Cornerstone's Faith-based Theater Cycle: How Does Faith Unite and Divide Us?

The 57 cast members of Cornerstone Theater Company's production of “A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters” pose onstage during the final dress rehearsal. Photo by Craig Schwartz ©2005 Click here for a slide show of additional images.

Cornerstone Theater planned its Faith-Based Theater Cycle (2001-2005) in Los Angeles to be completed in three years. Because of this company’s commitment to diversity, community and the collaborative process, the cycle stretched to four-and-a-half years and included 21 playlets in the Festival of Faith, seven longer plays and a final show that bridged all of the faiths portrayed throughout the cycle. Cornerstone’s mission to explore the question “How does faith unite and divide us?” was particularly timely. The festival began a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the cycle ended in the spring of 2005. Interviews with six of the participants a few months after the close of the cycle drew forth memories and thoughtful reflections on their experience in this significant and deeply moving community collaboration.

Cornerstone Theater’s tradition of collaboration between first-time community-based artists and the ensemble’s professionals became firmly established in the series of projects undertaken since the theater’s move to a permanent base in L.A. in 1992. Since its inception in 1985, the company had crossed the country, partnering with members of smaller regional communities to present adapted versions of classical theater works. Co-founders Bill Rauch and Alison Carey, along with other founding members, saw the opportunity in L.A.’s racial, economic and religious diversity to explore community issues and build bridges with and among specifically defined groups and neighborhoods through the creation of theater that reflects the communities’ particular concerns and raises the awareness of a wider audience.

“If we could do anything…”

Page Leong, an actor, director and choreographer in Cornerstone’s ensemble, describes how the idea for a faith-based cycle of plays evolved during one of the theater company’s retreats, which are planned to provide a “dreamtime” space where members can imagine, “If we could do anything …"

When the suggestion was made to base a cycle on issues involving Catholicism and the gay community, Leong’s inspiration was, “Why not a whole series of faiths?” The company had collaborated with several specific faith communities previously, but not with the broader diversity of L.A.’s communities of faith in one cycle. “When we talked about religion,” says Rauch, the company’s artistic director, “it immediately appealed to everyone in the company and I think it's because religion is such a personal, emotional, volatile community affiliation …that's often invisible”[1]

Ten faith-based groups were included in the cycle: Catholic immigrants, African-American Christians, Buddhists, Baha'is, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists, Tongva/Gabrielino Native Americans, who are the original people of the Los Angeles basin, and gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered (GLBT) people of faith.

Peter Howard, actor and founding ensemble member, speaks about L.A. as “gloriously diverse,” but says that, “although my neighborhood is diverse, it doesn’t mean I know the other people in it.” With diversity as a starting point, there’s a lot of work to be done in breaking down the assumptions and stereotyping that divide members of the same neighborhood, community or nation. “Art and process can be a part of that work,” says Howard. To Cornerstone’s methodology, Howard brought his experience as a facilitator, playwright and director in programs sponsored by the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ, formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews), which specializes in interfaith dialogue. Through this connection, Cornerstone partnered with NCCJ to bring together a dialogue process explicitly designed for the Faith-Based Cycle.

Community Dialogue and Collaboration

Artist-led “story circles” conducted with groups of people from each of the communities brought forth individuals’ experiences of living their faith within the larger community of Los Angeles. Cornerstone’s writers, actors and directors, many with their own ties to one of the communities of faith, attended meetings both to participate in the process and to gather ideas for the 10-15-minute scripts for the Festival of Faith and for the longer plays in the cycle. Leong recalls the circles she facilitated with the group of Cambodian Catholics for whom she wrote a piece, based on the old testament story of Noah, that was included in "Crossings, Journeys of Catholic Immigrants."

For this community, art was the key. They aren’t a community that will speak out about themselves. They tended to keep their story secret, not told too often, definitely private territory. But they had been a dance troupe, and were natural storytellers. They became liberated through the process of retelling the story. They wanted to incorporate the art of storytelling along with a strong desire to represent the Catholic Church and their community.

Shishir Kurup (standing) and Ibrahim Saba appear in a scene from “A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters.” Photo by John C. Luker Click here for a slide show of additional images.

Ibrahim Saba, an actor with eight years of experience in community-based theater, considers himself tricultural: Hispanic, Arabic and American. He grew up in Uruguay, and later became “transplanted from West L.A. to East L.A.” when he married a Latina. He calls Cornerstone’s art-making process a “decoration of dialogue.” Participating in story circles, he found that “the intention of dialogue is there, but the intention of making art adds color to it. Art has vision.” Mere meetings among people of faith, like political meetings, could be just

…recorded and done. But with the intention of making theater, the community stays involved. The dialogue stays at the level of the community’s interest, and theater records it. It ends up being a piece of work comparable to a drawing in a museum. People can stop and look at it.

Playwright James Still regularly attended story circles throughout the first three years of the cycle and scheduled some himself in preparation for writing the final play, "A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters." Still facilitated groups of two to 25 people of the same faith, interfaith, converts and others. Through what he admits was “naiveté and miscommunication about the privacy women needed,” he scheduled an all-woman story circle. Controversy erupted when the women discovered that a man would lead it.

It was painful and eye opening. I learned a lot that night about humanity, need, isolation. I had to remove ego and judgment and stay present. It informed my play deeply. I had regrets about the blunder of it, but no regrets about what I was able to absorb as an artist.

Dialogue Becomes Theater

Like Cornerstone’s past theater cycles, the Faith-Based Cycle culminated in a "bridge show," which unites all of a cycle’s actors in a production that incorporates themes, insights and elements that have developed throughout the preparation and run of the cycle. "A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters" employed (literally — all actors were paid) the cycle’s 57 actors in a series of vignettes based on the structure of Schnitzler’s classic play, "La Ronde." Each vignette involved an encounter between persons of different faiths, and from each vignette a thread of the story lead to the next, around the “circle,” connecting back to the first. When the combinations of faiths were set for each scene, Still held meetings consisting of two members from the two faith groups, and set the structure for the groups: “You have the opportunity to ask anything about the other. You have the option not to discuss what is asked, but you are free to ask anything.” He adds that no question was refused. The vignettes were based on the questions asked in these meetings. “Some were beautifully naïve or incredibly sophisticated,” says Still.

One question that got into the play involved an old Jewish woman and young Cambodian man who asks her, "Why do you not believe in Jesus?’’ The dialogues got to what elephants are in the room — the questions we all have but can’t ask. This gives audience the chance to explore things they’ve wanted to.

Still felt responsibility for giving each of the ten faith groups a fair share, respecting all of their interests and issues. “The whole time of writing the play was a crisis for me,” he reports.

The weight of it was really intense — the intimacy of listening to people’s personal stories, struggles with their faith, their resolution. I knew nothing about most of the religions. My interest was in the people — how do people live their faith? How does a Muslim wake up each day?”

Still sees the role of art in community-based work as “creating a relationship with the community, having it both celebrated and challenged. Art can stir up issues. Art and artists function as leaders. As an artist you have to make a hard choice.”

A heated controversy that eventually gained media attention arose concerning a scene that portrayed the dilemma of being gay and Muslim, a faith that doesn’t condone homosexuality. The beliefs, rights, identity and feelings of both groups had to be carefully considered in the climate of a volatile situation between and among the members of both groups. Rauch, the director of the bridge show, asked where the opportunity lay in the crisis. Still quotes him as saying, in his usual fashion, “This is incredible! This is the heart of it!”

Some difficult decisions had to be made in this situation and others, and Still repeatedly asked himself,

Is art driving this decision, or am I being pushed around by a decision outside that? I didn’t want to weaken the art in my play. Making hard decisions for art’s sake is maybe not obviously community building. But great art in itself can be community building. I wanted it to be an artist that wrote this, not just a stenographer.

The touchstone that kept him and all of the involved artists true to art as well as to their responsibility to the faith communities was Cornerstone’s mission for the project, How does faith unite and divide us? “When I lost courage, I would push the play to continue to explore that,” Still says. “I looked at the play as my own prayer to the world, or to L.A. — as both a wish and a warning.” The tension between the wish and the warning guided him from scene to scene.

When Faith Divides, Can Art Unite?

The notion of faith dividing people was strikingly evident in Cornerstone’s collaboration that brought the African-American congregations of Methodist, Catholic and Baptist churches together with the Black AIDS Institute, representing African-Americans infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS. Phill Wilson, executive director of the Institute, wanted to find a creative way of reaching the African-American clergy who are traditionally silent on the subject of HIV/AIDS in their communities. Story circles and discussions brought up sensitive topics such as homophobia and the high rate of HIV/AIDS among African-American women, who account for 69 percent of new infections among women in the US. [2]

Choir members in a scene from Order My Steps (left to right: Myron Jackson, Jennifer Hill and Nita Hutton). Photo by Craig Schwartz ©2003 Click here for a slide show of additional images.

Based on these dialogues, Tracey Scott Wilson wrote a play, "Order My Steps," the story of an African-American playwright whose husband, a deacon in their church, is “living on the down-low,” engaging in clandestine homosexual sex. He infects his wife with HIV and is banished from his church. The controversial play included traditional, rousing gospel music, which provided a processional feel in a format familiar to African-American audiences. Over 20 professional actors and community artists from local churches sang and performed the play in the Phoenix Theater at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee’s center in south central L.A.. Mark Valdez, who co-directed Order My Steps with Paris Barclay, reported one of this collaboration’s success stories that reflects how art helped to unite a divided community of faith: “A prominent Los Angeles minister had refused to mention HIV or AIDS from the pulpit. After he saw the show, that following Sunday he delivered a sermon talking about the impact of AIDS and HIV in the African-American community.” [3]

Space for Art and Community

Negotiations for venues for all of the plays presented other points of contact between Cornerstone and the faith communities. The Festival of Faith, which opened the cycle, ran for one month and played in five places of worship throughout L.A.: Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights; Los Angeles Baha’i’ Center; Faith United Methodist Church in south L.A.; Temple Emmanuel, a Jewish synagogue; and, New Horizons, a private Islamic school in Pasadena. The logistics and possibilities of each space brought joys and challenges to the productions. Paula Donnelly, Cornerstone’s stage manager for three of the five venues, found that coordinating four or five different plays with a four-night run in each venue demanding, but she valued the opportunity. “Collaborating on a project is great format to meet, trust and understand people. We share the defined structure of the theater work and appreciate what the others bring to it.”

In each of the Festival’s venues, at least one play had to deal with that venue’s religion, and at least one other had to deal with a different religion. Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple, for example, hosted this slate of plays, as described on Cornerstone’s Web site:

"Lighten Up"
An exploration of enlightenment, using Buddhist poetry with a simple and graceful physical vocabulary. "Lighten Up" connects past and present, sacred and sublime. Created by Mark Valdez and choreographed by Christine Chrest.

"Motherhouse Dreams"
Explores one woman's journey of faith and her growing understanding of what it means "to sister." A two-woman show with puppetry and bagpipes based on the stories of a former Catholic nun. The piece focuses on her early years in the novitiate. Written by Ann Hayes and created by Lynn Jeffries, Christopher Liam Moore, and Deb Piver.

"Down"
Examining the role that faith plays in mourning, the play involves a Latino family in Hacienda Heights who suffer the loss of their eldest son. "Down" incorporates movement and stop-action flashbacks to reconstruct and understand the touch of one human life on another. Written by Henry Lee Robles and directed by Scott A. Vandrick.

"Images of the Soul"
The spiritual journey of three members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints using writing from different religious traditions including the words of Rumi and Victor Frankl. Created by Isaac Walters and Mountain Top Theatre Company.

"Glimpse"
A short film play by Page Leong. She opens a window. She lets the light in. She opens a door. She lets the light out.[4]

These plays were designed to be site-specific to different areas of the temple, a spiritual and cultural center built in the fashion of Ming and Qing dynasty architecture, encompassing 15 acres with a floor area of 102,432 square feet, including a huge central courtyard and terraced gardens.

Another site that offered a variety of areas was New Horizons, the Islamic pre-school to fifth-grade academy, where plays were scheduled just weeks after 9/11. Donnelly says that the school was “just starting to implement security, and that affected both the artists and the audiences.” With the help of NCCJ facilitators, conversations were held with the director of the school about what they could share about their community and still be safe. Audience members had to show their picture IDs to get in to see the plays, but Donnelly, like other members and collaborators, welcomed the opportunity the cycle afforded to dialogue with Muslims, busting the stereotypes the media were portraying. She found them “actually a joyful people.”

Changing Perceptions

In discussions that resulted in the play "You Can’t Take It With You," Donnelly says, “The folks in the Muslim community were telling the company that everything around them was fraught with issues. ‘Can we do a comedy?’ they said. ‘We love to laugh.’ There’s something subversive about that. In the play, they can be just as wacky as they want.” Set on the backyard deck of a family, the grandfather pretends he’s dead because he’s being sought for arrest due to an innocent, foolish action. “It’s a serious issue, but hysterical, with helicopters zooming overhead,” said Donnelly. “It showed the terror of violation, and the comedy of it.”

Peter Howard, the writer who adapted the Kaufman/Hart play, with a subtitle, "American Muslim Remix," calls the play

both a revolution and revelatory. Even if it didn’t include some of the darkest points, it was revolutionary by showing the lightness in a community perceived as dark, and that’s misunderstood and suspect. The play gave this community a part in the great comedy of American life. Even the title is a Koranic concept: material goods in the here and now versus what one takes into the afterlife. To fold that Koranic concept in felt like coming full circle.

Shishir Kurup performed in, directed or wrote the script or music for a number of plays in the cycle. He appeared in "You Can’t Take it With You" and says that the venue, the Los Angeles Theatre Center, an historical landmark in Downtown L.A., was a classic setting for the “sit-com” format of the play. “Approaching faith in the way of people watching on TV,” he says, “was secularized,” but watching the production in 300-seat, venerable old theater filled with Muslim women wearing the hijab (the traditional Muslim women's head covering) was “something you never see in theater. It brought up the notion of theater as sacred space.”

Page Leong (standing) and Meena Serendib in “As Vishnu Dreams.” Photo by Michael Lamont Click here for a slide show of additional images.

Kurup, born in Bombay and raised in Kenya, identifies himself as an Indo-African-American. For the cycle, he wrote "As Vishnu Dreams," a contemporary adaptation of an epic Hindu poem, The Ramayana. Its production demonstrates the breadth of Cornerstone’s collaboration with the community and within its own ensemble. Cornerstone’s first choice for a venue for the play was a Hindu temple, but there are very few in L.A., and the performance, running three to four weeks, would have interfered with daily worship. Instead, co-production of the play was negotiated with East-West Players, which has been cited as the nation’s premier Asian-American theatre organization, and it was performed in their Henry Hwang Theater, housed within the historic Union Center for the Arts in downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district. Community partners contributing ideas in story circles and acting in the play were Artwallah (formerly Indo-American Cultural Center); the International Society for Krishna Consciousness-Los Angeles; Satrang, a support organization South Asian LGBTIQs (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgenders, Intersex, Questioning); the Vedanta Society of Southern California-Hollywood; and the Hindu Temple Society of Southern California-Malibu. The director, Juliette Carrillo, a noted theater and film director and choreographer, had been a longtime collaborator with Kurup, and more recently with Cornerstone in other community collaborations. Page Leong, who is married to Kurup, played a lead role in "As Vishnu Dreams" as the mother, Mandodari, who abandons her child at birth. Leong says the role was quite an exploration for her, having just come back to work in the cycle after the birth of their first child.

“The Ramayana is the Iliad and Odyssey of India,” says Kurup. "So much of religion exists in very concretized episodes in world culture. Western religions are influenced by Judaism and Old Testament stories," he states. For Hindus, the Ramayana has functioned similarly, having been applied traditionally as a cautionary morality tale, with a nationalistic slant on how men and women should act, as modeled in the story by an ideal couple, the hero, Rama, and his faithful wife, Sita. The demon in the story, Ravana, ruler of a southern Indian kingdom, steals Sita in revenge for the atrocities the warrior, Rama, had committed on his family. Ravana is despised as fierce, black and ten-headed, a characterization that is symbolic of northern India’s fear and hatred of the darker-skinned indigenous people in the south, a pattern of discrimination common to other regions of the world. Kurup wanted to expand the notion of religion and faith by basing his adaptation it on the Hindu tradition of southern Asia, which is relatively unknown in the West. The action takes place in the year of Sita’s captivity in Ravana’s kingdom, said to be the present day Sri Lanka, where he is considered a fiercely generous and protective hero. Kurup’s purpose was to reveal deeper layers of the tale by reflecting the perspective of southern India regarding the characters and their motives.

The challenge in writing "As Vishnu Dreams" was to make the myth meaningful to others. Kurup wondered how the play could ask questions like “What is a demon?” in a profound way. He took some liberties in revising aspects of the tale in order to make a statement that would resonate with a contemporary audience. “At core was the notion that nothing is reality, all reality is a projection of the godhead — the holographic idea that we are all projections of God. We just demonize others so we can go to war with them,” says Kurup. Within the stories and anecdotes that arose from story circles and discussions with Hindu community partners, the question was, "How do humans comport themselves?"

“Portraying demons doing good and bad, it makes you question how you behave,” says Kurup. “The idea that you are the demon in your own myth was something I had wanted to explore for many years. The demon is as necessary as the angel is. How do we find the god and demon within us?”

Part of Cornerstone’s mission in the cycle was to reveal to people the depth of their own religion along new aspects of it, as Kurup attempted to do with "As Vishnu Dreams." As storytellers, it is their task to gather information. Says Kurup,

The shaman is now replaced by the artist, telling the story of the participating group, or of mankind. We are God as this creative being. Hindus know about their religion but not all know the depth beyond the ritual. How can it be explored on a philosophical level?

Collaboration with willing first-time artists in communities of faith includes them in this mission, says Kurup, “as artists, philosophers, mystics and gurus.”

Audience as Community

The task for collaborators in all of the plays was, as Kurup notes, “how to write and produce not only to relate to but also to inform the audience. Not so they scratch their heads because it’s dense and arty, or roll their eyes because it’s corny and banal.” One solution for making this unusual story available to a multicultural audience included integrating a musical sequence in the “Bollywood” style of Indian popular cinema, and incorporating shadow puppets, a tradition in Asian theater, to capture, says Kurup, “the look and feel of the ephemeral quality of religion.”

Kurup also acted in "ZONES or Where Does Your Soul Live and Is There Sufficient Parking?", a play performed as a predecessor to the run of plays at each venue in the Festival of Faith. "Zones" was structured by playwright Peter Howard as a mock L.A. zoning commission meeting that engages the audience in dialogue. In this play, Kurup, in order to challenge himself and add interest to the characterizations, switched roles with another actor. Instead of his originally planned role as the hip, atheist legal representative for a nontraditional church seeking zoning for a proposed piece of sacred architecture, he became the Pastor, the representative voice of the Christian community. In the multiple performances of "Zones," the diverse audiences participated as actual citizens of L.A., grappling with issues that arise in the interface of religious and civic forces that exist in such a diverse metropolis.

The experience of the audience, made up of members of the involved communities of faith as well as the general public, was a paramount concern in every production in the cycle. Kurup describes the logistics involved in viewing "Crossings," a group of short plays which he co-wrote, based on Old and New Testament stories, exploring physical and spiritual journeys of Catholic immigrants from five ethnically diverse parishes. The plays were staged downtown, in and around St Vibiana’s, L.A.’s oldest Catholic cathedral, now unused and at threat of being destroyed. The audience for each evening of the five plays was split into four groups that rotated through the plays, from the sanctuary to the rooftop. Kurup says that this “connected the audience to art on a physical level. Each group had a communal experience—ghostlike, peripatetic — of the notion of Exodus.”

“With the Faith-Based Cycle, Cornerstone reached a different audience. It was planned for the communities to witness each other,” says Page Leong. The cycle’s finale, "A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters," played for eight nights at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, a 1241-seat outdoor venue in the Hollywood Hills originally built as a site for pilgrimage plays. The play incorporated the religious history of L.A. in its structure and content, “Watching the audience for the bridge show, you could see little fires light up in each community” says Leong. The actors onstage and the audience members would “witness and recognize each other, and the audience members would be hearing others’ stories on stage while sitting next to them.”

The Question of Social Change

In terms of art motivating social change, Peter Howard points to

what an audience gets from watching a character unfold on-stage. Really listening to another’s experience is the beginning of compassion and I hope a growing web of compassion will filter into new leadership and policy. But even on the level of human beings knowing each other past stereotypes, what’s different about how we consider and treat each other in the future?

Howard says that artists function in “creating fun, joy, music, dance, spectacle — it makes people want to see it, participate. Be an artist first, not with the intention of social change, but with social change as a by-product.”

Leong remembers "A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters" as an “unforgettable display of diversity and ownership that is L.A. — filling up the Ford Theater in a circle, a microcosm of L.A..” Referring to the cycle that culminated in the bridge show, she says,

I hope that it makes a shift — the shift that individuals make, the drop that ripples out in concentric circles. We can’t always measure change, but hope that this awareness will continue going on in theater and politics and be taken back within each community, in people’s everyday interactions — that they will look at someone and not make an assumption, but instead say "Tell me your story.”

“At the most,” says Still,

I’m hopeful that a couple of hours in a place where they are allowed to think and feel about this thing that’s so conflictual in our country, a place where you’re not driven to take a stand, be defensive, but to be curious, unhardened, questioning, exploring, that they’ll see not only "Muslim," but "human who lives as Muslim.”

Noting humor as a catalyst in presenting so many sides of life in L.A. and the U.S. in "A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters" and throughout the cycle, Still hopes his play “galvanized people, made them feel they belong, made them question their own faith and others, made them feel pride.”

The experience of collaboration in art as a community partner or an audience member can break something open in the psyches of individuals where they are stuck. Still was impressed that “the cast had very deep experiences working together — to do with faith, age, race, family structures — it was the show within the show, and it had a lasting impact on them.” Ibrahim Saba, who played a variety of ethnic roles in the cycle, says that the number of gay actors in the 57-member cast surprised him. “It was the first time I was involved with such a group. It accentuated something I’d been trying to articulate to myself — seeing each other as a whole human race, not seeing just class, race, religion,” or sexual orientation. “First you’re human, then other aspects are secondary or tertiary. You are born human, your identity is ‘human.’”

Cornerstone’s artists are reluctant to speak on behalf of the community’s experience of an event, but Still presented an anecdote about an audience member who returned several times, as many did, to see the bridge show. “The second weekend, a woman said she had come back and would a third time.” She told him, “For years I had stopped dreaming. Ever since I saw this play the first time, I’ve been having dreams and remembering them.”

“That was it for me, “ Still said. “Theater can make people remember their dreams.”

Jan Freya is an arts journalist and academic editor living in California. She once managed High Performance magazine and, to the never-ending delight of those to whom she reveals her past credits, she co-wrote the screenplay for the '80s breakdance classic, "Breakin' 2 IS Electric Boogaloo."

NOTES

[1] TCG National Conference, June 17, 2005
[2] Gail Wyatt, MD, U.C.L.A., in interview with Kai Wright, ed. of BlackAIDS.org
[3] TCG National Conference, June 17, 2005
[4] See here for descriptions of all of the plays in the Faith-Based Cycle

Original CAN/API publication: January 2006