre artists calling themselves Cornerstone Theater have been living and working in Port Gibson, collaborating with more than 70 Claiborne County residents on a production of Romeo and Juliet, keyed to local realities. Romeo will be played by an 18-year-old black Port Gibson High School distance runner; Juliet, by a 24-year-old Harvard-educated white woman from G lastonbury, Conn. Up North this is High Con-

BY ROBERT COE AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

15

cept, but in a county where the descendents of black slaves outnumber whites three-to-one and an all­but-black public school system and a private, all­but-white military academy help preserve a substan­tially segregated lifestyle, racial passions are never far below the surface: Port Gibson is less than tw'o decades away from a bitterly disputed black boycott resolved seven years ago by a U. S. Supreme Court decision, and faces the possibility of another boy­cott in three months' time. Enter a bunch of white, middle-class, Harvard-educated Northem ers­celebrated on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, People, Newsweek and The New Yorker, featured on The Today Show, The CBS Evening News and West 57th, the inspiration behind an upcoming Robert Benton film at 20th Century Fox-re-imagining the Montagues as the former leaders of a civic boy­cott, the source of the ancient family enmity. Not surprisingly, many white citizens of Port Gibson are made anxious and adrenalized by this approaching collision of fictional and historical reality; addi­tional rumors about the production's use of racial epithets, prolonged hot kissing and partial nudity have inspired a number of white cast members' fam­ilies and friends to plan not to attend what will in all likelihood be the most provocative integrated cul­tural event in the town's history.

"This is the greatest thing that has happened to Claiborne County in a long, long time," says Ar­nette Nash, a local welder, school board member and founding member of the Bells of Heaven, a local gospel group. Nash is reclining on plush red seats

A 1989 American Theater Affiliated Writer, Robert Coe is currently working on a play, Earthquake! A Romance of Old Los Angeles, commissioned by the

16 Mark Taper Forum.

with the rest of the company in the recently reno­vated black-owned cinema, facing an airy pinewood set with a hanamichi reaching to the rear wall. Following time-honored custom, blacks are sitting in the rear of the house, whites in front, but the mood is respectful and friendly.

"Hi everybody!" "Hey Bill!" Twenty-six-year-old Bill Rauch, Har­

vard '84, stands on stage in his customary baggy gray clothes holding his customary scrawled yellow notepad, promising to dispense hundreds of actors' notes in the dressing rooms. A former assistant director at the American National Theater in Washington, D.C., Rauch is unflappably kind and cheerful, combining the perfectionist instincts of a theatre professional with the patience of Job. His strongest oath in public may be "Goodness gra­cious!" but he knows how to keep three dozen balls in the air. He lets Edret Brinston, Port Gibson's Romeo, call roll. "Where's Earl?" - Earl Wilson, Claiborne County's high-school Benvolio.

"His parents won't let him come because of the tornado watch," someone answers.

"Could someone call h is parents and tell them that the tornado watch is in the next county and that we need him here, please?" Bill proceeds to explain how a technical run-through is a kind of dress rehearsal; unfortunately too many cast mem­bers have left their costumes home to make it one.

,.. Tonight's performance is vital for continuity but 1 may have to be stopped occasionally because light­~ ing designer Mary Ann Greanier is still writing

- ~~~:::I :g cues. Everything is coming in under the wire, as -=:......:.---2:2.....::..::..__.:....:..._;;__---1 ~ usual with Cornerstone, only this time there is a

better than even chance that the show won't be ready.

The run-through begins. A massive black woman dressed in mourning black rises from a centerstage staircase as The Chorus, singing in rolling gospel cadence. Time: the Present. Place: Verona, Mis­sissippi, a town remarkably similar to Port Gibson itself. A black teenager provokes a fight with a white boy not by "biting his thumb" but by "shooting his finger." Stylized by a visiting Baton Rouge fight director, a slo-mo riot is halted not by a Prince but by a black woman Mayor, played by a local fire dispatcher and election commissioner Mary Curry.

AMERI C AN THEATRE / MAY I 9 8 9

Booming church voices from a loft at the rear of the house plead with people to forgive their enemies­in the mode of the 19th-century traveling Shake­speare companies, Cornerstone has added 14 songs by resident composer David Reiffel, with additional music by locals Jerome Williams and Larry Davis. The singing is powerful, but the majority of the locals have never acted on stage before; their line readings are stiff and often difficult to understand. Romeo raps about his love-sickness, accompanied by the Montague boys' bouncing basketball and rhythmic beat; three white cheerleaders underscore Juliet's response to her mother's inquiry about the banker, Paris. Mercutio's Queen Mab has been re­conceived as slasher-film phantom Freddy Krueger in a theatre where Nightmare on Elm Street- Part IV was playing not two months ago - and in the middle of the speech comes Queen Mab's Revenge: every light in the Trace goes down. A power blackout­during storms they can come block by block in old Port Gibson.

"Everyone relax and stay where you are," Bill Rauch calls out in the pitch darkness. I grope my way to a side door and open it for the streetlight - to see that the Mississippi sky has opened, sending torrents through the gutters that will raise the river five feet by morning. Rauch has commandeered a flashlight: "I want everyone to move slowly into the lobby. We're going to continue the run-through."

The storm and the blackout alter the course of Cornerstone's Port Gibson residency. Protected by darkness in the overcrowded lobby, with thunder and lightning crashing in the street outside, a new intimacy moves behind the words; freed from block­ing, actors drop some of their Southern formality for Southern warmth, a sense of injured family pride and hot young blood. "My only love, sprung from my only hate?" cries Juliet, just as a sizeable chunk of damp plaster falls from the lobby ceiling on the back of her hoop skirt. Confronting adversity again makes Cornerstone magic, but at some cost: t'wo hours of lost tech and run-through before dress

..0 rehearsals begin. But Cornerstone has chosen its -g lot: to re-invent America's community theatre, to ~ give a new direction for the avant-garde of the '90s. ·§­Some Harvard friends still think they're wasting ! "-' "'--""'--''---""'-'"'--"=,=-="""'-'==== their time, but in less than two-and-a-half years Cornerstone has managed to create a national ex­perimental community theatre network as one alter­native to work in established nonprofit institutions and urban isolation; they have rediscovered connec­tions between professionalism and amateurism which have inspired theatrical alternatives since the little theatre movements of the teens and '20s, the trade union theatre of the '30s, the Living Theatre of the '50s, the '60s theatre of personal liberation, and the performance art of the '70s and '80s.

What it is that matters most about theatre is obviously not the exclusive property of profes­sionals, but how that spirit will play here in Port Gibson -where even The Cosby Show is larded with IS-second commercials on Mississippi togetherness without a single black face-is anybody's guess. There are folks here who will tell you that there are no racial problems in Claiborne County: Whites go their way, blacks go theirs, and never the twain shall meet. But with the Klan operating out of nearby Vicksburg and Natchez, and with a former Grand Wizard ending a triumphant election campaign for the state legislature across the river, these state­ments are not to be believed. In Mississippi two societies, both alike in dignity, once separated by

A female Tybalt (Ashby Semple) collars Romeo (Edret Brinston): Tybalt's taunt '7hou art a villain," had only one obvious rewrite. Opposite page, scenes from Port Gibson: Locals Tom Curry, left, and Sammy Hill warm a storefront bench, top, and the town's only movie house, the Trace, which became Cornerstone's venue.

AMERICAN THEATRE / MAY

law, remain separated by custom and prejudice. And if 12 performances of a play written over 350 years ago are to make any difference at all, they will have to renew a faith in interracial harmony that time and history have never allowed to stand.

PORT GIBSON GIVES ITS NAME TO A nearby Civil War battlefield where the fate of Vicksburg and the entire Confederacy were sealed back in 1863; within living memory black people were paid 50 cents for hand-picking a hundred pounds of cotton. The 1963 civil rights summer of Mississippi Burning failed to reach this southwest portion of the state, but two years later Charles Evers arrived in Claiborne County to begin the dangerous process of registering voters. Local police disrupted many of these early meetings; tensions in Claiborne County continued to build toward a his­toric 1969 consumer boycott of white businesses. White community leaders initially agreed to some black demands, including equal access to the town medical clinic, employment and political office; the right to courtesy titles such as "Mr." and "Mrs."; the right to maintain places in shopping lines in the presence of white people. Community leaders re- 1 7

l 9 8 9

fused, however, to integrate public toilets or employ blacks on cash registers.

The resulting boycott lasted two years, becoming a national cause celebre, with black leaders accused of physical intimidation and white provocateurs re­portedly paying blacks to cross picket lines and provoke fights. As more and more businesses went bankrupt, local merchants filed an improbable law­suit against the NAACP and black property owners, winning more than $1 million in damages from a local chancery court; the NAACP and labor groups responded by raising an appeal bond of over $1 million, continuing litigation until July 1982, when the Supreme Court voted 8-0 to uphold the right of individual citizens to stage nonviolent political boy­cotts and spend their money as they pleased.

With the end of the boycott in 1971, changes came swiftly to Claiborne County: Today blacks and whites mingle casually in restaurants and nearly all places of business. With their demographic supe­riority, blacks have come to dominate the local courts, the sheriff's office, the fire department and county government. Culturally, however, segrega­tion continues nearly as strongly as ever, with churches and schools the major cultural divisions. Faced with mandatory school desegregation in 1969, white families transferred their children to the private Chamberlain-Hunt Academy, a military reform school established in 1879. Nothing divides a town more painfully than school segregation: Ra­cially divided schools socialize parents and kids, magnify differences into oppositions, and produce a racially divided community. A second and more recent source of tension is the Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Station, a 20-year-old project which has transformed one of Mississippi's poorest counties into one of its richest, increasing the tax-base thir­tyfold. To hear most whites tell it, much of that money was stolen by a corrupt black board of educa­tion president through sweetheart construction deals and valueless educational programs, resuldng only in a loss of state accreditation at Port Gibson High. With black juries unwilling to convict a black elected official, white leaders decided to play their cards at the state level: They pushed through a constitutional amendment which divides the Grand Gulf money, taking half away from Claiborne County and giving substantial new revenues to the city of Port Gibson. Most of Claiborne County's white population lives in _town, where the Mayor and three of five city Aldermen are white. The same white attorney represented both city and county during these political battles, exercising what most local blacks consider a shameful conflict of interest.

"Mississippi is still Mississippi , and Mississippi is still burning," says Claiborne County tax assessor Evan Doss. If the city and county attorney isn't dismissed by May 1, Port Gibson will face another consumer boycott, although Doss and other black leaders are holding open the possibility of more discusssion.

Cultural apartheid; racially motivated battles over tax money; the prospect of renewing the town's most bitter human conflict: This is the hot water into which Cornerstone was lowering itself, assisted by the only multiracial cultural organization in Claiborne County. "Mississippi: Cultural Cross Roads" is the 10-year-old creation of a petite white woman from Chicago named Patty Crosby, who constantly searches for politically neutral ground on which blacks and whites might build trust. The

1 B Mississippi Arts Commission recommended her to

"CULTURAL APART-

HEID, TAX BATTLES, A BOYCOTT: THIS WAS THE HOT WATER INTO WHICH CORNERSTONE WAS LOWERING ITSELF. 11

DISCOVERING CORNERSTONE'S AMERICA THE INITIAL IMPULSE BEHIND COR­nerstone Theater, born at Harvard University in the mid '80s, grew from a sense of frustration among a group of undergraduates at the prospects of enter­ing what they viewed as a frozen professional theatre establishment; the company found its identity by reapproaching classical drama through classical avant-garde teaching techniques and the concerns of ordinary Americans. Cornerstone's founding members come from a generation which looked to the avant-garde of the '60s the way the '60s once studied the '30s-as distant and often sadly irrele­vant progenitors. Forced to confront the crisis of institutional professionalism, the death of the avant-garde and the onus of public service at once, Cornerstone found itself asking theatrical questions uniquely its own.

Artistic director Bill Rauch is a son of postwar corporate globalism: His father worked in marketing for a number of leading multinationals- IBM, GTE, Nippon Electric-and moved at least 10 times during Rauch's childhood. As it is for many nomads, theatre became his home. In the seventh grade he directed his first adaptation of A Midsum­mer Night's Dream; entering Harvard in 1980, he

AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

~------------------------------------------------------------------------------------~ ~ met a recent graduate, Peter Sellars, who communi­cated his tastes for textual play and contemporary relevance. But a Harvard acting teacher named Joann Green became Cornerstone's ongoing men­tor: "More than anything," Rauch says today, "Joann teaches me that every object and moment and character on stage is worthy of equal respect and thought." Majoring in English, Rauch directed 25 plays over the next three years, helped to revive a semi-professional summer theatre at Harvard, and worked as an assistant to Susan Sontag at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. And as semester followed semester, conversations about the nature of "the American theatre" came to seem more and more abstract, and less rewarding. Facing the pros­pect of printing up headshots and sending out re­sumes, Cornerstone's future members chose instead to discover American theatre· by doing it.

The idea of creating an ensemble theatre collec­tive began during Rauch's junior year, with an eclec­tic and freewheeling R & J and Lorca's Yerma on the Loeb mainstage: Drawing inspiration from New York's Wooster Group, Rauch kept his cast together and formed the Kronauer Group, which included present-day Cornerstoners Amy Brenneman, Chris Moore and Peter Howard. A simple quality of warmth lay at the heart of their work, and radical updating: their experimental production of Medea Macbeth Cinderella interwove the Greeks, the Eliz­abethans and American musical comedy in an at­tempt to discover the mechanics which make popular theatre possible. Rauch's postgraduate ex­plorations with children and with mental patients, including a Sganarelle with a black illiterate in the title role, introduced the notion of working with non-professionals-an approach which many Har­vard friends considered "not serious." "There is al­ways the danger of getting frustrated by their lack of technique and experience and the lack of.hours to work," Rauch admits. "But on the other hand you get a natural objectivity and a natural openness which helps you to challenge your own assumptions, and to understand what those assumptions are."

Peter Sellars' vision of an American National Theater in Washington lured Rauch to the Kennedy Center in the fall of 1985; at the same time plans continued for what became Cornerstone with Ali­son Carey, a recent Harvard graduate in American history, who agreed to the job of managing director. Rehearsing in an old community center, Cor­nerstone premiered with an interracial production of Our Town in Newport News, Va., during the summer of 1986, mingling local performers with recent Harvard graduates. Inspired by 300 years of U.S. history, The Pretty Much True Story of Dinwid­die County, collectively researched and then written by resident playwright Doug Petrie, was likewise performed outdoors, in a woodland Virginia park.

But Cornerstone only began to snowball during the fall of 1986, in residency at an old vaudeville house in the Badlands town of Marmarth, N. D. (pop. 193 ). The play was Hamlet; the challenge was getting a community onstage. Employing a third of the town's residents for two months, Cornerstone members rose at dawn to milk goats and tended bar at night so that locals could make rehearsals. "We thought they were crazy, pure and simple," says Marmarth's mayor, but very early on the Cor­nerstone folks decided it was Shakespeare who had stopped making sense. "We began to resent the

foreignness and irrelevancy of the language," says Rauch, who helped fashion an adaptation, a Wild West Hamlet with eight original songs, five dance numbers and lots of local color. The Marmarth Hamlet proved a major regional triumph, with $500 left over to help create a local community theatre which survives to this day.

Cornerstone's ability to galvanize an entire com­munity went national during the company's spring 1987 production of Noel Coward's Hay Fever, re­conceived for Marfa, Tex. (pop. 2,466)-a west­ernized version with Spanish ballads, a chorus of Canasta Tea Gals, and a new title, That Marfa Fever. After an unsuccessful Florida version of Au­den and Isherwood's Dog Beneath the Skin, adapted to the AIDS crisis and performed by a cast and crew of 40 at Miami's Carillon Hotel, Cornerstone moved on to Norcatur, Kans. (pop. 195), for Tartoof (or, an Imposter in Norcatur-and at Christmas!), adapted to a midwestem farm family and a local high school gymnasium. For the first time the lead­ing role was taken by a local-a six-foot, nine-inch gentle giant of a farmer named Ron Temple. Every paper in Kansas covered the event blow by blow, People and The New Yorker sent reporters and film director Robert Benton visited, helping to arrange an $85,000 option for Cornerstone, for a future movie about Romeo and Juliet in the Jayhawk State.

Perhaps grassroots audiences didn't always know what to make of it all, but in an era of fatigue over the theatre's social irrelevance, Cornerstone's list of private contributors swelled: Peter Sellars, David Mamet, Robert Brustein, Rocco Landesman, James Lapine and McGeorge Bundy sent checks. NEA Chairman Frank Hodsoll met Rauch by accident in Kansas City and sent an auditor to Norcatur; unfor­tunately no grant was awarded, leaving the com­pany without the NEA "seal of approval" that might attract additional private-sector funding. Cor­nerstone continued to struggle financially with a $230,000 annual operating budget, but there was no turning back now: In the spring of 1988 they journeyed to a Paiute Indian reservation and the town of Schurz, Nev. (pop. 705), to create The House on Walker River, adapted from the Oresteia to address local issues of justice, treachery and retribu­tion. Living in trailer homes, Cornerstone members joined a community struggle against a proposed munitions-waste detonation plant planned for the reservation; the Trojan War translated into a con­flict between the city of Reno and the fictional Argos Paiute Tribe, with Agamemnon portrayed by the actual tribal chairman. By the time Cor­nerstone left, the Paiutes had discovered a theatrical identity of their own: a Walker River Living Theater came into existence, helped by $500 seed money.

Clearly the Cornerstone idea worked, driven by an essentially postmodern vision: to make the best possible classic theatre under regional conditions and local circumstances, a moveable feast with rec­ipes for continuing community work. So far the relatively stable 11-member collective had managed to do this without confronting a major social con­troversy head-on through the work; plans for a mul­tiracial Deep South residency offered just such a prospect. In the fall of 1987 company development director Stephen Gutwillig began canvassing the South, eventually discovering a town by no means the worst in Mississippi, but by no means a model of community integration and racial ease. - R. C.

AMERI C AN THEATRE / M A Y 1 9 89

0 u

From top, Cornerstone's The Good Person of Long Creek, set in the Oregon outback; The House on Walker River, adapted from the Oresteia for a Nevada Indian reservation; and Tartoof, Moliere refashioned for a Kansas farm selfing. Opposite page: Maske Family Musical, a company work now in development.

Cornerstone, and Cornerstone phoned; she paid little attention until she heard that all Port Gibson had to provide was housing and a theatre for a four­month company residency.

Crosby took the idea to the Port Gibson Cham­ber of Commerce for support; the white community responded well to the prospect of returning theatre to a town which long ago enjoyed visits from Joe Jefferson and blackface musical troupes, in a state with a Long and lively history of segregated commu­nity theatre. Cornerstone's original production idea was The Good Person of Setzuan, but this sounded arcane; Patty Crosby's husband David, a Shake­speare professor, suggested Romeo and Juliet without giving a thought to any possible racial implications. Both parties simply assumed that the integrated casting would be racially blind-Cornerstone's pro­gressive approach since Harvard days. The Cham­ber of Commerce, Claiborne County's Board of Supervisors, even Mississippi Power & Light, pro­prietors of Grand Gulf, all produced small grants to help bring Shakespeare to Port Gibson.

A few weeks before moving South, Cornerstone members drove east from Oregon, where they had just experienced their first taste of social contro-

20 versy: During a fall 1988 residency in Long Creek

Romeo and friends, disguised in Freddy Kreuger masks, invade the Capulet ball, above; Mary Curry as the Mayor is surrounded by the cast in the ploy's final scene, left; Romeo and Benvolio (Earl Wilson, left) eavesdrop through a store window. Opposite page, the grieving Romeo throws himself upon Juliet's slumbering body in the morgue.

(pop. 265), a timber and ranching community in Oregon's eastern outback, Brecht's Good Person had hinged on issues of what goodness meant to a town Largely populated by fundamentalist Christians. In Mississippi social backlash was already in progress: An offer to perform in an historic former Jewish synagogue had been withdrawn when the owner discovered that the production was interracial. For a time the show was transferred to a shoestore pres­ently occupied by courthouse facilities, but when the Antebellum Courthouse's renovations weren't completed in time, Cornerstone was once again homeless. Finally the company settled on its natural venue, the town's only movie house, which was far from neutral territory: The owner of the Trace was William Dowery, a former black boycott leader viewed with suspicion in Port Gibson's white busi­ness community, largely because he conducts most of his business in cash.

-t; On principle, Cornerstone had no desire to in­§ flame a county: its members work with good cheer to ~ reconceive the classics, to absorb and reflect the ::8 nature of community, town, Locale. But this time iil the group decided to select a racially specific cast-

white Capulets, black Montagues. "We wanted to create a world in which race was the major factor," says Rauch. "What had initially seemed too obvious seemed right for Mississippi." Cornerstone's first Deep South production, the largest it had ever done anywhere, was to be about interracial hatred, sex, marriage and murder-and with Montagues as boy­cott leaders. In a sense, this Romeo and Juliet was throwing a gauntlet into a community as sym­bolically divided as fair Verona. Over dinner Patty and David Crosby tried to change Rauch and Carey's minds but finally relented-though not without trepidation.

"We've only got one world," says Patty Crosby. "We've only got one community and we've got to figure out how to live in it together or the kids will go elsewhere. And to my way of thinking, the best way to be together is to work together."

ARRIVING IN PORT GIBSON ON NOV. 5, Cornerstone settled into William Dowery's drafty and dilapidated two-story boarding house on U.S. Highway 61, the main drag through town, and launched into its usual first order of business: seduc­ing a community with a good mind to resist. Five

performances at the local public and private schools, at nearby Alcorn State and at the Trace, revived three works: the company's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, an original school-age piece called I Cant Pay the Rent and a musical revue with slides of selected Cornerstone works. Company members visited churches- Presbyterian, Method­ist, Episcopalian, Catholic, several varieties of Bap­tist, Evangelical and Pentecostal, even the local African Methodist Episcopal Ministry-and rose in each to address the congregation. PSAs on local radio stations and newspaper ads appealed for ac­tors, singers and musicians; Cornerstone members went door to door, stopped motorists at stoplights, even pulled kids off bicycles to tell them about auditions over two weekends in mid-November.

The company's double-barreled nightmare was the possibility that whites would stay away because the Trace was black (despite being the only movie­house in town) and that blacks would stay away because Cornerstone was an all-white company. On at least one occasion black citizens walked into the Trace, saw whites auditioning, and walked out; Ali­son Carey Literally ran out after them, and when she couldn't find them cruised the streets in her car until she did. "I'm sick of culture being for the elite, " said one man, who returned to audition for the chorus with a Sara Vaughn standard, then announced, "I'm schizophrenic." A core group of five-to-ten local black alcoholics began hanging out regularly around the theatre, including one 35-year-old vet­eran who claimed to have been a bodybag sorter in Vietnam. The best reader in town, he won the role of Montague.

Seventy people auditioned in all, from drunken illiterates to pillars of the community. Forty-seven won parts, an extra-large cast which would mean heavier work for everyone. "We don't like to leave anyone out," says Rauch . Cornerstone actors filled the parts of Juliet, Mercutio, Tybalt and Friar Law­rence, but the rest came from a remarkably diverse

"THE TRACE THEATER

IS OUT OF CONTROL, A VISION STRAIGHT OUT OF MARK TWAIN OR SOME 19TH­CENTURY RIVERBOAT SHAKESPEARE COMPANY."

cross-section of town, forging the kind of art-life correspondences which characterize the postwar avant-garde. Cornerstone's Romeo and Juliet would help the town see itself for what it was.

The wife of the Mayor, Joan Beasley, became one of the "Mint Julep Belles" who attends the Capulet's Antebellum Plantation Fest dressed in the ball gown of a daughter of the Confederacy. So did Linda Headley, the daughter-in-law of the recently defeated former white sheriff, who wept during her moving improvised audition about teenage suicide. One of the town's leading lawyers, 39-year-old Melvin Mcfatter, limping permanently with a cane as the result of a hunting accident, took the role of Paris; election commissioner Mary Curry became the Prince, reconceived as Verona, Miss.'s black Mayor. As usual, Cornerstone failed to produce enough community men: "There I was," recalls a laughing Amy Brenneman, Cornerstone's Juliet, "chasing the manager of the local Piggly Wiggly around the tomatoes, saying, 'Don't you want me to be your daughter?' Afterwards I walked out saying to myself, ' Is this what I want to be doing with the rest of my life ? I am .very confused.'" In the end Rauch reconceived the Capulet clan as a matriarchy, with Kay Bilbro, a former elementary school principal and currently a nuclear information officer at Grand Gulf, cast as Mamaw Capulet, Juliet's grandmother and stern leader of the Capulets; Kathy Ellis, a local dentist's wife and a physical therapist by profession, became a very feminine Mrs. Capulet. Bobbi Jean Young, a rotund music and elementary school teacher, was cast as Juliet's black Nurse-the term "Mammy" was never used. To attract young men for the Montague clan, Cornerstone had to ask Port Gibson High School's principal to summon some students to the school auditorium to audition; for a time the leading candidate for Romeo was a one­armed town alcoholic and drug-addict named Julius, but at the high school one day Alison Carey

continued on page 52 2 J

AMERICAN THEATRE / MAY 1989

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511--------------'

VERONA, MISSISSIPPI continued from page 21

heard a voice calling, "Hey, I want to be.Romeo!"

Edret Brinston had been a trouble­maker until his track coach got him in lirie. A handsome 18-year-old raised by his grandmother in a small, wood­heated shack in the nearby town of Pattison, Brinston grew up with an iron will, a cool gaze and a strong physical presence. He became the most important of a dozen or so public high school students in the cast, many of them from Patty Crosby's local Pea­nut Butter and Jelly Theater­including the Schaufnagel girls, Dana and Darcy, two of only three whites enrolled at Port Gibson High. Three students were cast from Chamberlain; Hunt Academy, and two from the pri­vate elementary school. The sole black student at CHA, a sad and inex­pressive victim of regular beatings and at least one cross; burning incident outside his dorm room, was specially invited to audition. He averted his eyes, saying only, "I'm booked."

With a cast in place, a welcoming supper was held at a local Catholic recreation hall, black and white edu­cators, clergy, politicians and business people eyeing one another over fried chicken from the Piggly Wiggly. The Mayor's wife rose to speak of "a new beginning for Port Gibson." iiI as~ sumed it was sincere," Rauch says. "It was hard to tell how much of a first this was, this coming~together of the two sides of town. We could definitely feel a lot of politics going on beneath the surface that we knew nothing about. But the fact is that the pat­terns for our residencies are always the same: During the first weeks we meet people we never see again. The cast becomes our contact with the community."

The first read-through of Shake­speare's script was painfully slow; Brinston reads with difficulty, and at certain points older black cast mem~ bers leapt in to help with Romeo's lines. Port Gibson's adaptation would be written during the three weeks be­fore Christmas, with Rauch and Carey seated at the boarding house word processor, "guided by our aesthetic­working for clarity,· and for the audi­ence," says Rauch. "We're the first tO admit that we lose some of the poetry, but we hope we gain another kind of poetry." Some of the rewriting was guided by local high school students approached during classed taught by

AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

all 11 Cornerstone members on a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council. Asked to describe a spirit which comes in your sleep, Claiborne County school children of all ages in­variably cited Freddy Krueger; what seemed corny to Harvard graduates had universal meaning here, and so Queen Mab was pushed aside by Hol­lywood's dreamtime master. The deci~ sion to change Juliet's balcony fantasy so that Romeo would deny not his "name" but the color of his skin was Cornerstone's. Consequently, Tybalt's taunt, "Thou art a villain/' had only one obvious rewrite, but rather than present "Thou art a nigger" to unsus~ pecting cast members, Carey and. Rauch decided to leave the offending word a blank. When the new script was read before Christmas, everyone in the cast agreed that there was only one appropriate epithet.

Cornerstone broke for the holi­days on a positive note, organizing a Christmas show which brought together choirs from black and white churches for the first time in Claiborne County's history. Around their own production, however, the controversy had barely begun.

MOST OF CORNERSTONE'S MEM­bership now believes that the month­long holiday break was a mistake, and not simply because their 15~person van was stolen during the interim. Returning on Jan. 16 left only six weeks to assemble a massive musical;

· dramatic production with a very ama; teur cast. In the best of cases, "a Cornerstone residency is a very weird psychological beast," Alison Carey tells me two days before the opening, seated with Rauch near the gas heater in the chilly boarding house living room. The cold weather has contin~ ued; six feet away from the heater's open flame, the room is 40 degrees. Cornerstone, is a warm, civil, close; knit group, difficult for outsiders to penetrate but completely above~ board.

"Each time we go into a community it's a little like re~inventing the wheel, which of course is no way to live," Carey continues. _"For one thing, we're in the position of always have to be 'nice,' both among ourselves and with the community. We're forced as out; siders to discover everything, and in most instances there's nothing fueling us but bravado- 'Well, we've done it before,; we'll do it again.' People are being asked to work mind-numbingly long hours just on our promise that

they won't make fools of themselves." "The Mississippi cast is probably

the warmest we've ever worked with,,, Rauch adds, "but tha~ hasn't meant a constant round of partie~t People have little concept of how hard we work -and for no money. Most people find that odd."

Rehearsals were held at the Trace, and on one ,occasion at the public high school where many white cast members had never set foot. Gradu; ally the cast shrank from 47 to 38, due to the demand on time and constant schedule changes. Twice the Vietnam vet playing Montague showed up at rehearsals too drunk to work; he fi~ nally withdrew from the production, Bells of Heaven singer Arnette Nash moving from the chorus to replace him. But more serious problems arose among white cast members: The Mayor's wife, who had promised a new beginning for Port- Gibson, quit, say~ ing simply that she was too busy. Rumors persisted that her husband's political differences with Trace owner William Dowery were behind the move.

"If it was Mayor Beasley's daughter playing Juliet, maybe he wouldn't even allow the play," Mary Curry told me. "His wife was iil. it, now she's gone. Maybe she's too good to be around black people." Rauch was taken out to lunch by another one of the Mint Julep Belles, who told him that Romeo and Juliet were kissing with a bit too much enthusiasm; that whites wollldn't come see the show. "She felt that a shy little kiss would be okay in Port Gibson," says Rauch, "but that they seemed to be enjoying it." Another white participant com~ plained that with such goings~on, she wouldn't be able to bring her children. A chorus member objected to Mer, cutio's dying curse, "A plague on both your races." And worse: At work someone told Kay Bilbro that if she embraced a black man on stage, as she did in Mam.aw Capulet's conciliation with Montague at the end of the play, then the recent unsolved sex murders in Port Gibson's black community might well cross racial lines. Bilbro telephoned Rauch to tell him pri, vately that she'd rather not do it any­more, and Rauch relented-without telling Montague the reason. "The closer we came to production," Patty Crosby later remc1rked, "the more I was saying to myself, (Goodness, girl, what have you done?"'

Mary Curry believes she under· stands the reasons for White resis~

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tance: "I suppose the idea is that it might give black boys the initiative, show that white girls are no longer forbidden fruit- you know, 'He kissed her, so we'~an go get us one.' Curry was unafraid of any serious white backlash-"Racists don't want to make the blacks mad" - but black members of the cast were unaware that the good ol' boys at the gas sta­tion across the street were waving the red flag of interracial fraternizing around town. Cornerstoners were la..­beled immoral potsmoking hippies by one CHA instructor; when its mem ... bers visited the nuclear power station, rumor had it that they'd chained themselves to the door. Gratefully, the KKK was nowhere in evidence, but the town's former sheriff report..­edly joked that "the Klan was proba­bly figuring how big a bomb it would take to torch the place." Such dark humor cut both ways: "He's got a lot of bodies in his backyard," muttered one black cast member.

Given these unpleasant conflicts and innuendos, attorney Mel McFat ... ter persisted in his belief that "the commuhity would have been better served by a play with an integrated cast which did not have racial strife and interracial sex and marriage as its central themes." Whatever the case, Cornerstone worked to moderate the flames their drama fanned; their steady good cheer and unpatronizing warmth was richly returned by Claiborne County cast members of both races. "We're theatre artists, not social workers, 11 says Rauch; indeed, Cornerstone members were not above rolling their eyes at bad acting or jok­ing among themselves about the cast member who wondered aloud whether he had to attend all the performances or not. Cornerstone staff and per ... formers continued to work without snobbery or condescension, willing to make allowances, eager to assist the uninformed, the ungifted, and draw out the best colors in everyone. Cer ... tainly Cornerstone had its own prob ... lems to deal with: While the prospect of a cinema had prepared them for working with no wings, no flies and no backstage space, Rauch and designer Lynn Jeffries went through four dif­ferent set designs after discovering that they couldn't tie into the walls or ceilings. The building's bricks were crumbling and wouldn't bear weight; the original two..-story structure, along with most of Rauch's early blocking and staging ideas, went out the win..­dow. Cornerstone actors received lit..-

tle directorial help because of the need to focus on community mem ... bers; Kay Bilbro as Mamaw Capulet, for instance, had to understand that there was no "right" way for her to say her lines-that understanding her own freedom was the beginning of her portrayal. Although Edret Brinston's Romeo tended to drop most of his final consonants-"Nigh's can'les are blown out," "I am too bol', t's no' t' me she speak'" - Rauch decided to let the accent stand. Neither missionaries nor cultural imperialists, Cornerstone chose to transcend cultural and racial differences for the rich and compli­cated business of putting on a drama. A week before opening, the cast feel­ing of us and them, whether black or white, began to wane somewhat; with the introduction of costumes and a make..-up artist from out of town, sud ... denly a payoff was in sight.

Strange and wondrous things had begun to happen: a CHA student with the improbably white Southem name of Graven Bilbo was actually hanging out with Edret, Earl Wilson and Walter Mays-kids roughly the same age, kids who'd grown up in the same hometown without ever having met before. Three nights before the opening the huge storm and a black­out caused a company breakthrough. Theatre was once again exercising is magical ability to bring people to­gether in community.

"It's not Broadway," Patty Crosby told her husband. "Yes," David Crosby answered. uBut it's hard to be ... lieve it's Port Gibson."

AN HOUR BEFORE THE OPEN­ing night performance, a crowd has already gathered under the neon glow of the marquee; Romeo and Juliet's competition tonight is the regional championship game of the Port Gib­son Wavettes, a girl's basketball team ranked fourth in the nation by U.S.A. Today. In the lobby Alison Carey is pouring Mercutio's bloodbags; Amy Brenneman is laughing with a group of young black children from the cast-hugging, kissing, rubbing each other's faces, a mutual fan club. In the theatre Bill Rauch is onstage directing the Montague gang-"You guys be talking together as- you go"--while Ashby Semple, Cornerstone's female Tybalt, in a jacket with a Confederate flag oh the back, tries to summon a curdling rebel yell for Mercutids death blow. In the house the rest of the cast gathers for notes. Excitement has been stirred by a flattering front page story

AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

JulieYs Nurse (Bobbi Jean Young, left) looks on as Mr. Montague (Arnette Nash) and Mrs. Capulet (Kathy Ellis) embrace a~er the bodies of the star-crossed lovers have been discovered.

in the New Orleans Times..-Picayune. For the first time cast seating is more or less colorblind; black and whites share every row.

1

"This is the hardest I've ever worked for no scratch," Kay Bilbro is saying, rubbing fingers together.

One of the Mint Julep Belles pro­nounces the word "hair" with three syllables: "I'm gonna have to get me a little fall for my hay-eh-er ... If I'd done this right, I coulda lost a lot of weight."

In one of the rear rows Juliet's Nurse announces in a booming voice, "Peo ... ple are comin' to see Miss Bobbi Jean Young!"

"I told my father..-in..-law it's great to be working with professionals,,, says Mint Julep Belle Linda Headley. "He said, 'If they're that good, why aren't they on TV?' "

Mary Curry assumes a country voice to describe her son's response to the show. "He say, 1Mama, why you be hollerin'?' I say, 'I'm in the play, honey. Do I be scarin' you?' He say, 'Nah .... "'

"Hi everybody!,, "Hey Bill!" As boyishly as ever, Rauch again

promises to circulate some of the hun..­dreds of individual notes he's taken. "That young man is going places," murmurs Ron Temple, the local star of Cornerstone's Kansas production Tar ... toof1 , who has driven from Norcatur for tonight. One of Rauch's final group notes is odd: "Everybody should chew gum in the final scene, when the corpses are discovered in the county morgue."

"And why are we supposed to do that?" asks a flabbergasted Mel Mcfatter, town lawyer.

"You never asked why before," says Bill, and gets a good laugh, although the Belles continue to grumble that no Southern lady would, ever chew gum in public-not even in _a mausoleum.

Bill closes by wishing everyone a great show, even chokes up a little, saying, "You1re all part of the Car, nerstone family now." I glance into the aisle and watch Port Gibson's Romeo crawl on all fours as a gag to, wards the dressing room. In the early going Edret Brinston was Joe Cool, even skipping an entire rehearsal once; it took three weeks before he would let Amy Brenneman into his house, and he still keeps her away from girlfriends. Brinston has risen to his challenge; he has overcome his read, ing problem and learned his part down cold. One Cornerstone member re, marked that this was probably the first time in his life that anyone had ever taken him seriously- for his mind.

When the doors open at quarter to seven, the opening night audience is notable for the absolute absence of the town elite, black and white. Less than a quarter of the crowd is Caucasian; nearly all of the white people are middle,aged, affluent, with a couple of kids; a large contingent of black high schoolers includes Edret's track team, dressed to the nines. Admission to the theatre is free, but the older black audience members, seeing a do, nation box by the door, drop·in a buck or two, good churchgoers all. Alison Carey and Bill Rauch pace the lobby, as tense as if they were opening a $6, million musical. Outside, 25 people have to be turned away from the 123-seat house- as the doors are closing when a voice cries out, "It's me! It's me! Hattie Turnipseed!" The seam, stress who .sewed Juliet's costume is one of the last people admitted.

Anyone who attended opening night of Cornerstone at the Trace is not likely to forget the scene: When the brawl starts between the black dudes and the white kids in the uni· forms of Chamberlain-Hunt Acad­emy, the younger black continge_nt in the packed house erupts in wild whoops and hollers. The audience is suddenly electrified; no one had antic­ipated such a visceral response1 but the tone of the evening is set. When the Montagues burst into the Planta­tion Fest in Freddy Krueger masks, Tybalt calls out, 11 Fetch me my shot, gun!" For a moment I think seats are going to be pulled out of the floor. "Give me my sin again!" says a black Romeo in hightops to a gorgeous

white woman in· a strapless evening gown, and Edret Brinston's friends al, mo-st drown in tears of their own hi, larity. "Henceforth, I'll never be black," says Romeo, producing snorts and howls of derision, which at least shows they're- listening.

The Trace "Theater is out of con, trol, a vision straight out .of Mark Twain or some 19th ,century riverboat Shakespeare company; somehow Brinston is unaffected, handling his first public appearance on stage with absolute aplomb. Father Lawrence, reconceived by Cornerstone actor Pe, ter Howard as a Boston liberal Cath­olic priest, exposes a Martin Luther King T,shirt under his jacket, to more laughter; when Mercurio turns his back to the audience and exposes him, self to Tybalt, saying 11Here's my Con, federacy ! " the riot reaches its peak. Tybalt's taunt, "Thou art a nigger,'' draws a collective "uh,oh," segueing after Mercutids death into cheers and triumphant shouts as Romeo plugs his White Supremacist slanderer five or six times with a handgun. A small black boy, not more than four or five years old, races up the aisle from the stage in te:rror, hot tears streaming down his cheeks; one of four little girls seated in front of me fetches him to her seat, where all four pat his back, saying, "Hush now, Jefferson, it's all pretend." Father Lawrence offers Romeo a vision of a lynch mob, Romeo flees, and the first act, blessedly, is over.

Very light applause; kids bolt up the aisles towards the popcorn standi little intermission talk among the adults. A very pasty-looking Bill Rauch passes me with a mortified smile and a cold shudder. The three-and-a-half.hour performance is only half over1 but de, spite the pandemonium some of its deeper meanings are coming through. Cornerstone and Port Gibson are of, feting a Romeo and Juliet driven by an irrational, unexamined belief in the twining power of sex and death. There is no sense of natural rightness in Romeo and Juliet's passion; issues of education and class are completely avoided here in Claiborne County, where there is no earthly reason foi­this Romeo and Juliet to be together. The mechanisms of love are unex, plained, but the raw impact of black and white lovers, kissing long and hard, he shirtless, she in a T,shirt and panties, is undeniable; their defiance of bigotry feels courageous and true.

Rauch pounds home the theme of death at every opportunity: At the top

AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

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of the second act, Juliet sings a beauti, ful song repeating Shakespeare's im, age of Romeo's dead body cut up in little stars, then absorbs her Nurse's faulty news of Romeo's death with in, stant acceptance. By mid,act the teenagers have stopped changing sea,ts and seem to settle a little. They watch quietly while Romeo lies atop Juliet's slumbering body in the morgue; they snicker when Romeo OD's with a nee, dle, laugh nervously when Juliet blows her brains out with a pistol, then roar when poor Montague bursts into tears at the sight of Romeo's corpse. For me, the single most moving image in the production is Mamaw's refusal to em, brace the grieving Montague- a chill­ing image of white Southern rectitude released when Lady Capulet embraces him instead. After one of the more legato death scenes in the history of Shakespeare1s Verona, the Mayor de, claims, "Never . . . was a story . . . of more woe ... than this ... of Juliet . . . and her Romeo."

Curtain call for the entire cast of 38; light applause, as if a movie has just ended. The.high school jerk-offs in the front row stand to cheer-they

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have been making kissing noises to Juliet throughout the show-but the rest of the house remains dazed, glued to their seats. Three teenage girls in the audience are sobbing. In the tur, bulent lobby, families gather to greet friends, sons, daughters, husbands and wives dribbling down from the up­stairs dressing,rooms. Brinston arrives looking customarily cool and unper, turbed, greeted by friends who, when all is said and done, seem impressed. With the exception of actor Peter Howard, who goes home to bed de­pressed, the Cornerstone people are unfazed by the wildly indelicate response of their opening night audi, ence. Rauch gradually waxes philo­sophical: In the boarding house kitchen where he's heating up a pizza, we decide that the art/ social service dichotomy thrown Cornerstone1s way is false-that in theatre, art and social service are identical. Port Gibson's R & J is no artistic triumph, but judg, ments of good and bad which have crippled the American theatre at large seem irrelevant here; an RSC produc, tion in Port Gibson wouldn't have meant as much. For Rauch the real work of the show, the real contact with the community begins now, and he's convinced that the deeper mean, ings of the play will out-that audi­ences will understand the work subliminally-which is to say, that they will understand that love is a force to overcome even the bitterest enmity.

FRIDAY MORNING THE TRACE Theater office is swamped with phone calls, a madhouse: Romeo and Juliet is a hit, a palpable hit. Chris Moore's Mer­cutio is the overnight sensation of Port Gibson High-a white man who gets himself killed defending the honor of a black man who's been called a nig­ger. Friday's audience makes a sharp contrast to the opening: attentive, al, most demure, with only a few choice comments hurled from the peanut gal­lery. Several black teenagers rap along with Romeo and Benvolio- a sure sign that a cult is building. In the green room at the beginning of Act 2, there's a party going on which will continue through every night of the run: Juliet's song_ speeding Phoebus' fiery wheels is piped over·the intercom and sets everyone on their feet, blacks and whites dancing together on the linoleum, under the harsh fluores, cence. "Get down, Juliet!!,,

A bigger problem is where to con­tinue partying after the show: The

AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

conflict arises when CorQ.erstone's Ashby Semple wants to bring two public high school boys to Buddy's, the local redneck roadhouse. "I never had to feel white before," Ashby tells me. Blacks can go to Buddy's for din­ner, but not late,night dancing­certainly not interracial dancing. Blacks go to Zanzibar and the Dia­mond Lounge, where white new, coiners are approached to buy drugs, then left alone- unless they · try to dance with a black woman. After the Saturday night show, with the first days off in nearly two weeks looming, everybody wants to blow off steam­but no one wants to divide the cast along racial lines. The solution, at least for the teenagers in the company and Cornerstone, is a spontaneous party on the street outside the Trace.

Under the neon marquee, Edret, Earl and Walter turn up lce-T on the boom box to show Cornerstone's Peter Howard a few steps. Four or five Acad­emy girls join in for a soul,train line, and Cornerstone's technical director Benajah Cobb comes from the theatre with a rectangular piece of plywood which he plunks on the sidewalk to break dance, spinning on his knees like a New York street kid. Now as many as 15 blacks and whites are boogeying off the curb, Bobby Brown is on the box, and Earl is doing his fresh thing; suddenly a County Sher­iff's squad car cruises by, slows, checks out the scene-and drives on. The face behind the wheel is black. Then a station wagon cruises by; one of the Academy girls squeals and tries to hide, but Mom has caught her, 90 minutes past her curfew. 110h god! I'm grounded!,,

White girls and black boys dancing together on the streets of Port Gibson at half past midnight: impossible. Un­fortunately, just like Romeo and Juliet, the adults are a bi_t slower in getting together. I called Mayor Jimmy Beasley for a statement: 111 don't have any problem with it," he told me. "What do you want me to say? Every~ thing I heard about it sounds okay." Will you be attending soon? "I suspect I'll see it, but I'm a pretty busy guy." Bill Rauch sends a personal invitation by mail, but the mayor will never show-nor will his wife, although rumor has it that she wants to attend. Over the next two weeks, blacks will continue to outnumber whites in the audience roughly two or three to one, as they do in the county; blacks will consistently cite the racial themes as the bestpartoftheplay. To whites, it's

the worst. One audience question; naire respondent notes that inter; racial marriages are "Biblically forbidden."

In the Old South,' a real-life black Romeo might have been lynched; in the New South, he would probably be let off by an all-black jury, says Mel Mcfatter during a Thursday Human­ities meeting addressed by a number of Mississippi Shakespearean scholars. There are grounds for that statement; these and other issues explode during an in;company discussion of the play's themes and issues following Friday's performance, provoked by the Thurs­day meeting. The cast, which has de­cided that when all is said and done the production was worth the work, presents Cornerstone members with Port Gibson T-shirts and a plaque, before launching into a rare, often angry and sometimes tearful open dis; cussion of the future of Claiborne County.

Mary Curry rises to say that her son Allan and another IO-year-old cast member, Athena Hynum, an Acad; emy girl, may be playing together now, but as soon as the show is over everything will return to normal -whites will once again pass black peo; ple in the streets without so much as a hello. Cast members of both races are extremely upset by these remarks and say so, sometimes in the presence of their children; as Allan Curry dole­fully tells Bill Rauch, "The past brings out a lot of pain in people." Much of the discussion hinges on specific issues of public education, made especially urgent by the financial instability of Chamberlain-Hunt, temporarily kept alive by a recent $100,000 gift from an anonymous local citizen. Everyone agrees that the public schools must be re-integrated; given the public high school's loss of accreditation and its all-black faculty, the question is how. From the discussion it is clear that the end of racism won't solve black and white problems, it will only make solu­tions possible. But solutions are neces; sary: If they are not forthcoming, Claiborne County risks the fate of its neighboring Jefferson County, which saw a white exodus and an economic depression when blacks assumed power. As Mississippi's rural agrarian past continues to recede into memory, the worst strangleholds of racism will surely ease as well; what is amazing to me is that a bunch of Northerners barely out of Harvard figured out how to use theatre to advance society's ends.

THE 12TH AND FINAL PERFOR­mance of Romeo and Juliet has a wait; ing list of 230 people, over a tenth of the town's population. The show runs 15 minutes longer than usual because Edret Brinston is savoring his words for the (irst and possibly the last time. Afterwards Cornerstone presents a $500 check to Arnette Nash and Patty Crosby-seed money for a new community theatre that will continue the interracial spirit Cornerstone and Crosby's Cross Roads organization be ... gan. Ashby Semple and Mary Ann Greanier will stay in town for a week past closing to help organize this fu­ture company, which will begin by doing a fully integrated, colorblind play-one definitely not about racial tension, thank you very much. The rest of Cornen,tone has plans to take to the four winds for its first annual uscatter Project," a visit to .the coffi ... -munity theatres left behind in every town they've visited except __ Prince George, Va. and Miami-a project temporarily curtailed when Rauch and Carey, along with two-thirds of the student body at CHA, come down with the flu. Borrowing a page from the Federal Theater Project of the '30s, Rauch has hopes that on Feb. 1, 1990, all eight Cornerstone-inspired theatres will present regionally spe­cific production of an as;yet;unnamed one;act play, simultaneously with Cornerstone's own production in a new home theatre.

After this year's Scatter Project and a two;month break, Cornerstone will move on for a West Virginia Ibsen and a Maine O'Neill; they would also like to work in the Soviet Union, but glasnost has produced no thaw for them as yet. Then, in the summer of 1991, an alumni show will bring to­gether the most talented people they've met from around the coun, try-European, African, Latin and Native Americans-for a truly na ... tional tour. An Asian;American pro..­ject can't be far behind.

As the Free Southern Theater and others demonstrated in the '60s, as Kentucky's Roadside Theater, Califor­nia's Los Angeles Poverty Department and Nebraska's Magic Theater demon­strate today, theatres which redefine risk in social as well as aesthetic terms release vital energy into an art form stagnating in the backwaters of the culture industry, recycling itself for the sake of its own institutional sur; vival. With Cornerstone the em ... phasis is on art, but this has been precisely the basis for its social

AMERICAN THEATRE/MAY 1989

achievement: Urging a renewed faith in that infinite moment of connection between the stage and the world, Cor­nerstone creates singular communities. which ripple outward through a play­wright's vision like pebbles tossed in a pond. Peter Sellars views Cornerstone as part of a new vision for the theatre of the '90s: "Instead of pontificating about what the public wants, Cor; nerstone has gone out and met that public-indeed, has found out what it is. It's a new generation discovering theatre on it::; own terms, not believ..­ing what theatre is supposed to be, but discovering it from scratch.,,

Or as Arnette Nash put it, Cor ... nerstone in Claiborne County dem; onstrated "that people can work together without consideration of race when their efforts and energy are used to make a project successful.,, No one knciws if its spirit will last, but no one believed it could ever happen in Port Gibson, Miss. And there it was. D

LETTERS continued from page 4

follow, in the same issue, an article dealing with, among other things, the invisibility of women playwrights.

Burke Walker, artistic director The Empty Space Theatre

Seattle

Editor's note: Bob Clark is the director of the film version of Rita, Sue and Bob, Too, which was based on Andrea Dunbar's play.

Corrections

Due to an editing error in Toby Zinman's article about the Wilma Theater's production of Incommunicado ("Pound in a Cage," March '88), the appellation "The Great Bass" appeared to be a translation of "Il Miglior Fabbro." While both phrases refer to Ezra Pound, the latter is T. S. Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land to Pound, and means in Italian "the better craftsman."

A typographical error in the same issue changed the name of blues singer Dinah Washington, the central character in Jomandi Productions of Atlanta's Queen of the Blues ("March On Stage"), to Donna Washington. D

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