Interview with Dudley Cocke, Donna Porterfield, Ron Short and Tamara Coffey, core artist/manager group

By Michael Fields

Michael Fields: What does theater in community, or grassroots theater, mean to you, or to the people you work with? Start from there. For me, it always means why I, after 30 years, keep in this work?

Donna Porterfield: I think a certain number of people we work with are not thinking much about theater, much less the delineation of different kinds of theater. So many of our community partners are just community groups or churches or social-service agencies. A big part of our national partner list in the past has been arts presenters. They would think about it. And usually a lot of those would think that grassroots theater may be not such a good thing. We’ve educated people by doing projects with them in the past. But for me, what we are doing is important. I’ll just tell a personal story.

When I was a little girl I lived on a farm in West Virginia. My father was raised on the same farm. He always loved any live performance. From the time he was a little boy, he would make shows with the farm animals, and make his cousins be in them and stuff like that. When he got older he wrote plays and did them with the church youth group. They weren’t religious plays but they let him do it. My mother and brother didn’t like that so much, so my father would always take me to any live performance there was anywhere. I had seen a good deal of theater when you add it up over time. Then we moved to northern Virginia, off the farm, and saw theater people usually think of: Arena Stage, Catholic University. When I was out of college, I came here to visit a roommate of mine from college. Her husband worked at Roadside Theater. We went to a Roadside Theater performance – this was about 1975 – of "Red Fox/Second Hangin’." That was the first full-length play that Roadside did. It just bowled me over because I realized that of all the theater I had seen, for the first time I was seeing theater that was from my background, from my class background, from a rural sensibility - all these things that I had never seen. It was really overwhelming to me.

I think the theater that we do here, and the theater that we work with other people to do in their communities, is that. It’s their own stories from their own background, and how you make theater out of that. That’s the kind of grassroots theater that I think of, and that’s what’s important to me. That’s the reason. A little epiphany. My dad, who was still alive while I worked at Roadside, saw Roadside’s theater a lot. He pretty much felt the same way. Particularly with the play "South of the Mountain," which was written about his generation. It really spoke to him.

Tamara Coffey: Well, my story isn’t a whole lot different than Donna’s cause I grew up in the land that time forgot, so we have similar backgrounds even though they are a few years –

DP: And that is Wolfe County, eastern Kentucky. Tamara is over ten years younger than me, yet she had the same upbringing?

TC: I did! Except I didn’t grow up on a pig farm. I grew up in a very rural area, and when I was a kid, it was just very common for people to tell stories on their front porch in the evenings, or down at the general store. It was very common to hear live music everywhere you went, church being the main place, but we also oftentimes would have music at school in the evenings for the community. My parents love music. Neither one can play very well. My mom sings okay, but they’re not really musicians. What they used to do is, whenever they got a few extra bucks, they would buy musical instruments so that whenever one of their friends came by that played music or could sing they didn’t have the excuse that they didn’t have their instruments. So, we had an upright bass, three or four guitars, a mandolin, a banjo–we had everything. Nobody in my family played anything but the piano very roughly.

We used to have these music nights at my house on Friday and Saturday nights. We never really told anybody that it was going to happen. People would sort of drop in and we would end up with a house full of 50 or 60 people, playing mostly traditional music, a little bit of early bluegrass style and occasionally some gospel or some original music, even. It was mostly, though, just what people knew from having grown up hearing it. It was one of those things that was just so much a part of the way our family lived that it didn’t seem odd until it was totally gone. Now I don’t have that in my life anymore and I can see how remarkable it was that that happened. People would just drop in, people that we didn’t even know would just drop in ’cause they knew that there was going to be music. We had a hall closet that was the stand-up bass house.

From the time I was a little kid I loved theater. I never really saw theater until I was a teenager, and then it was high school or college theater. I don’t know why I fell in love with theater, but from the time I was a little kid I wanted to work with theater. I had dreams of going off to New York and working with "the real theater." And when I was in college working in college theater, it was fun, but I didn’t see it going anyplace. I didn’t see anything happening out of it, and went through a lot of different things in my life, and got an opportunity to go and see Roadside.

The first time I met Donna and Dudley and Ron, I actually came in for a show they were doing up at the elementary school at Pound and it was "Pretty Polly." It just blew me away. After I talked with Donna and Dudley the next day I realized that I had seen, "Red Fox/Second Hangin’" on the public television station in Kentucky probably three or four times and had just loved it. And never connected it with somebody from here, for some reason. It really was such a sharp thing. It was just so real, and I could see what was going on there. I just begged and pleaded until they let me come and work here.

To me, that’s what grassroots theater is, that’s my understanding of it. It’s so connected to where we are and what we know as individuals, separate from theater even. It’s so much a part of who we are as people in the community. It’s sort of a natural thing to go on. I agree with Donna. I think that most people, when they come to see us, don’t think of it as theater. They’re just going to hear stories and hear music. They don’t make that connection to theater at all.

DP: Here at home. Nationally, it is a bit different.

MF: So, the limos don’t come...and fur –

TC: Well, Ron insists on a limo, but the rest of us –

DP: And you know he has that fur piece that we had to follow him around with.

Ron Short: Around here, "fur piece" means coming from a great distance.

Dudley Cocke: So, what is grassroots theater? Well, we’ve actually spent some time creating a matrix of what the principles of grassroots theater are. That matrix is in a publication that we offer as one of our resources, a publication called "From the Ground Up." It actually has half-a-dozen or so points on the matrix that together describe what grassroots theater aspires to be. Not to go over that, but just to point out two points on that matrix, grassroots theater has its roots in a particular place. Almost, one could say, in a particular soil. It’s rooted in a particular place is one point on that matrix. And another point on the matrix is that it’s accessible to everyone in the community. There are another four, five or six principles in that matrix, which together describe how we, in some more formal way, think of grassroots theater.

With Roadside, I’ll just say that the theater came to be because form, content, audience and place were linked at the inception of the theater. So, that linkage of form and content, audience and place at the very beginning has allowed us to be an experimental theater because it has given us a firm foundation upon which to make new work. That is what we do. All our work is original work. Each piece is different than the piece before it. All the pieces have a root, a strong root in this heritage, this place. All the pieces are accessible to anyone. Some of the pieces you may need to be ten years old to follow, but not all of them. All of our work is for a general audience.

Those are two important characteristics of our theater, accessibility and commitment to place. By commitment to place we mean commitment to the people here, the culture here, the heritage here. And that commitment leads to the responsibility to make that heritage new, to reinvent it. That’s what the fun of theater is. Taking the traditions and stories of the people, stories of the place and reinventing them in a way that’s entertaining and instructive to the audience – who is always, in Roadside’s work, part of the show from early development all the way through to performance. There’s no fourth wall. We value and maximize interaction with the audience in any number of ways. Both during the formal presentation and afterwards. In the development of the scripts, so forth.

RS: It’s the same experience for me. There is a connectedness that brings us together. It has been not only the work that we have done together, but the major mystery of how we found each other coming from those diverse backgrounds. There is, to me, a kind of mystery. How did we find each other? So, we were individually driven before we came together to make this work, and now we’ve got the work. That does help identify us. It’s almost a kind of another identification for yourself in the community, being a part of something.

Personally, I think one of the more interesting things for me, after being in this work for awhile, was going around and seeing other theater, that I never would have seen had I not been able to use this work to propel me in my travels throughout the country. One of the curious things that people ask me is, "There is no tradition of theater in the mountains that you come from. Where in the world could art come from in a place that has a long history of poverty and a long public kind of popular belief that people are backwards?" I just am amazed by that, obviously, because there is so much drama in everyday life here. Our lives are just filled with drama, by constant drama. In church, the thing that most people understand the least is the potential to see theater in some ways at its best – theater of long history, of storytelling. In my church they tell stories, so I’m amazed that other people sometimes can’t see the theater here in the ways that we see it. Naturally it amazes me that they will look elsewhere before they will look in their own place.

I may change my mind tomorrow, like Myles Horton. When Herb Kohl was trying to write his book he would go to talk with Myles and the next day he would go and say, "Now, yesterday you said this..." and Myles would say, "No, I didn’t, that’s what you heard. I didn’t say that." My idea constantly changes. You may ask me today, and it may change on you next year. But I think there are some things that won’t change for me. I think basically now, in the world we are living in, there are two clear approaches to culture. I mean you can divide the world up into two camps. There’s popular culture and then there’s everything else. Popular culture nobody has any trouble identifying. It is driven by market. It is driven by everything that serves economy and market and politics. It’s in some ways what most people would say is American culture. It’s Coca-Cola. It’s all those trademarks that we have come to accept as part of our lives. And then I think there is a whole hidden world of America that people never see. And I do believe that community theater, or grassroots theater is that other voice. It’s that voice that never gets a chance to speak for itself or demonstrate itself in a real way.

When you live outside of those boundaries you don’t have any of that political control, that economic control, even the control of your own image. Somebody else is controlling and telling you who you are. Then the only thing that you have is your own story. That’s about the only thing that you have. It comes down to how do you use that in a public way. That’s essential to me. Theater is the last public forum for common people. We still can have access to it. You don’t have to have the huge corporation. You don’t have to have the technology of television. It is a place where common people, everyday people, can get up and speak their mind and have other people listen to them. That process of dialogue with the audience enters into the collective consciousness of that community and helps shape that community. As it uses the collective knowledge, it gets built together.

For me, that’s what grassroots theater is. It’s about having a voice. A public voice. One which demonstrates not only, "This is what I think and feel," but, "I’ll speak it in the public forum and then I’ll wait for a response so that we can have a dialogue about that." We can continue then to formulate our thoughts and change and grow as we need to in our own community. But it will be driven internally. It will come from within. It won’t come from that other place. Even if we have to struggle with that marketplace – and we do, we have to understand. You can’t dismiss it. You have to accept that it exists and you have to learn that you are bounded by those same political and economic boundaries. You have to learn that they exist. You can’t just ignore them and find a way to make what you want to say fit in with that. Find a way to make that voice public.

Some people would say, "That don’t sound like you are working in theater. That sounds like you are organizing, or that sounds like social work or something else." But I was moved from that place by seeing theater that did just the opposite. And not only did it do just the opposite of what I was saying, it presented itself with the identity of saying it was doing what I’m talking about. They had said that this is what we’re doing, and I clearly understood that was not only not what they were doing. In fact, some of the work that they were doing held what I believe, or what appeared to me at least, to be premeditated ignorance on their part. It appeared at other times to be almost malicious. In attempting to talk about cultural things in terms that people didn’t know about. And like the rest, I saw a performance that was as great as an affront to my culture and my personal life as anything I had ever seen. A week later I saw Roadside Theater. I didn’t have any doubt, any question, about which form of theater I wanted to represent me. And then consequently which form of theater that I wanted to be a part of – grassroots theater that speaks from a place for the people and gives them a voice that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

MF: That’s a great statement. I think that sense of the event you speak of – seeing one thing one day, and one thing the next – changes you forever. The day I got my draft card to go to ’Nam I saw the San Francisco Mime Troupe do, "Dragon Lady’s Revenge." I was 18 years old and scared to death, and it was all about me. That play was the first thing I had ever seen all about me. I joined a guerilla theater company in Seattle, not knowing at all what that meant and fearing for a bit it might mean wearing a gorilla suit. They gave me the assignment to sit in front of a Methodist church in Seattle on a Sunday morning dressed in Vietnamese black pajamas with a sign that said "Stop the War." And I did that. And the only direction I was given was not to do anything. They just said sit there. And those people came out of church and kicked the living crap out of me. Talk about a little epiphany. I thought, "Gee, if I can do this with a sign. What could you do if you actually knew something about some of this stuff?" Y’all have a lot of published material. "From the Ground Up" is actually a great example because there are a lot of definitions in there. There’s also a certain methodology of how work is developed. How did that come about? That sense of creation? Was there trial and error? How did that happen?

DP: Well. Here’s my memory. We started touring in about ’78 and then, you know, picked up. I was actually hired to do booking because we had these plays that hadn’t been performed, which I didn’t know anything about and had to that figure out. Once that got rolling we were mostly doing one-night stands or what they call a two-day residency. Really performance oriented.

We talked earlier about the importance of audience to our work, or place to our work. When we are here our audience knows the stories and is from this background, which is economically primarily working-class and economically poor. But when we were touring, because we toured nationally pretty quickly, we were presented by arts presenters getting their money from the regional arts organizations who were getting their money from the National Endowment for the Arts. These organizations didn’t want to give their money to anyone they didn’t see as fiscally responsible. The arts presenter groups in the community were primarily women at that time and from middle- to upper-class white backgrounds – many of them very well-intentioned and wanting to serve the whole community, others of them not wanting to serve the whole community. Sort of a social club, "wanting to bring culture to their community" is what they would say, which is kind of a red flag for us since we believe it exists in every community.

We were traveling to these places, and the audience would be their friends and buddies from the same background. Here are plays are from this different background. I think they enjoyed the plays, but they weren’t so sure if they should laugh at some parts. They were very polite. The plays couldn’t come to their full life without a diverse audience, a little more diverse than that. So, we made all this publicity material to get out audience. Radio spots, sent them around. And it worked. For our plays anyway. When folks followed the program, they got out all these people that had never showed up to anything before. Many of them were delighted. Some of them were horrified. In fact, more than one person said, "Oh no, now they’re here, they’re probably going to want to tell us what we should bring in. And it might be country music."

We were making at that time anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of our income from these tours. And so we were saying well, we’ve got these people there. This isn’t working. What’s responsibility? And how do they get integrated into these arts programs? That’s when we all talked about it, and Ron really pushed it that we need to do community residencies. We need to stay in the community longer. We didn’t exactly know what that meant right then. We had some ideas. We decided that we would go for that. Our booking partner was from Southern Arts Associates and we all thought this was economic suicide, you can never do this, it’s too expensive. Our booking partner said, "Yeah. Let’s do it. It’s important." She believed in it. That was Theresa Holden. So we did. And at that time we were able to raise money and start doing these things.

We started doing one of these residencies, and booking was a lag time, in Dickenson County Virginia where Ron grew up and where we have a really strong audience for our work. Right over here, the next county over from where we are sitting. We were doing a residency with a high-school drama class and a teacher. They were crossing over and working with a senior center and all these different things were coming about. We started talking about how can you get people talking to each other and telling stories again. It used to happen all the time, as Tamara mentioned, in these different places, and it doesn’t anymore, naturally. So, how can we come up with a way of that happening? We came up with a story circle, developed a story circle, which all the methodologies and written material have to go on. Anyway through this residency we started to figure out how we could make arts participants rather than arts spectators out of the audience.

We started out with an idea of the methodologies, sort of the way you see it in the written literature. But, in the beginning, we were thinking, oh you just go all the way – step one to whatever in every single residency. And of course, you don’t do that. Over time and residencies we learned to gauge more what makes sense, what doesn’t, how far people want to go. We got better at it. And as we got better at it we started writing it down because it started making clear sense to all of us. And we wrote it down, everyone in the company. At one time we had nine people on full-time salary, and everyone produced residencies. It didn’t matter what job you did, you were a residency producer. The methodology that we had, that we all agreed on, that was the way we were going to do it and the place we were going to go. However, each of us was very different and related to the community differently. We all did it in a little bit different way, but we got to the same place. I think the methodology we have written down is what we go by, but we all go about it in a slightly different way. Every community is different. Every residency is different. And so in my memory, that’s how it came about.

MF: Just as a segment to that, in the materials that you sent, it was interesting to see that you have a "Residency Goal Sheet." I was very fascinated with that, because we keep such lousy records. And it is an interesting tracking of what happened. What was intended, what was set out, and, in the short form, what happened? That is very valuable information for folks because it tracks an experience.

TC: I just remember that when we were starting to do the goal forms, that one of the things that kept coming up was that we were working with the same people a lot of the times at different points in time. If someone didn’t keep really good records, then we didn’t know what the previous conversation was, so we couldn’t really build on that work. That’s where I remember we really got into getting more detail on the goal forms. Keeping our goals, and the presenter’s goals, and really looking at it in a bigger way. Which I think, in some ways, made the work a lot stronger cause we could really take advantage of what we had done in those places before. That’s it. Donna said everything. Donna took all the good lines.

DC: I think the process is pretty well spelled out. We think of it as maybe a circle, but the different parts don’t necessarily happen discretely. Sometimes, two or three things on the circle can be happening at the same time. The first point is that we show our work because that is the fullest expression that we have of all of our thinking and emotion about something. We show the work, and usually, at that first point on the circle where we show the work, maybe we do some explanation about how that work came to be – though, because we involve audiences, our work is fairly transparent. It is really not intended to conceal, but rather to reveal the whole approach to performing and acting. The whole approach to acting, to design, to directing is to try and create transparency so the audience person can look through the actor, and the story, the set, and the direction to become in touch with their own story. The intent of all the work is revealing not concealing.

With that all in mind, it encourages audience members to believe more in themselves and their own possibilities as artists. Often communities will ask us to help them do what we’ve done. Really, all our residency methodology is, is a deconstruction and a teaching of what we’ve learned over 25 years. At the same time we are deconstructing that and teaching it to people, we are also continuing to learn by exploring new work. The two happen side by side. We continue to do our work and to teach its principles so communities can do their work. We’re not really taking our style or our stories or our heritage and in any way overlay those in a community. Quite the opposite, we want the community to find its own voice. So, that’s the first step.

The second point on the circle is where we help the community to hear its own voice. We do this through particular methodologies like music and story circles. The community actually begins to realize that it does have a voice, and, as Ron said in the last round, this notion of a public voice is really important. It isn’t just a private voice, in the family, or in the shower if you are singing to yourself, but it’s a voice that is public and comes from the stage. This second point on the circle culminates with public performances of community stories and songs for the community.

On the third point on the circle, often communities will be so encouraged by hearing their own voice that they will want to be more intentional and more artistic about shaping that voice. They’ll want to make some sort of more formal play or performance. We help them do that. We can. We do whatever we’re asked to do. Dramaturgy, to help with direction, to help with music composition, whatever the need is. But the whole point of this teaching is to get this community to rely upon itself so we always have that in mind. We are always, not always but often, pushing the community and challenging the community to do a little more than maybe they are comfortable with. Or to do a little more than maybe they believe they can do. The point is for them to have their own plays and to have their own voice. In this process we are both. Sometimes we are just learners ourselves, and sometimes we are teachers. Sometimes we lead. Sometimes we follow. That’s pretty standard, I think, with good teachers, pretty standard pedagogy.

In the fourth point in the circle, if successful plays are made and people want to establish their own theater we help them do that by recognizing people in the community who have done the work. By helping them figure out what kind of infrastructure in terms of organization, in terms of funding, whatever is needed to get that group of people a toehold in the community, to have a nascent theater, so that they can continue to explore their local voice. Then, at that point, they’ve become, in some ways, peers with Roadside Theater cause that’s what we’re continuing to do here in our own community and we’ve been continuing to do the whole time we’ve been teaching them. We’ve been continuing to explore our own issues and voice. We introduce them and welcome them into the kind of national network of people trying to do this work. Sometimes we make collaborative plays together with them. Often they will come here and show their new works. We really set up a peer relationship at that point. This process can take anywhere from a couple of years to half-a-dozen years. There’s no big rush, in a sense, because if it can take root, then it can go on for a very long time.

And just a couple of other things on the, "Residency Goal Sheet.".. I think a lot of good points were made. It was really about continuity. As we were going through that process I described, there has to be continuity. And there has to be a clear understanding of what the outcomes were and what the obstacles were. Writing that down helps clarify that. And then also we are in a situation where we are passing the baton in a lot of residencies. I may be doing the work one month, and in the next month someone else from the company will be doing the work and they’ve got to know exactly where I left off. They have to have all the information. I would have if I were going back so that they can then pick it up, because a critical factor in this work is beginning where the community is. If you start out ahead of the community, or if you start behind the community you are just creating trouble and the project will not be a success. You have to be very astute in trying to understand where the community actually is, and you’ve got to go to that place to work. If you expect things out of the community that are unrealistic then everybody gets frustrated. If you patronize the community then you can forget it. The point of entry in this community work is critical, as is the continuity of passing the development along. It’s a whole development process.

We really could not continue to develop all the work that we were developing only here in this place. Our highest ticket price is $5, students and seniors is half price. So, we needed to get out. But it turned out to be fine because it has been important for the Appalachian voice to travel into other communities. There are so many stereotypes about Appalachia that it just became part of our mission to be a more authentic voice for the life, and concerns, the hopes, and the joys of people here. That became a part of our mission and we really have come to rely on audiences like us, which are people here in Central Appalachia, and audiences unlike us, which are audiences in many different places that we’ve been. We’ve been in about 45 states, so you can imagine we’ve encountered a whole range of folks.

The key thing for theater people, and for people working in culture, is to have that interchange with other audiences, other communities, other artists. What is critical is that you – as a company here in Appalachia, or as an artist here in Appalachia working – you’ve got to stay in control of all the riches you encounter: what to include and what to leave out. You have to make those decisions so that, at the moment something is being imposed upon you, either for commercial reasons or in some other colonial way, that is the time when you are going to really lose your artistic voice, or the thread of your artistry. It’s going to be bent or cut, or however you want to think of it as a metaphor.

RS: You were talking yesterday about the fact that in Ireland or Denmark artists don’t have to pay income taxes, and there are places where work in theater is a part of the community. Like saying the church is a part of the community, or the business section is a part of the community. But I think that you have to understand that when you live in a community, or live in a country, where art - like everything else - is a product sold and packaged, if you don’t have that experience of being able to purchase, you aren’t a theater-goer. You don’t have that economic opportunity to see it in that form. You may come to misunderstand what it means. One of the struggles in this community, where the daily life is a struggle – paying the bills and keeping a job – people often don’t see art as viable or important to them in their lives. They may not understand why this has any value.

There is a constant struggle, then, when you enter in to the making of theater. There is a process by your very banding together in this way, an almost exclusionary process that happens in the way that you work and think, as opposed to the way that they work and think on a daily basis. You have to, by necessity, not only do the work but deconstruct and instruct constantly. Don’t get caught up in the form of the style. Don’t get fooled thinking this is one thing when it is really something else. We are constantly needing to teach, from the beginning, that this is a model of community. Roadside Theater, what we are doing, that this is a model of community that we are both trying to teach and learn at the same time – us individually, as a group, and what we are trying to teach and learn in our own community.

You have to understand, then, for us to be able to use that model in a real way, our first need was to demonstrate to people how they fit into that. You go and you start the conversation by saying at the heart of theater is story. And at the heart of our theater is going to be story about place. Those stories are going to be not only about you, but from you. You are going to tell us stories and we are going to reveal through this process of art, through this process of education, through this process of dialogue. We’re going to find the secrets together. We’re going to find the truths. Not the truth, but the truths that we all can agree on and share. Once we start making a foundation of those things, those truths, then the form won’t mean so much. We won’t worry so much about style and form. That’s not what it’s about. You can exclude the truth to just focus on form and style, but we are back at pop culture again. Maybe the model that is the most powerful one causes people to respond because of its ability to reach us in our basest level, which we all have. What we are looking for is our greater truths. What holds people together in those times of struggle? What are those truths that have allowed us to exist and continue?

It’s not a great discovery that music and story are still a vital part of community life here. When you look at the history, it’s amazing, how has it survived? You listen to what people have to say, you bring them into the process and you find those truths. Again, not the truth – because you are not trying to exclude people by going, "Now. I have the truth and you don’t have the truth, so you are going to have to go on over there." That’s one way, and it’s not about one way. What you have to understand, though, is that the way you come to the truth is not through the universal. You come to the truth through the particular. You come through those individual truths of daily life. When I tell a story that speaks of truths, and an Indian in Zuni hears that story and it activates in them that same button of truth, then we have been able to communicate. If I had tried to speak to that Indian in Zuni and tried to worry about form and all of that we would have lost.

By looking at the particular and understanding how important that is, and continuing to focus on that, then what you do is come to those truths. And those truths speak to people no matter where you are, no matter what language it is in. It seems to me that you have revealed the heart of what it means to be community: communal sharing. It does not mean that I have to have the same religion and the same rituals of religion, but yes, religion is important. It does not mean that my family is the same as their family, but yes, family is important. You begin to start isolating things and you find in yourself. What part art is going to do is to reveal what it means to be human.

DP: You talked with Jamie Funk yesterday, you can see how some of these things that they are mentioning really came into play. Some of the things that Dudley was talking about, and how these things proceed. Looking at what we have in common first and then moving to the harder questions. I often look at, when I am producing a residency, you know the actual doing of it is a series of problem-solution-problem-solution-problem-solution. We have our methodology, and we can branch off and do things that aren’t on there if they are achieving what we are trying to get to. For example, we talked about how the staff weren’t trusting us at the beginning of the Hope House residency. I decided to do interviews. The interviews are not what we usually do, but it was a problem solution that got us to a place where we could keep going down the list of places we need to go.

MF: It is very interesting how what might be described as an activist agenda exists in this place to such an extent, embodied in this particular organization. And I’m talking about Roadside being a part of this organization. Watching the film yesterday, "A Stranger with a Camera," brought that home, how the critical issues that we face tend to be personalized in a way that can be accessible. I’m curious as to those issues, how they get into the work?

TC: I think it has to do with making art from this place. I know that all places have their problems, but this place is like a microcosm for all the problems in the country. For the last 100 years we’ve been like a little colony. We’ve got a lot in common with the Third World. We have had all of this just so present and up front in our lives, and as a part of this place it is not avoidable. People here that try to avoid it can’t do it. They don’t even try real hard to do it. I mean people can get blasé-d out on the television or the Web, or whatever. That happens more and more. But it comes back, even if it’s in the mode of depression.

We have serious, serious economic and social problems here. We have for a long time, and they are a result of 100 years of economic and political oppression. It isn’t anything anybody is making up, or wants even to deal with. But it’s there, being that our industries – timber and coal – are so destructive to the land, and the land is such a vital and important part of the culture and of people. Every time I turn on my washing machine I know where the energy to run that machine is coming from. I can look out the window and see the strip mine. It just isn’t avoidable. Where I’ve lived in other places I could not think about it for a little while. I can’t ever not think about these things here.

I think the most important issue that Appalshop is founded on, and this theater, is the importance of cultural identity. That is so essential. To be strong in your cultural identity and to understand the strength of it, and to understand who I am in it is essential to being able to solving these other problems. I think in our theater that has been the first thing that we address by making theater from this place, and from this culture –the story, the song, the history from here. When I saw, "Red Fox/Second Hangin’," that is what I saw. It was about my cultural identity. I’m from West Virginia in a place that was not coal mining, but still it was closer to what I grew up with than anything I had ever seen. Now that I’ve lived here for 25 years I understand even more of that. I think that’s not avoidable. In the work, too.

It isn’t as if our plays don’t say things that sometimes people disagree with, in fact I think they do. And people might tell you about that, some people. What brings the audience together, despite their sometimes diverse political beliefs, is their cultural identity. They see that we’re portraying primarily the working people and the economically poor class here. Everybody sees themselves as a part of that or coming from that in some way shape or form, or understands it, knows it. It can come together in the stories and songs. And then it’s possible to have conversations about some of these political opinions that there are very divergent opinions about. So much of the written history and political point of view that people would know here has come from the group of folks who wrote it, a lot of whom weren’t from here. There are people here that went along with the folks who weren’t from here and were making a lot of money here. In the work that Appalshop does is the voice that wasn’t heard in that mix. That voice tends to be stereotyped. We try to take those stereotypes and break them apart and make something that we think is making more sense. To me it’s about cultural identity and everything else proceeding from that.

I grew up in a place where, even today, the average income for a family of four is less than $10,000 a year. When I was growing up it was a place where a lot of people didn’t work outside the farm or the house that they lived in. So, they didn’t actually have spending money unless they sold a hog. A lot of people grew tobacco where I’m from, so when they sold their tobacco, they stocked up on the basics. People were surviving really well at that point. They didn’t know what poverty was because they didn’t know they were poor till people came and took pictures of them and put them in magazines.

I remember in school, this girl I went to school with got picked to be in Seventeen magazine along with like five other high-school students across the country. And when they did their story they did the whole thing from a poverty angle and they showed a picture of her house and talked about how she lives in a shack. She was so embarrassed by that, and upset about that. We all were, because that’s how most everybody was living. It never occurred to us that we were poor. It never occurred to us that people would see us as something to be pitied. It was a real awakening for people in that area. At the same time the U.S. Corp of Engineers decided that the Red River Gorge area – which is a beautiful place for hiking and camping, but a lot of people have farms down there – they decided that would be a really nice place to dam up and make a lake. They came in. They were just going to do it. They didn’t expect anybody to grouse about it. What happened was people said, "Wait a second. My family came in here 100 years ago and built this farm. My grandparents worked this farm, my parents worked this farm, I’m working this farm, my kids are going to work this farm, their kids are going to work this farm. We’re not leaving." They had about a 10-year battle to keep that from happening, and they were successful at the end of it, which was an amazing thing for me because I had never seen that struggle up close and personal like that. At the same time that was going on, all the strikes were going on up here in the coalmine area. The only way I saw a connection to that was when my brothers were truck drivers and they would be brought in to haul coal. They sort of got to know that experience firsthand.

To me, what we do is about all that. It’s about what Donna said. It’s about who we are and being in this place and there is no separation of it, and we can’t ignore it because it is in our face everyday. I think when you grow up with that it is in your personality, you can’t pretend that it’s not there. It’s just who we are, and we can’t separate ourselves from it, or it will kill us. It’s just going to get us, so we can’t turn our backs on it. One of the things that I’ve always liked about Appalshop is that as an organization we look at issues from a lot of different angles, and we work on them from a lot of different angles. You have some people that are working on immediate needs, which are so important to cover, and then you have some people who are working on longer-range things. Then you have some people that are working on sort of the root of the problem, which is what I think Roadside is doing. Sort of looking at this culture in a bigger way and figuring out how to get our own voices heard, how to fix it so that people in the community feel that what they have to say is of value and should be listened to, and should be said. To me, with all the projects in Appalshop working together ,we just cover so much and we are so capable of making change in this region and in other places.

DC: One of the plays we made because we came to understand that the young people in high school didn’t really understand their history past a couple generations back here in this mountains. We made a play that connected the more recent history of say the last 60 or 70 years with Scotch-Irish. We focused on the Scotch-Irish tradition because that’s the heritage of a lot of the people here, particularly the people who came here before 1900, and the early 1900s. We just made the play because it was like an assignment – the kids around here, the teenagers around here, don’t have a sense of a longer history, so let’s make a play that tries to talk about that, and demonstrate that, and entertain with that.

We took that history of the Scotch-Irish and stretched it back to the British Isles. What you do when you stretch that history back to the British Isles is you understand that the struggle here, in some ways, is a struggle that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years in a culture. That it is sometimes very present, the struggle of 300 years ago, in a song, in the language, in just the way of being that exists right now in 2001. It’s a very long struggle relative to just the three or four generations. It’s a much longer struggle than that, and it takes all kinds of quirky and interesting manifestations. One thing I remember, I guess, Ron, it was your grandmother who resisted electricity as long as possible. Her rationale being, as I recall, that she wasn’t sure what was on the other end of that electricity. And that’s about as clear as you can say it.

I think we all really agree that we try to work from a deep cultural place. I guess that’s what the story of how that play came to be illustrates. It is a place of cultural identity, but it’s a cultural identity based in a lot of history. When you are looking at cultural identity, like Donna said, you have to look at the strengths and the weaknesses of it. It’s not just about pride in who you are, but it’s also about the limits of pride. It’s about all the complexity of those issues. Yet complexity itself cannot be the end, and has never been the end, of what we do because one can be endlessly complex and never really get to the point. I remember Marianne Moore, the Brooklyn poet, said that, "Complexity is not a crime, but carry it to the point of obscurity and nothing is plain." We’ve always in the end tried to be plain and say what we stand for, and at the same time look at that in a complex way that registers for our audience. Because people live very complex lives. They are very aware of complexity. To over simplify may have a short-term effect. A lynch mob is an oversimplification. So, it may have a short-term effect to make an enemy, to tar and feather that enemy, to lynch that enemy, but in the end it’s gotta be more than that.

We’ve tried to work with identity, but work with identity in a way that examines it and also brings us to some statements about what we believe, what we value, some politics. Even when we make a declaration about our politics it is provisional. It’s our politics and we never try to put that on the audience. We always kind of end our plays with asking them in some kind of artistic way what do they think, what are they going to do with this story that we’ve told? It is what they are going to do that is going to make for change. As Tamara so well said, politics is inescapable here. All of us, with the exception of Tamara, who is the only one who took any theater in college, we all came to this work through politics. All of us were involved in politics, the politics of positive social change, in poor-people’s politics before we ever came to theater. It was really seeing theater as this wonderful instrument to talk about politics and social change – that’s how we got going – and then began to appreciate theater more on its own terms. Own terms being that it is a pretty fun form, and it has a long history of characters. That’s a pretty good reason to do it right there.

RS: It’s sort of like, if you’ve got a barnyard full of hogs, you’re going to eat sausage sometime. I think the statement to make about not only what we do, but what it is not, is a constant critical examination of the work. The one thing that I worry about in some ways is how to walk that line of complexity that Dudley was talking about. That is a struggle that we all face, and I think in some ways it is a struggle that the artist faces. The artist, I think, embraces complexity, but it is their job to simplify that and to present things in a way that allows people to have access to that complexity. I think that it is in human nature not to like chaos, not to like struggling against things we can’t find answers to. We would like to just be simple answers. I really do believe that one of the great faults of pop culture is that it dehumanizes. I don’t mean that it intentionally sets out to make devils out of people, or to make us seem dumb or stupid. But it does that. It dehumanizes in that it does not attempt to do the other. It does not attempt to go for complexity. It goes for simplicity.

I did not become aware of this through art. I became aware of this through politics and the Vietnam War. When I came to understand that the news media, the thing that is supposed to serve all the people, was in fact another arm of popular culture. They could take whatever tact they wanted to, writing about the Vietnam War, and that would be how people interpreted it on that day because they didn’t want to try and understand the complexities of that history of involvement. People didn’t know how we got to be there. Here is the other side of that: If you are standing in one of those paddies you ain’t asking about what the politics of that is, it’s a very personal story. It’s not a political issue, some larger thing, in some ways it is very directly related to you. I came to understand that there’s a real difference in just always going with that pop culture, it deconstructs to the point of over simplification. Read the accounts that said, "This week in Vietnam only 300-and-some were killed and there were 2,000 wounded." At that point we were thinking that was good news. I was on the ground carrying the bodies, how could you look at those piles of coffins out there and say that’s good news? There’s no way. Something in your mind says, "Wait, something is wrong with this picture here."

There is also a danger, I think, in issue-based art when you only focus on the larger issue and you don’t understand there is a human story behind all those issues. If you start talking about unions and you don’t understand that the face of a union man is my cousin Billy Jean, if you don’t understand that then you’ve oversimplified it. You take what appears to be a complex issue and you focus on it in this way, but the truth is I think that by focusing on issues there is oversimplification. Just simply focusing on issues. To try to reveal the lives of the people, all the people that are involved, is a much more complex way of looking at the issue – of looking at the world. I think that is exactly what we do by taking the long haul. We are in it for the long haul, not for whatever is the trend of the moment, the issue of the moment. Sometimes those issues can become trends in the same way that marketing can become trends, when people look at them in a short-term kind of way.

Rather what we say is, okay, we tell this story, and in this story, this issue will become a part of these characters’ lives. You will know that in your audience you’ve got union people, you’ve got company people, you’ve got people who are unemployed, and what you have to do is to let all of those people have access to what you are saying. Not because you oversimplify, because you create the complexity that allows each one of those people to have a view of that without you telling what they should be thinking or doing. They’ll come away with different ideas about what they heard, but in that process of having those people together in that way you have this dichotomy that you could never have in any other way. You have this opportunity for people to hear something that could add to their point of view, add to their argument or challenge their own point of view. It is not because we selected what the issue was. What we have done was to enclose it within the complexity of culture, of identity, of history.

The long term, that thing – history – is not about the examination of all the told stories. It is about the examination of those untold stories so that we understand how did we get to this point. What the hell am I doing standing here up to my ass in a rice paddy with people shooting at me? I need to know that. And I need to know that in its complexity. But I need to know it in a personal way, in a way that I can understand. Something that is not intended to obscure the point of view of the individual as we are. I think that our work tries to do that. It goes for complexity. And I don’t think people always see that. I think that they don’t see that because they don’t have the same entryway points that some people in our own communities may have. They may think they have the knowledge, but they don’t have the knowledge, they don’t have the complexity. In fact for them it seems oversimplified because they only a limited point of view about what it is that you are talking about. You are always walking that line.

MF: As I look around the country, there are groups of our ilk around but they are all now our age. There are other groups coming up and that is great, but I’m talking about the ones that have really kept at it, and this kind of work. You all have a lot of published works that are available, and those have come out of evaluation. They come out of critique of your own work. One thing feeds another, feeds another, feeds another. I am also interested in how life, stages of life, also affect that. What’s the future look for you all? Not in terms of particular projects, but in interest and drive and where you see your next stage at?

DP: We’ve always written things down, but I think partially because in the core group of people we have writers. We all write. I can express myself better writing than talking, and so we’ve always written things down in addition to writing plays. I think there is a real concern for that now, because of the age like you said. Not just my age, but the age of the theater. When you’ve been doing something for 25 years, if you haven’t learned a little bit, somebody should just shoot you. You want to put it down. We learned an awful lot from things that were written down during the Federal Theater Project and the WPA Projects, all the story gathering. We learned stories from our own culture that way. We didn’t know all of this when we started. Then we happened on to the Little Theater movement, and all these things that had been written about. Some people were still alive who had participated, but some people were gone. It was really important to read about those things. I don’t know if what we did is going to be important for people to read about or not, but it’s important to leave your footprints. Then it’s there. If someone wants it they can have it. If not, that’s the way it goes.

We’ve tried over time, you know, from a long time ago, to involve younger people in the theater in the hopes that they are going to take charge, or whatever. What really happened is that we trained a lot of people that are now out doing other things, and doing important things. You can directly see how their work came from learning these things, and there is nothing wrong with that or what they are doing. They just weren’t interested in jumping up and taking over this. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of which you would expect, like their own personal reasons. A lot of it is, if all the old honkers are still around with all your ideas, like we are, and also still doing theater - we haven’t retired - it isn’t time for people to take over.

Now, for some reason, we are getting more interest in the work of Appalshop by young people than we have ever had. This generation of young people who are in their 20s right now are all of a sudden latching on to us. It isn’t because we solicited this, it is because it started happening. I noticed at the NET [Network of Ensemble Theaters] meeting a lot of theaters were having the same experience. All of a sudden, young people were coming to this thinking about the social issues. That’s a new thing. I don’t know what all will come of that. It’s a recent development. But I do think it’s just important to write these things down.

The artistic work we are doing, I think it is more exciting than anything we’ve done. But I think that way at every step of the work. The collaborative plays allow us to speak from a place and work with people in a larger way than we have in the past – have larger casts, just in every way. To work with different aesthetics, to put our culture in a different light, it’s just an exciting thing to me. The play that we are wanting to work on with a jazz pianist is an exciting idea for me, very different. On other hand, we are able to do those things because we’ve learned these things for 25 years, because we didn’t start out with theater backgrounds. We learned as we went. Because we are culturally based, we’ve gotten to a point where things are possible that weren’t when we didn’t know what we know now. And so that’s exciting, and it’s a double-edged sword. You know, we want to keep doing that , but what comes after you? I don’t really know, but I know that people will know what we did if they read. If they are interested. And they may not be, I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers your question. It’s a hard one to answer.

MF: It’s certainly a question that we face in our group. The core, I’m talking about the core. We talk about this same thing. What are we leaving, what do we want? ’Cause we are not ready to die yet. People would like us to, but we are not ready yet to move on.

DP: Our politics come from a certain inclination. I don’t really know what it means yet that these folks in their 20s that are showing up on the doorstep now have a different politic than the ones that showed up, or that we sought out or tried to find ten years ago. They didn’t come with this clear. They are in their 20s, they are figuring it out. But something that is important to them is different. I haven’t got it figured out. I’m one of the old farts, so I don’t know. Tamara is younger, ask her. But she grew up in the land that time forgot.

TC: That’s right. So, it’s not like I’m younger at all. It’s kind of like I get the benefit of old age, but without those extra years. My perspective on this is very different because I haven’t been here for 20-25 years. I’ve only been here for seven-and-a-half. I didn’t have the experience of helping to make this company from the beginning. It’s a very weird place to be in. It is sort of like being middle-aged, you are not really one of the geezers, but you are not one of the bright young ones. It’s a weird place to be.

For me it was disappointing when I was working at Roadside with people around my age and not seeing them interested in continuing this sort of work. It was really disappointing for me. When I really got to know Roadside well, it was something I hoped we could keep doing for years and years and it will outlive all of us. Like Donna was saying, the group that was in there that was my age were interested in doing other things. I think the politic was different for them, so it was disappointing for me. With this younger crowd, I don’t really see someone coming up to take over Roadside and continue it. I see them doing things using some of the work that Roadside has done, using some of the ideas that Roadside has moved forward and doing their own thing, which is very exciting on its own terms. It seems to me that with all the documentation, it is even more important now that you know someone is going to pick it up and do something with it. I think when these guys retire, I’m just going to go live on a dairy farm somewhere and have Donna’s life all over again.

DC: I don’t really know what the future is. I know we are working harder now than ever before at this. Working harder now in our 26th year than we worked at it in our 25th year. I’m not sure how good a thing that is. I know that we don’t have enough time. I’ll speak for myself, I know that I don’t have enough time to really research and study things like I would like to and I know would be beneficial. Maybe that will change. I know we are looking to create time to be more reflective. In fact, documentation itself is a way to take a respite from constant production and touring, grant writing, administration – to get some perspective.

We are working harder than ever, and it seems that it is very much still an upstream swim. By that I mean that the minute you stop stroking you end up down stream, which is the wrong place to be. It hasn’t gotten to be less of a current to swim against. That’s really too bad because when we began this work in the mid-’70s we were filled with a kind of optimism that would have put us much further ahead than where we are now. And I’m not speaking just personally or just in terms of the theater. The culture that we envisioned in the ’70s, and even up until about ’82 or ’83 when the Reagan administration came in and the reversals began. put us much, much further ahead of where we are now, as we were imagining it. And it’s still very easy to imagine where we could be now versus where we are now. This current flowing the other way, all the factors – popular culture, whatever you want to lay in there – it all causes this current that’s very strong. It’s required that we really never depart from the way Bernice Reagon has always put it - you go into any situation, a meeting or whatever, and you are going to either gain territory or lose territory. She puts it in a warriorlike metaphor. I can soften that by saying you are either swimming hard upstream or you are getting carried with the current where you don’t want to go. Any way you cut it, it’s about a battle, a continuing struggle.

You try to figure out how to be smarter about struggling. John O’Neal says he so admires the older drummers versus the new drummers down on the New Orleans music scene. The older drummers, they seem to get the same sound, but they seem to also expend about half as much energy. They aren’t better than young cats, but they sure figured out how to do it within their means. I guess we are inevitably going to have to figure out how to struggle within our means, and within our age. The prospect of not facing the struggle seems very dim at this point.

If you were asking me in the mid-’70s, I thought that we would accomplish more than we have in terms of a national movement towards equity and justice. What we have really been interested in is how do we get enough of a level playing field for this nation’s many cultures. So, not only can we learn and support one another, but so we can compete with each other in a mild and friendly way. I mean competition is good in that way. And yet we’ve not been able to get a level playing field so we can’t even have that mild competition. In having no level playing field it is very hard to learn from and support one another as much as we would want to. It’s been a long time in a human life, but a speck in the history of things. So, that’s the speck in the history of it.

RS: For me this is the most complex question. One of the stories that remains true in my own life, from Zuni, was: Once upon a time, even moreso than today, there was a very real complexity in living religious rituals and structures at the heart of their community. These rituals are greatly diminished from what they used to be. Even the language is different. Because those rituals aren’t there, there’s not the language there to talk about them. There’s a kind of diminishment. Though most people could take a look at the Zuni spiritual life, compare it to their own, and say the Zuni are very rich.

There was a story about the people that serve the Zuni community through religion. They are central to the growth of that community, but it takes up all their lives. They are priests to the people. They are dedicated. Even now people have a hard time trying to hold down jobs while trying to be spiritual leaders; some people just can’t. Once upon a time they had a sun priest. The sun priest’s job was to get up every day and, through a series of complex prayers, pray the sun up. It was your job to pray the sun up over the people every day. And they couldn’t carry on the tradition. I know this before I tell the story, I know that it ended. But at one point in time, when the sun priest was still central to the people’s lives, a group of anthropologists came in and they asked all kinds of questions, real interesting questions. And one of the questions that they asked the sun priest was, "Say, what do you think would happen if one day you didn’t get up?" And the priest looked at them and said, "Now, why would I want to do that?" That’s the struggle in my life. Why would I want to not do this work? It is so central to who I am. It’s not separate from those other things. It is ritual and religion for me. It is the integration of my history and my culture, and my family.

My family has entered into this work with me. They have changed through this process, the way that they see themselves. So, it’s just integrated everything. And so, I don’t know how to distance myself with the work. That’s a problem I have in my own family and sometimes in my own community. It’s not about being an actor and always on, but I don’t know how to turn off a thought. I don’t now how to start thinking on the issues and working on the issues. I see the integration of this in the same way that priest does, I don’t know any other thing. I didn’t come to this. I didn’t just suddenly have an epiphany and just suddenly see clearly the light. You know I have worked at other things in my life. I’ve done everything, all kinds of jobs. And I’ve never had anything that was able to integrate all the elements in my life in the way that this work does. Nothing. Ever.

This is what this has taught me – look at the full scope. Don’t look at the moment, no matter how bad the moment is, wait until you’ve got the whole darn thing. It is sort of hard to figure out how you are going to drain the swamp when you are up to your ass in alligators. Yes, you are up to your ass in alligators all the time, but you can not get your mind off that larger issue. It’s just there in front of you. How to keep working? How to keep working on that, and stay sane in your own life? How to maintain a balance?

It doesn’t make you pedantic and all those words that people don’t like. You don’t be lecturing and preaching to people all the time. It’s about continuing to stay in and have a dialogue, but know that there is something in your life that you don’t see in other people’s lives. They go to work, and they cannot wait until Saturday, because then they become another person. Or for two weeks out of the year they go on vacation and they are somehow able to discard everything else and be someone else for two weeks. I don’t believe that’s true. You still have to deal with the struggles, but somehow people have come to believe in segregating their lives. I have come to the place in my life where I can’t accept that, so, what do I do now? It’s like I can’t accept that anymore. I can’t. So, what do I do now? I’m like the priest, why would I stop? And I don’t mean that I know the work’s not going to go on. It’s never been the same. It’s changed constantly. People from the outside don’t see it as clearly as people from the inside. It’s just constant change. It’s always been a roller coaster around here.

I have grown up. My life, so personally, I cannot believe how far it’s gone. When I look at the full scope of my history, how I was brought up, all the influences that were around me – I can’t even imagine. I can’t even begin to imagine that I could be here talking. I had goals. At worst, I was going to be a coal-miner; at best, I would be a small-time bureaucrat working a social program, or I might have been a teacher. Those are all worthwhile things, but I see how limiting those roles have become for those people who are in them. My wife is a wonderful teacher, but it has sought to diminish her the whole way. It has sought, and it has diminished her. Now, the work that we do may be hard, but it’s not diminishing. See, that’s the difference. The work is a constant struggle. But I know that I am better than I once was, and I have hopes that I will be even better than I am now. I know that I am richer than I ever expected. I’ve seen the face of beauty. I’ve seen the face in other people. Only through other people, you can’t see it without having that experience. I will always be writing and thinking in this way.

Now I see opportunities to grow in other ways, at this late stage. I’ll be 56 in June and I’m talking about growth in my life. I’m saying this is going to be the richest period in my life. When people are talking about retirement, I’m thinking this is the richest period of my work. I’m writing better than ever. My thinking is in some ways clearer. It may not have the same energy, but it doesn’t take the same energy. When I watched Myles Horton at 85 years old, he learned from the people that came before him. He said, "Take only one thing in your life and believe in it all your life and you will have a life."

The one thing that we’ve talked about as our greatest failure is not bringing the younger generation in. We’ve talked about that as our greatest failure, but I have also come to in some ways reconcile that with the experience Donna was talking about. I remember the day that I went and talked with Robert Withegow. And I remember talking with Robert Gard. These people that did the work, that were part of the WPA in the ’30s. The first thing that they said to me was, "We’ve been waiting. We thought that you had forgotten." And the next thing they said to me was, "Write everything down, because some day somebody like you will come looking for it." And I remember that, and I think that’s what we’ve done.

I truly believe that it’s just a natural part of history, when you look at the long haul, that it skips generations. This is not big-headed, this is not writing your own legacy. Not to put it down does not give those people, when they come looking, the opportunity to find things that they will never have been able to find in that other world. There’s a thousand blue million things that they can find. Damn. We’ll document Elvis’ life 3,000 times and show it on television and it will go on forever. But, when those people come looking – those special people, for that special work – when they come looking, because we have done the work, it will be there. It will be there. I don’t know of a legacy, if you want to look at it that way, that could be more important. Saying that we did our best, we didn’t always succeed, and here’s what we learned.

DC: And we tried to do it in our own voice.

RS: Always in our own voice because otherwise we couldn’t understand ourselves. It’s like a line from a play, "If you don’t tell your own story how you ever going to know who you are?"

DP: The fall of the NEA meant the fall of all the funding to arts presenters – which is the fall of touring, and the great reduction of our ability to earn income from touring. This was important because in this area we have such small populations that you are only going to go but so far with a resident season in town of 1,200 people. What that has meant is that we have to make all that income through raising income, which has basically been through foundations who don’t have mandate. It’s not the peoples’ money. It’s private money. It’s not a mandate from the people that you have to be democratic in any way shape or form.

Even though the NEA was flawed, we came about. Appalshop couldn’t get funding from the state arts council. We got funding first from the NEA, before we were even considered a theater. That funding thing is diminishing to me because it means now I have to spend twice as much time on fundraising then I ever did in the past. I don’t think it’s what I’m good at. I’m better at other things I’ve done at Roadside. It’s much easier for me to do documenting writing, or any kind of writing rather than grant writing – which I’ve gotten pretty good at. That increase really slows down my ability to contribute to the company in any artistic way. And I consider a lot of documenting artistic because it’s really looking at what’s been done and being able to convey that, and also see the future of that. The grant writing need also gives me less of the reflective time, which I think is so important. The other thing that is so worrisome is that foundations are at somebody’s whim. The board and I don’t know who those people are. We really have to raise our money nationally because there isn’t any money locally.

That’s my little whining session on one hand, but on the other hand, I think it is a serious issue for a lot of nonprofits that started in our time. I think a lot of those arts groups started with the same seed of money and federal job program money we did. And with the falling out of funding for arts, public funding for arts, in this country is also a falling out of respect. Unfortunately respect is tied to economics in our country. I think that’s an unpleasant thing for me to face at my age. I know what I know, and I have to spend my time doing these things. Why don’t they just let you write down what you want to do, give them a budget, give them the audit? Why answer this long list of silly questions that you try to make your theater fit to, that you never did fit to anyway because your theater is different than Actor’s Theater of Louisville or something. I’m losing patience with it, I guess, is what I’m saying. I’m not going to get any better at grant writing than I’ve gotten now because I’ve gotten pretty good. It’s not something to aspire to anymore. It cuts back on creativity I think, because creativity comes from time to reflect. And that’s another reason that the documentation is so important to me. For all the reasons that were mentioned, but also because it does give me a chance to reflect on what we’ve done and that does help me come up with new ideas. That’s something we try to effect, but it’s not something internal even to this place, much less to this company. You know how those changes are taking place with public money.

DC: As I go around the country, to pick up on something Ron said, one of the things I find is a real longing in people. Sometimes articulated, sometimes even not conscious, but a real longing in people for more wholeness in their lives. It is interesting to think of theater as a medium for integration and for wholeness, because that’s in fact what it is. It relies on the live personal experience. The degree that theater tries to become film or some other electronic media and loses its aliveness is the degree that its losing its uniqueness and really, its biggest value. It is interesting to think of theater in light of that wholeness.

We often think of it, to say again in a slightly different way than it has been said, as a way to tell new stories and old stories in new ways. I was thinking of that as Ron was saying how his family is a part of his writing as a playwright, and how it’s changed his family’s story. Take a play like "South of the Mountain," which is based on his family’s history. In the transmutation that occurs with art, it becomes something more than his family’s story. It becomes a much larger story, and it changes the family’s story. The family now sees that period of time within this larger story. They understand it in a larger way. That’s just a personal example of a bigger fact.

I began this essay I was writing the other month about theater and social change with a story that was told to me as a true story. The story begins down in Florida a month before the election. Someone from National Public Radio is interviewing two older gentlemen. The reporter says, "So, what’s important about this upcoming election?" And the first guy says, "Well, the Supreme Court." And the second guy says, without missing a beat, "The culture." And the reporter says, "Well, I understand the Supreme Court, but the culture?" And you know these are guys retired, older, sunning themselves. This isn’t the Harvard intellectual faculty club that he is interviewing. So, he is surprised, and he says, "The culture?" And the guys finish each other’s sentence. The first guy says, "Who controls the culture..." and the second guy finishes, "controls the story the nation tells itself." That’s where it’s at. Whether you look at it in Ron’s family, or you look at it as a nation, or you look at it in some sort of global international way. People understand that. People who broker and control power, they understand that. They understand the power of culture and of the story. They have no doubt about it. In that way, we agree completely at Roadside Theater. We have no doubt about it. Theater people who don’t realize that and politicians who don’t realize that are less effective for not understanding it.

Michael Fields is a founding member of the Dell'Arte Company where he acts, directs, teaches, creates plays, manages all company business and oversees development. He is the producing director of the Dell’Arte Mad River Festival. He is also the director of the California State Summer School for the Arts Theatre Program and resident director with Het Vervolg Theatre of Holland. Fields has taught at the American Conservatory Theatre, the California Institute for the Arts, the Dutch National Theatre School and the Danish Dramaturgs Institute. He has directed numerous productions nationally and internationally. He received 1984 and 1986 Drama-logue awards and a 1984 S.F. Bay Area Critics Circle award. He holds a BA in Communication Arts from the University of San Francisco and an MFA in Directing from Humboldt State University. Fields is on the board of directors of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) in New York, he is a member of the James Irvine Foundation California Arts Leadership Forum, and has served as a National Endowment for the Arts panelist.

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