Knowing the Secrets Behind the Laughter: Findings of The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project

The findings of the "Performing Communities" project emerged from an extensive process using qualitative research methods and techniques commonly employed in several different fields in the social sciences, humanities and education. The study focused on in-depth interviews with a relatively small set of data. The interviews and field notes, or raw data collected by the project site visitors have been coded into categorized topics for analysis. A primary guide for this analytical process was "Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods" by Robert C. Bogdan and Sari Knopp Biklen.* This process was of inestimable value in rendering the volume of perspectives and opinions into useful information to be compared, combined and critiqued.

The methodology of the project also rests on the long-term practice of its leadership and their various sets of approaches to art making – directing and community arts practice, in Leonard's case, and textual analysis and community arts practice in Kilkelly's. [Please see "Biographies of Key Project Personnel" for further description of the leadership.] This essay is based on the case studies and individual commentaries of each ensemble in the project. It contains occasional excerpts from those individual commentaries.

The investigators approached this project on the premise that the many participants in an artistic enterprise – the artist, the audience, the community sources and partners – are essential voices in the development and understanding of the theories and practices of community art making.

Responses to the original framing questions from these many voices structure this essay in three areas of findings:

The most important finding to identify first is that these eight ensembles are all singularly committed to creating plays for live performance that originate out of the community in which the artists work. Each of these ensembles makes work in, from and for specific communities. In fact, the community is itself a primary ingredient to the creative process in wonderful and surprising ways that differ ensemble by ensemble and project by project. Much of this essay will introduce the rich diversity of these creative mixing bowls.

However, it is first crucial to recognize that when theater is made in such intimate collaboration between artists and community, the histories, cultures, traditions, cares, concerns, questions, faiths, doubts, fears, perspectives and experiences of the community are more than present, they are essential to the plays made. The plays of these ensembles are expressions of the communities from which they emerge. They are, therefore, essentially political, that is, of the polis or town. These ensembles, their audiences and their community partners understand the intimate and sophisticated relationship of community and its art. Sometimes the plays speak what everybody knows; sometimes they speak what nobody says. Sometimes they open paths or unveil truths; sometimes they challenge the way things are done or understood. Sometimes the storyteller slays the dragon; sometimes the storyteller is the dragon (to borrow from Jo Carson, a daring storyteller and well known community-based artist.) The deeply political and social nature and context of these ensembles create a realm of remarkable possibility and artistic wealth. It is the realm of theater every bit as much as is the mysterious domain of the human soul. The artistic impulse to present or represent the political and social infuses the aesthetics and the creative methods of these ensembles.

Yet, understanding how the aesthetic process is itself political requires a careful look at the assumptions often made about art with a clear social agenda. The term "political theater" carries with it certain unfortunate and misleading baggage — a cause-and-effect expectation for direct change: Do this to get a new set of street lights, to get a new government or a new way of life. The interviews of this study identify this baggage as entirely off the mark of their own realities and immaterial to their successes and challenges. To consider, to evaluate the work of these ensembles in terms of quantitative impact on social change is to miss the point entirely. These ensembles make art to be enjoyed and evaluated for what it reveals, how it engages, what it stimulates in the moment of its performance and in its resonance with its community and in the imaginations and lives of the participants. The politic of these ensembles is to make good art that is responsible to its community and is part of civic life. From this viewpoint, it is often a failure of civic life that it does not include work of the imagination in its emphases. Several ensemble members offer their own unique perspectives on this crucial matter.

Alison Carey, ensemble member of Cornerstone Theater Company, says bluntly, "Our primary job is to create good plays." She goes on, "Our art doesn’t exist without the way our art is created, with the involvement of the community; and the involvement of the community wouldn’t work with bad art." Joan Schirle goes into the substance of what she understands as good art when she describes how The Dell’Arte Company approached the fight over the last remaining resource in northern California logging country. "Our position has not been to side with one or the other, but to reveal the kind of complex human web that underlies that. Fear." Though there is dramatic value in the conflict that sets up sides, the artist’s real focus is the humanity of the situation. Schirle’s description reveals the artist’s curiosity and relentless spirit of inquiry.

The Dell’Arte artists use the phrase Theater of Place to articulate their artistic connection with their own geopolitical community. Their notion of "theater created by, for and about the area in which you live" applies aptly to several of the ensembles in this study. However, as provocative and valuable as this concept may be for some, it is incomplete or inaccurate for others.

For Rosalba Rolon, artistic director of Teatro Pregones, the art of her ensemble is the continuous exploration of a popular and accessible aesthetic, the development of style that comes out of a long-term artistic investigation of the culture and life realities of their Puerto Rican and Latino audiences and the creation of "innovative and challenging theater rooted in Puerto Rican traditions and popular artistic expressions." Given the unfixed geography of Latinos in the United States, some experts use the term "translocal" to describe the community that Rolon understands as theirs. According to site visitor Arnaldo Lopez, "Latino communities, they say, are never altogether of one place. The ties that bind will draw them in many different directions, pull them towards more than one home." It is particularly revealing that Lopez observes, "Making community will often entail travel." That is true for Pregones’ audiences, who travel long distances to see performances at the theater in the South Bronx and it is true of the company itself which tours widely in the Northeast and around the country, always seeking to "make community" with Puerto Ricans and Latinos wherever they may be living.

Likewise, for the members of WagonBurner Theater Troop, their theater is a momentary event that draws together a community of people who are displaced. WagonBurner ensemble members themselves live in different states and only come together to make their work. They are bound by their histories, their traditions and their desire to make work but not by their places of dwelling. The event of their theater becomes a place itself, a place where community can be made. Similarly, when Pregones’ member Jorge Merced describes his ensemble as providing a "space for [audiences] to pursue their own questioning," he inadvertently flips Dell’Arte’s Theater of Place around to the place of theater and expands the idea into a space that is both physical and metaphysical

This notion of the interconnection of imaginings between the play and the audience in the place/space of performance is a common thread amongst all these ensembles. For all, the event of performance is a moment of community that is both known and new. An important finding of this project, reflected in several of the ensembles, is that community may exist in tradition and spirit, but it is made and remade, a constructed result of the artistic process. In this sense, "community" is that coherence, that belonging, that specific social and aesthetic reality which is produced intentionally by the people coming together in acts of imagination.

The art of these ensembles is to create images from the audience’s own experiences, histories and traditions that provide the possibility of such moments.

Community is not necessarily a given but it may be made through acknowledging and/or celebrating a sense of common heritage or place that emerges in the event of live performance. That is where the art of the making comes in. Community is a protean thing that both reflects and creates agency.

Ron Short describes Roadside Theater’s ability to conjure community by allowing story to cede the singular authority of the expert individual (the playwright or author) to the power of multiple voices in the disenfranchised communities of central Appalachia:

Short’s imagery of entering into the collective consciousness suggests the resonance of theater that Dell’Arte member Michael Fields describes as reflecting "back and forth." Linda Parris-Bailey, artistic director of Carpetbag Theatre Company, frequently talks about "giving back" to the community. Not only does this phrase imply the strong sense of historical obligation to home communities expressed by many educated black people, it defines the ensemble’s sense of its part in an artistic and cultural exchange with its community. In hearing and retelling stories, in giving and taking through their art, Carpetbag both reflects and defines cultural identity. It is in this resonance between artist and community that the art of these ensembles thrives.

Site visitor Keith Hennessy takes this concept beyond the performance itself. Applying Virginia Wolff’s observations about the needs of women writers to Jump-Start Performance Co., he says, "A company needs money and a room of its own to create quality performance work." In the context of the other ensembles’ imagery of place and space, the need for a room carries multiple values. Hennessy’s citation underscores the fundamentally political and economic nature of aesthetic judgments and organizational structures. Indeed, Jump-Start’s executive director Steve Bailey remarks, "To me aesthetics are politics and politics are aesthetics." This is another aspect on the resonance of the art of grassroots theater ensembles. It not only applies to the exchange within the moment of performance, it applies to the presence of the artistic organization within the community.

Nowhere is this resonance between the artist and the community (and the artistic organization and the community) more clear and more powerful than in the performance of "Agents and Assets" as witnessed by Los Angeles Poverty Department site visitor Ferdinand Lewis. This show was scripted directly from the transcripts of a Congressional hearing on CIA involvement in crack cocaine sales in California. It is easy to imagine with Lewis the powerful "irony of hearing the words of educated, skilled politicians spoken by actors who at some point in their lives were casualties of the Wars on Drugs." Lewis reports that "it was the act of witnessing an event so fraught with contextual weight that produced emotion" in the audience. Lewis’ report suggests the issues of justice and the dynamics of power were present in the bodies and voices of the performers and accessible to the audience, not because of virtuosic impersonation of character but by the artful collision of dissonant cultures and conflicted contexts. These collisions are a known reality of the audience Lewis witnessed, consistent with the life experience and, at the same time, the play unveiled truths through the otherwise entirely remote political hearings. This is exactly what Steve Bailey meant by "aesthetics are politics and politics are aesthetics." Judging by Lewis’ accounts of audience response and the responses of the actors themselves in their own interviews, the event of "Agents and Assets" is exactly the resonance of art that Ron Short says "enters into the collective consciousness of that community and helps shape that community."

Audiences from the communities of this study have a clear understanding of this relationship, this dynamic, that is articulate and inspiring. The people interviewed reveal a reliable expertise, founded in their own experience, that is an important voice. Confirming Dell’Arte’s intimate relationship with its home, Blue Lake, California, Gene Supka, proprietor of the Logger Bar down the street from Dell’Arte’s theater, recognizes that the value of their plays lies in the fact that the audience from Blue Lake knows the secrets behind the laughter. Supka’s imagery reaches into the substance of the comedic form itself. Knowledge in the audience must be tapped by the comedic artist for laughter to go beyond the consequence of mere stage antics. The reciprocity of knowledge, what is publicly realized as shared but secret experience, resonating between the artist and the audience releases the theatrical event from the physical to the metaphysical and gives the art its value. Gene Supka lays this down with profound simplicity. It is a key concept in a critical dialogue about all of these theaters, regardless of form and in the development of community art theory.

How these concepts and approaches are practiced and what the practice actually creates depends on the artists, the communities and the projects they select to do. These eight ensembles demonstrate a range of practices that seems infinitely variable. Certainly they work with styles ranging from the ancient traditions of storytelling and physical comedy to theatrical realism, satire and parody, vaudeville and popular entertainment traditions, theatrical adaptations of other literary forms, new adaptations of classical drama and contemporary expressions of performance art. Some of these ensembles are committed to the development of a singular style, as in Roadside’s lifelong investigation of storytelling. Other ensembles, however, are openly interested in the development of a diverse range of theatrical styles and forms. Jump-Start is committed to the freedom of each of the ensemble members to design and create their own works, allowing style to follow needs of the project and the individuality of the makers. Jump-Start work draws on material from the gay/lesbian/bi communities, African-American communities, Chicano communities and women, yet the work comes originally from an individual whose passion reaches out in specific ways. While Jump-Start’s definition of community is broad and inclusive, they work in extremely distinct communities and neighborhoods, building connections and long-term relationships. The diversity of the ensemble generates diverse work. Site visitor Keith Hennessy writes about the unique values of this approach.

Despite the vast difference, there are commonalities. Regardless of theatrical style, the story as a central structuring element is one such common practice. Likewise, the dramatic event of an individual voice speaking from a group, either as expressive of the group or in opposition to the group, is often found.

Some of these ensembles develop new work based on the creative input of an individual writer. Others work collectively with improvisational performers as the base for the creative process. Yet every group is guided by a profound respect for the time and energy it takes to make new work. They do not attempt to conform to the multiproduction "season." Rather, the creative process is understood to fit within the daily routines of life. Shows are developed over months, even years. The creative processes, though widely varying, typically include complex research and communication exchange between ensemble members and all kinds of people in the community. Cornerstone uses highly practiced processes of focus groups, advisory committees and other kinds of gathered community resources. These resources provide insight, perspective, inspiration, depth and breadth of opinion and experience. They sometimes provide material taken "as is" directly into the ensuing show. WagonBurner invites everyone in the yard out front to come in and join a "talking circle." "We’re making a play, what do you think these characters might say or do?" Everyone talks and several people record the offerings. They talk around and through issues and ideas, they echo and reinforce each other, they use complex cultural analyses, stories and humor. The next day, everyone hears what was spoken the day before and things get reconsidered, reconceived. In addition to the "talking circle," WagonBurner methods include collective writing, editing and performing. Within the ensemble everyone has a say, under the remarkably flexible guidance of LeAnne Howe, the ensemble’s organizer and principle writer/director.

Several of the ensembles use various forms of improvisation in the development process, mostly used to allow actors to work "on their feet" in rehearsal. That material is then set, more or less, for public performance. As such, this type of improvisation differs quite distinctly from the forms used for public performance by comedy groups. Alison Carey of Cornerstone, John Malpede of LAPD and several of the Dell’Arte ensemble are among those in this study who are highly skilled at using improvisation in this fashion.

John Malpede uses workshops in the community as venues for development of material. What people say and do around a particular conversation or subject matter becomes grist for performance, whether the originator is a performer in the show or a contributor to it. Malpede says, in talking about his creative processes,

Malpede understands the time it takes to work this way. He recalls, "We’d written a grant for workshops … and I was going to make a piece about neighborhood issues. I started doing the workshops and … it was a year before anything came out of it."

Peter Pennekamp, a longtime fan of Dell’Arte, underscores the time it takes to make this work when he points out that, while everyone knows the truths in their plays actually come out of the community, it is not by simple coincidence that the artists express it at a time and in a way that it can be heard. Pennekamp clearly respects that these plays are the result of years and years of the artists’ commitment to the town, the whole community, as well as to their craft of theater making. Over time, they have built a trust that allows people to talk with them, to share private thoughts. This accomplishment represents a set of skills equal to those required to construct a play or execute an effective comedic bit of stage business.

Another commonality, besides honoring the creative process itself, is a comprehension among those ensembles specifically devoted to working with community traditions that these traditions are theirs to reinvent, as well as to respect. Story forms the basis of Roadside’s methodology and is the key to their link between art and community wellbeing. Part of Roadside’s work for many years has been to undo the class and regional biases in so much mainstream culture. Roadside presented a very early and very radical challenge to longstanding concepts of poverty and class in the region. Moreover, their programs and productions countered the canned versions of Appalachian life that too often stand in as representations of the regional culture. Ron Short makes us understand that such biases are deeply embedded in theatrical forms as well as in straightforward social behavior and institutions. Roadside has devoted much of its creative effort to exposing the depth and nature of such prejudices and to creating a public place for the beautiful, real voices of the region.

Making reference to his own experience in the Vietnam war, Roadside ensemble member Short’s sense of theater as "the last public forum for common people" connects the need for story to an implicit idea of outrage and resistance. Short implies that the voices of those who do not make war but are required to fight, or of those who do not control economic policy but must bear the consequences of it, can be re-bodied or re-imaged on a stage or in a performance environment. Differentiating from what he criticizes as "popular culture" or predigested commercial television and other mass-produced forms that manufacture for profit a homogenized "mythos" that keeps the real stories suppressed, Short says, "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 Roadside ensemble member Dudley Cocke makes the following brief definition of the theater, the process that got Roadside there is visible.

As if echoing Cocke’s perceptions about reinvention of heritage, Pregones ensemble member Jorge Merced describes a moment when he realized the substance of their creative process.

Pregones includes as part of its artistic "inheritance" Puerto Rican theater artists, poets and novelists, as well as theater practitioners, political activists, artists of all disciplines and community leaders from throughout the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America. One of the requirements of using this vast array of resources is constant education of the ensemble members in the histories, traditions and cultures of these resources, so that they are able to use them authoritatively in their creative processes. Besides vision and courage, this work insists on discipline, or, as many Pregones’ members call it, rigor.

It is fascinating and enlightening to see that the process of bringing new people into the Pregones ensemble parallels their creative processes. The ensemble is made up of Puerto Rican artists who were born, raised and trained in Puerto Rico, then moved to the U.S. mixed, in near equal measure, with Puerto Rican artists born, raised and trained in the U.S., for whom English, not Spanish, is their first language. The differences between the native Puerto Ricans and the Nuyoricans constitute the realm of "the other" just as rigidly as any other cultural collision. The substance of the problem is not only language in all its manifestations but gesture, common understanding of the world around us and common practice in relating to all the people in it.

Each process, making their work and integrating actors into the ensemble, confronts that which is often considered somehow "untouchable." Pregones removes the taboo and accepts the difficulty. This is the terrain and region of Pregones’ work — making valued contemporary art and artists out of the cultural traditions and resources rooted in Puerto Rican life. The ensemble has developed an expertise in negotiating these problems, in order to exist, which interconnects directly with the problems presented when creating new work out of established plays, novels, poetry, music and the traditions that permeate the many cultures they tap.

In a particularly wry application of these approaches to creating out of traditions, WagonBurner uses the Bingo game, a common form imposed on the Native gambling traditions by the dominant culture, as the anchoring dramatic structure for their play INDIAN RADIO DAYS. The ensemble members are very aware, with a kind of W. E. B. Dubois’ "double consciousness," of Native American identities within the white man’s world. They can perceive and make visible in their theater the "edge" where the difference of given and chosen native historical communities meets the dominant system. The most provocative and powerful theme in the interviews is this understanding and constant presence of humor, laughter and critique in the collaboratively created performance work. They collect gags and antics that reveal and mock. They provide a writing/telling that helps individuals cope with difficult situations and connect to memories and cultural histories that are sustaining. And what flashes off virtually every page of the interviews is the pleasure, the fun of the process.

One particularly challenging reality for all of these ensembles that each one has discovered that it must struggle to find balance between speaking truth so that it can be heard and not alienating people or segments of their communities. This struggle is not unique to grassroots ensemble theater. The close relationships ensemble members actually have within their communities, though, makes the struggle immediate and present in daily life. Michael Fields at Dell’Arte suggests a particularly disarming and thoughtful perception that goes a long way toward keeping that balance. He recognizes that collective collaboration is not "normal" in our society and therefore requires that constant special care be taken to make the structure and the behavior of the collective processes as "transparent" and available to everyone as possible. At one point in the interviews, talking about bringing new people into the organization, he voices this principle of transparency.

Reading the interviews of their audience members it is clear that Dell’Arte has worked hard to make the organization transparent within its community. It is likewise clear that they have made their art transparent, accessible and available, to their community as well. This notion of transparency is consistent with the reality at Pregones where the methods of acculturation used to integrate new actors into the ensemble are the same as those the company uses to create new work. It also is consistent with the requirements of integrating the theater into the community. Ensemble member José Joaquín García, recounts a brief but telling moment he remembers, working with associate director Alvan Colon Lespier.

Another strategy for many of these ensembles is to work overtly on the premise that community service need not be limited to making theater or doing anything artistic. Community service can mean doing what the community needs doing — waiting on tables at the weekly Grange breakfast or partnering with the SRO movement to remake buildings into suitable housing for the homeless or joining the PTA. These artists understand that they are citizens in the community. As they integrate this practice into their lives, the community recognizes them as citizens with commonly shared concerns and experiences. The process of a theater becoming a part of a community happens on many levels and through many relationships.

While each of these ensembles has become expert with a certain set of skills and practices required by its form of collaborative and collective creativity, taken as a whole, these ensembles dash the conventional wisdom that the craft of theater requires singular authorship and stage direction. Taken individually, they represent a valuable spread of approaches. The interviews and commentaries of this study hold the details of this spread but certain practices call for mention in this essay.

In this regard, one simple and perhaps obvious reality of ensemble theater is that the artistic group remains the same people for long periods of time, often years. Hence, for the theater to get better, to grow and flourish, the members of the ensemble have to grow and flourish. This requires certain practices that may be more uniquely practiced in ensembles than in other theater organizations. Many of these ensembles have worked out ways for artists to talk critically about their own work, each other’s work and the work of the company. Jump-Start as a whole has a contemporary theoretical inclination, formed by cultural politics, feminism and queer studies. In the interviews, there are lengthy passages that might be extracted as theoretical texts in and of themselves. Obversely, Jump-Start artists have learned not to assume that their status as artists specifically equips them for the work of community exchange. Rather, they seek training and they work with partner artists and educators to sustain community work. This idea of ensemble-member training as a part of the regular scheduled work day is common in these companies. This might appear on first glance to reflect a kind of generosity of spirit, but it is far more practical than that. Cornerstone’s Alison Carey is particularly clear about this when she says, "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.’" This sense of need for others with whom to make, from whom to learn, for partners, teachers, others who share in the work is expressed universally in these interviews. Some ensembles bring in outside guests with the specific agenda of learning from them. Some create collaborations with other ensembles for the same purpose.

Several of the ensembles seem to thrive artistically on mixing forms — theater and music, theater and poetry. Pregones artists talk extensively about their appreciation for these mixtures. Rosalba Rolon and Alvan Colon Lespier are especially articulate about this, referencing a multitude of Latino artists who are their guides and sometimes partners in this quest. Linda Parris-Bailey, artistic director of Carpetbag, is likewise fascinated with the mixture of dramatic realism and communal singing. She places great emphasis on the written word and their plays have a literary quality that is often framed out in classical realism. Yet, her written words are fully woven with the parallel text of choral spectacle and dance. Carpetbag’s stories are often the journey of a young person learning her/his place in the community. It is a kind of intervention, offering an imaginative place for encountering obstacles and temptations, witnessing and analyzing them, even changing through them. Yet, the dramatic progression is often accomplished through the emergence of a song sung by one or even all the cast, sometimes within the framework of the narrative and sometimes in an entirely presentational intervention. There is room, then, for lyrical departures from the dramatic action that intensify the theatrical event. This kind of formal eclecticism is also favored by WagonBurner, Cornerstone and LAPD.

A profound consequence of these approaches and practices is that these ensembles are deeply and essentially affected, even shaped by their communities. Some have brought theater forms to the community and allowed those forms to be reinvented, reconceived, transformed by the artists’ interaction with the community. Others have chosen their form directly out of the traditions of the community itself. This formal cooperation between artist and community is far more fundamental a relationship than what subject a particular play chooses to undertake. The form itself is a consequence of an artistic trust in the community. Then, with this trust as common ground, the artists and the community are able to open an artistic dialogue about subjects that matter, that have the community’s attention and interest as an active ingredient in the performance event itself. Yet none of these artists have given up their own integrity, their own vision. In fact, this relationship lies at the core of the many visions of these ensembles.

There is also no doubt that these communities are affected in a long-term fashion by the presence and the artistic expressions of these ensembles. Some recognize that the way of life in a community has been expanded, perspectives and understandings changed. Others have found their own resources to create and build anew, in response to the work of these ensembles. A dynamic present in all these ensembles is the understanding that "helping" is an artistic function that involves making one’s expertise available to another without seeking control or imposition of one’s own vision. Repeatedly, community partners see these ensembles as having led them to their own discoveries. Marilyn Maxwell, the director of the Mountain Laurel Cancer Research and Support Center, thinks that storytelling and theater that she and her staff have created, out of a series of workshops with Roadside, is of critical importance to the vision and dream for their center. She says,

A year after WagonBurner’s LeAnne Howe led a month-long playwriting workshop at Sinte Gleska University in the Rosebud Reservation, Liz Hopkins and Nancy Whitehorse were rewriting and restaging their own plays for a tour to other Native American communities in a multistate region. Similarly, from the evidence of this study, it can perhaps be said that Carpetbag’s greatest success in its 31 years, greater even than its many productions, is the rolling wave of creativity its performances and workshops have set in motion. Like WagonBurner and Howe, Parris-Bailey and Carpetbag have had the wisdom and the aesthetic to move the collective energy of the community to the center of their work.

Yet, in the face of the acts of imagination accomplished by these ensembles, for which we may cheer as small revolutions, Steve Bailey at Jump-Start speaks with experienced wisdom. When Hennessy asks Bailey to talk about how Jump-Start tries to affect the community, the answer is typically complex:

Bailey analyzes the liberal notion that artists and educators are supposed to bring the uneducated, non-artists to the table or to the theater so that they can be the objects of the production:

Bailey’s remarks come from his own painful learning about racial and ethnic dynamics. His "not caring" is about refusing to perform a racial transaction that validates him as an artist while appearing to help a community with less privilege than his own. He is impatient with unchallenged ideas of how borders are crossed and the too frequent assumption that if people come to see a show about a particular community that they will necessarily be changed by it. He understands that change is long-term and slow and involves going to the community more than bringing audiences in. This way the attendance at a given event becomes a sign and result of conditions already present in the community

What is going on here, in the careers of these remarkable ensembles, then, is more than their accomplishments, more than the formal maturity of their plays or the individual moments of epiphany and communal self-expression. These ensembles are setting standards of excellence that stretch beyond our conventional assumptions of theater and its function. They are practicing the skills necessary to allow a play to resonate with its community. They are documenting the ability of theater to be an active citizen, to exchange and learn with its community even as it unveils secrets. They are responding to the challenge presented to the American theater since the early 1970s that the simple presentation of a season of plays authored by nationally recognized playwrights must be overstepped so that each theater can become an actual expression of its own community. They are proving that the national theater of as richly varied a nation as we are can only be conceived and understood in multiplicity. Each community and its theater can be asked – expected – to contribute its own values and its own images. They can be held to a specific standard of excellence that these values and images are faithful to the dignity, fairness and honesty of the community from which they emerge, that they excite the community in ways that are satisfying to all partners in the exchange.

It’s no big thing, really, in the large scheme of things. It’s just what happens when good art resonates with the community of its source. It is something we as a nation are only just now beginning to experience: our own theaters as integral parts of our lives.

Robert H. Leonard is associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech where he teaches directing and improvisation. He brings 30 years of experience as founding artistic director of the Road Company, a nationally recognized theater ensemble (1972-1998) based in Johnson City, Tennessee, which created and produced two dozen original plays reflecting the history and issues of the Upper Tennessee Valley and Central Appalachia. Leonard served as a site visitor for WagonBurner Theater Troop for "Performing Communities," and currently serves as a member of the national board of Theatre Communications Group.

Ann Kilkelly is a professor of theater arts and women's studies at Virginia Tech. She is recognized nationally as a scholar and performer of jazz-tap dancing and history, performance studies and interactive performance techniques. She has received Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and performs and gives master classes in jazz tap around the country. At Virginia Tech she served as the director of Women's Studies for six years, she teaches and directs multimedia performance concerts, and she recently created the Diversity Training Laboratory to help students and faculty use performance techniques to examine diversity issues. Kilkelly also served as a site visitor for Roadside Theater for "Performing Communities."

Bogdan, Robert C. and Sari Knopp Biklen. "Qualitative Research For Education: An Introduction To Theory And Methods." (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, Third Edition, 1998)

All unattributed citations are from this research project and can be found in the online interviews of "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project."

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Knowing the Secrets Behind the Laughter: Findings of The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project

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