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Interview with Alison Carey, writer in residence[Interviewer’s note: Art-making based on community interaction must have a unique aesthetic, flexible enough to include a "multiplicity of viewpoints," yet vigorous enough to ensure the best art possible. Alison Carey has been the company's writer-in-residence since its founding, and as such is often on the frontline with nothing but the company's aesthetic and her own experience to guide her. She feels that art-making is the finest goal of grassroots theater, and that the social dimensions of the work are simply the context and the source material. It is clear that Carey is passionate about working with communities, however, and the process of developing plays with them. "I would write very bad plays if I didn't have all this input," she says. — F.L.] Ferdinand Lewis: The company distinguishes between "ensemble shows" that don't involve community members, and "community shows" that do. Why is that distinction necessary? Alison Carey: The lines of distinction aren't as important now. It's just that we found that the community shows are so large we found it's easy to lose connection between one another. You're not using that set of muscles that you use when the ensemble members are working together directly. You're not connected to one another, you're connected to the community. So the ensemble work is important to keep us connected to one another for the community work, but also the community work is good for the ensemble work. A lot of the people we've met in the community shows have become part of the ensemble shows. The distinctions are emotionally vital when starting this work. FL: Why is that? AC: Because you have to fall in love with the community every time and want to learn and you have to be in a safe place to do that. One way to be in a safe place is to know the people you're working with very, very well. Ensemble shows gives you the chance to sit next to the person you've been sitting far away from during the community shows, because you've been sitting next to people from the community. It's the difference between dinner at home and going to a party. FL: Sounds like it comes down to your need to be there. AC: You can't just do the community work out of the sense that it's the right thing to do. Community shows are about discovering the community and being with the community, turning that into art, and the ensemble shows tend to be more self-reflective of [the ensemble]. If you do this for purely selfless reasons, you're going to burn out soon. You have to fall in love every time, and you have to want to fall in love and it has to fill you up, you can't do it because it sounds morally appropriate. It can be true that it's morally appropriate, but if you're in this context and you're not producing the art that you want to produce, you're going to burn out. You've gotta really want it for you. FL: What exercises do you do with community members to generate material? AC: A lot of them are essentially improv stuff up on your feet, but I also focus a lot on writing and just talking. I use simple stuff like people writing down what are three smells of your community and what are three sounds of your community? As the playwright, I need to think about those things that other people take for granted; it's a way to get them to not take the community for granted. I do so many adaptations, so you're looking at the core of the play. but in the context of the community. If a moment in the play is about, say, "hiding," it's practical to find out where a person would hide specifically, but also what would make you hide. We spend time just free-writing, like giving people a starting sentence like, "I woke up this morning and I…" and then passing the papers around and everybody writes, then everybody passes their papers and then you have to respond to that story. You get these wild expressionistic stories. That just gets people talking. FL: What's an example of how you adapt the exercises to the themes of the play? AC: For "The Good Person of New Haven," in one exercise a person would write to an imaginary grandchild why they've been a good person that day, and pass that to the person on one side of them, then write down why they were a bad person that day and pass that to the person on the other side of them. Then we can talk about what it's like to have people know you as both a good person and a bad person. You sit down in a circle with a group of people and do a writing exercise and that's a springboard, a starting point for a conversation. I always go in there with a plan of what I'm going to do and have to change it, because every group is different. FL: Do the words of community members find their way into the script verbatim? AC: Sometimes. It depends on if I have a lot of time with people. It's generally not that, though, because there's not enough time with people to get specific, but it definitely happens when someone does something and you say "that's perfect." But I'll tweak what someone has done. I do my best to credit people all over the place, and I would write very bad plays if I didn't have all this input. In "Steelbound," there were passages that were word-for-word or moment-for-moment from what someone told me of his experience, and I talked with him about it and he was fine. People come to this not because they have things to keep to themselves, but because they have things to share. As a writer I am a funnel, a facilitator of the process. When we start a workshop process I start by saying, "I know nothing, we need you in this process." What the hell do I know? I think that the community members take being needed in the process very seriously and they realize quickly that their role in the process is very valued. FL: Part of Cornerstone's mission is to "build bridges," which implies that while you make art, you can also deliver on the social effects of your work. AC: Actually, we say that we "try" to build bridges. We didn't start to claim the side-effects of our work until about ten years into it. FL: What happened ten years ago? AC: Well, I have to tell you the Port Gibson story: We did an interracial "Romeo and Juliet" in Port Gibson, Mississippi. They chose "Romeo and Juliet" because all the kids had all studied it in school, and we liked it because it was about young people who grew up in the same town but never met. When we got there, we realized that all the black kids went to the public school, and the white kids all went to the private school directly across the street. Our show was the first time blacks and whites had been on stage together in Claiborne county. Well, we've always been excited about theaters starting in our wake. We could point to it and say, "This happened because we were there, this happened because the energy was focused enough for this to happen." But it didn't always happen. In Port Gibson they did one big community show after we left, but that was it. But then, years later, when we did "Winter's Tale," which was a United States odyssey involving all the communities we had worked with over the years, we went back to Port Gibson, and people kept talking to us about the Main Street Program, the Main Street Program, had we heard about the Main Street Program? It turned out that the City had just gotten an award that they had the most integrated Main Street Board, and they said it was because we had gone there and done this play. So here was this very concrete bridge that was built because we had been there. You can't know your impact, but it made us know that the impact was there. Impact is very difficult to judge and quantify. As with many things in life it's a matter of faith. Audience makeup is one way of measuring impact. But creating broadly representational audiences for plays is hard, and anyway, theaters tend to make a niche. If you look at our audience surveys: For "Broken Hearts," it brought together all these different mixed communities, a real mix of age, race, income. We actually established a mixed audience, that was a measurable thing. Knowing that made us happy, and a little more comfortable laying claim to this thing that we know we do, though we can't always know when we do it. We know that it happens sometimes, and sometimes less than people think, but that's not a bad thing. Our primary job is to create good plays, and if we did a crappy play for a very diverse audience, we would have failed. To say you have to keep the art first would be a false dichotomy. Oxygen is first, but you can't go three days without water. Our art doesn't exist without the way our art is created and the involvement of the community, and the involvement of the community wouldn't work with bad art. We used to get questions in the beginning: "Are you art or social work?" We're not either of those things. It can look like social work on the outside, while it's actually a way of making the kind of art that's most satisfying to us. There's no way that we would have lasted this long if that weren't the case. Ferdinand Lewis is a founding member of The Ghost Road Company, an educator, writer and theater artist. He is currently at work on two books: "Ensemble Theater: An Anthology" and "Ensemble Theater: Traditions, Approaches, Strategies." He lives in Los Angeles. |
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