The challenge

“The experiment that is the United States of America is full of glorious promise but it is built on a legacy of bigotry and hatred and yes, fear of the other,” says Bill Rauch, who believes that theater is the most collaborative and all-encompassing of art forms, and can be, he believes, “a rehearsal for changing the world.” Through art and theater, Americans can air their differences and “collectively shape a new set of images for how the world does and doesn't function,” he adds. Every community in which his company has worked “has been divided, often along racial lines, but as often because of who does or doesn't have money or political power or because of who worships where. In fact, I have learned again and again how in the U.S. race often masks other differences. I'm dismayed by how quickly lines get drawn, how positions harden and dialogue dissolves into posturing.” In any community, as long as these masks are in place, compassionate social change is unlikely, he says.


Seeds of commitment

Bill Rauch’s motivation as an artist is his keen sense of exclusion and inclusion. “I am moved to make plays with the majority of our population who claim they have no stories to tell because I have learned that they always do,” he explains. “I am moved to make plays with people who have often never even seen a play because everyone is an artist, even if most of us have not had the opportunities and the privilege to find our artistic voice. I am moved to make plays for people who feel plays are for an elite that is different from them because I know as a gay man what it feels like to be the other.”


Accomplishments

Harvard classmates Bill Rauch and Alison Carey (now Cornerstone's resident playwright) founded Cornerstone Theater in 1986, with early support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and dozens of individual donors. Cornerstone is a multi-racial ensemble of artists. It has a unique mission: to bring live theater to communities across the country, casting local residents alongside a small band of professional actors and adapting classical and original plays to the local setting. “We make plays that examine multiple perspectives on community issues,” says Rauch. “The majority of performers are first-time community actors of all ages. Most of the plays I direct don't happen in theaters. They happen in malls, in barns, in closed factories, in public and private spaces that are transformed into sacred spaces through the highly political ritual of live performance.” Under Rauch’s leadership, Cornerstone’s productions have changed lives and communities:

• Aaron Meeks, whose first play was with Cornerstone at the age of seven, recently won the N.A.A.C.P. Young Performers’ Award for his role in the Showtime series, Soul Food. • Ron Temple, a 6'9" wheat farmer, had never been in a play until he was the lead in a small town Cornerstone production in Norcatur, Kan., population 220. The play was a version of Moliere's “Tartuffe” adapted to examine the life of a disintegrating farm family. Temple went on to found the Norcatur Arts & Humanities Commission and has testified before the state senate on the importance of rural arts. • Port Gibson, Mississippi, where Cornerstone produced a racially integrated production of Romeo & Juliet, was subsequently designated a "Main Street, U.S.A." town through a federal revitalization program; the town was honored for having the most racially diverse "Main Street" board in the nation. Board members credit the Cornerstone play with forging the interracial relationships making that possible.

• When a rural Virginia school system banned the company from performing because its members had worked with people with AIDS, a press conference was held, parents sent their Cub Scouts and Brownies in uniform with supportive banners, and a community-wide AIDS education initiative was launched. • Concern among North Dakota ranchers and their wives about what they considered blasphemy in a Cornerstone production of Hamlet led to a discussion of ranch swearing and community hypocrisy. • Cornerstone established a theater residency at the Paiute Indian reservation in the town of Schurz, Nevada (population 705) to create “The House on River,” a play based on a Greek tragedy, to address local tension between democracy and traditional tribal government, between Christianity and native spirituality. By the time Cornerstone left, the Paiutes had created a theatrical identity of their own – the Walker River Living Theater.

• During a theater residency in the working class Los Angeles community of Pacoima, police shot and killed a teenager waving a broom handle in a threatening manner, and another child was killed by gang gunfire in the theater’s area two weeks before the opening. “The cast pulled together to discuss whether to cancel our performances. Instead, they recommitted to the play, a cautionary tale about violence against children. The playwright dedicated her work to the two young people, and the audience was packed nightly,” says Rauch.
• In a recent Los Angeles production, a group of mostly white policemen – played by real L.A.P.D. officers – burst onstage to arrest, mistakenly, a half dozen young men of color played by men from various low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods. Recalls Rauch, “I'll never forget a particularly stoic cop sobbing on closing night.”


His leadership style

“Cornerstone is re-envisioning community activism. No one has ever done this work in this way. It’s galvanizing, thrilling work,” says Ben Cameron, director of Theater Communications Group, a national service organization for nonprofit theaters. Cornerstone engages community collaborators in every step of the process. They invite community advisory committees to participate in project planning, run acting and writing workshops, and enlist community artists backstage and onstage. Cornerstone assures access for people who might not otherwise be involved by assisting with transportation, printing marketing materials in multiple languages, and having a pay-what-you-can admissions policy for all community projects. As the company has evolved, Rauch and Cornerstone have expanded their definition of community. While they continue to work with communities defined by geography, they are also producing plays with communities defined by occupation (civil servants citywide); by age (for low-income senior citizens in the nation’s largest senior citizens housing project); by culture and language (Arab-Americans citywide), and even by a shared birthday (diverse Angelenos born on the anniversary of Cornerstone's first day of operations, June 30). Cornerstone is currently embarking on a three-year series of projects involving diverse faiths, including Ba'hai, Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Quaker, Mormon, and Protestant congregations. “In 2004 we will invite all the artists and audience members to come together to create what we call our ‘Faith Based Bridge Show.’” In short, Cornerstone plays don't exist without a collaborating community – whether it’s a community of place, of interest or of faith.


The future

When the production ends, involvement does not. Cornerstone stresses the need for communities to continue the dialogue. “The real value of the work,” says Rauch, “is the process of helping the community address the issue raised in the production long after the play is finished.” Sometimes community members transfer their energy to solving the social problems surfaced by a play. In other instances, the arts are enhanced. “We try to keep up a relationship with individuals and community organizations so something lives on,” he says. “We plant the seeds; then it’s up to them.”


More about Bill Rauch and the Cornerstone Theater

“Imagine walking up to a group of teens and young adults you've never seen before, loitering in the courtyard of a public housing project in south central Los Angeles, and asking them if they want to be in a play. Some might call such an overture foolish, even dangerous. For Bill Rauch and members of his theater company, it's all in a day's work.”
– The Orange County Register December 20, 2000

“In our Port Gibson ‘Romeo and Juliet;" we made the Capulets white, the Montagues black, and cast the charismatic Edret Brinston, a black high school senior and track star, as Romeo. Edret's teachers were incredulous. ‘Not only is he a troublemaker,’ they said, ‘he can't read….’ He was so excited by his role that he had worked with his grandmother to learn his entire part during the two weeks we were away…. But it was not until the production was over that we learned the astounding truth. … Edret had not been force-fed those lines from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by his grandmother. He had actually labored over them himself and thereby learned to read…. He has since lost a brother and his best friend violently. Now he lives in Kentucky, works for Sprint, and misses acting. He also reads. Playing Romeo gave him a reason to read.”
– Ashby Semple, a Cornerstone associate artist, writing in The Boston Globe, February 7, 2000