Partnering for GOOD: Sojourn Theatre Cuts a Deal

Sojourn Theatre's “GOOD,” June/July 2007, Wentworth Subaru, Portland, Oregon. All photos courtesy of Sojourn Theatre - Click for slideshow

Michael Rohd was thinking about buying and selling. Rohd wanted to use Brecht’s “Good Person of Setzuan” as a frame for a play about business, ethics and community, so he was brainstorming with his company, Sojourn Theatre, around notions of gain and responsibility. They kept returning to the iconography of cars. Rohd hit on the idea of staging the show in a car dealership — but at first this seemed like a fantasy.

Rohd’s fantasy became a bit more of a reality once the company hit upon its connection to Megan Wentworth. Megan is a local arts fundraiser, a Sojourn fan and part of the Wentworth family that owns car dealerships all over Portland, Ore. They’ve been in town for over 100 years, having entered the car industry by selling horses and buggies to Portland pioneers. One of their buildings, Wentworth Subaru, is in Southeast Portland, a neighborhood thick with car dealerships. It was also one block from the Sojourn space (at the time). Rohd realized that Wentworth Subaru was the perfect performance space for Sojourn’s new piece and approached Megan with a proposal. Despite the unorthodox nature of the request, she was open to the idea. “Our family is land-rich and cash-poor,” Megan likes to say, “so if we don’t have to give money, we’re happy to help.”

Thus began “GOOD,” a site-specific, traveling performance where the audience traversed every inch of Wentworth Subaru in search of answers to the question: In a world where some have more and some have less, who are you responsible for?

“GOOD” was not just a performance — it was a model for innovative community partnerships that bridge the gap between arts and business. I came along for the ride as assistant director, so I can relay to you first-hand the challenges and rewards of a community partnership that involved both a deep trust and a degree of risk for both parties.

Family Partners

Sojourn prides itself on a history of innovative community partnerships. For “The Justice Project” (staged in a historic courtroom), the company partnered with the Multnomah County Justice Department to find interview subjects in all realms of the court and jail systems. For “Hidden” (staged in an old department store in a mall), Sojourn partnered with the nationally touring Anne Frank exhibit and the Jewish Leadership Council to share research resources and reach new audiences. For “Witness Our Schools” (staged in the round at various non-performance venues around Oregon for a year), Sojourn partnered with the Oregon Historical Society, the Chalkboard Project and the Oregon Department of Education to gain access to schools for interviews and marketing. All of these previous partnerships had been based around access to stories or money. But the Wentworths provided Sojourn with a home for its work. It was also a convenient partner organization because the artists did not have to wrestle with any corporate bureaucracy; they just had to climb the chain of command within a family business.

Once they reached the top of the family, so to speak, they found that Wentworth Subaru was unusually generous. During the first tour of the building, Greg Wentworth, Megan’s father, was already suggesting places where the actors might be able to perform. By the end of that meeting, he had basically given Rohd the keys to the building and free reign during non-business hours. They would even have mechanics move cars at the end of every business day so that the ensemble could have open space in which to move and create.

Sojourn Theatre's “GOOD,” June/July 2007, Wentworth Subaru, Portland, Oregon. All photos courtesy of Sojourn Theatre - Click for slideshow

Over the course of four months, Sojourn explored every inch of the Wentworth building. They quickly realized that, in many ways, Wentworth Subaru was an ideal performance venue for a traveling audience — lots of open space and a building that transforms as you move through it. The showroom is as shiny and sharp as any car dealership. The mechanics area has high ceilings and bold architecture, and it is big enough to run a 100-yard dash. The back lots are dark and creepy, especially at night when Sojourn rehearsed. The Wentworths promised to keep one of these lots clear at all times, so it was a space that could be transformed. In addition to these main rooms, there were offices, storage areas and strange, unfinished rooms that had been forgotten during recent renovations. The building was alternately welcoming and ominous, full of unexpected details, and there were a thousand different places for the audience to stand — a perfect candidate for a site-specific performance.

Before rehearsals began at Wentworth (and soon after I arrived), Sojourn explored the shows themes and “set” by creating a piece with its apprentice company: just two actors and one car. This piece introduced Sojourn to the mechanics at Wentworth. It had been performed for friends and loyal Sojourn audiences, but to perform for mechanics was definitely more unknown. We bought them pizza and hoped for the best. They seemed to enjoy the short piece, especially when we made the car bounce with a hidden sex scene, but we were still nervous. We left that day whispering to each other, “Do they really know what we’re going to do in here?”

Our contact with the mechanics continued to be delicate throughout the rehearsal process. The management was enthusiastic and extremely welcoming throughout, but for the mechanics, we definitely got too close for comfort on some days. For one dance that we created on a big wall in the space, we climbed on big, sturdy-looking cabinets. Once our footprints were discovered, we were informed that these were actually tool cabinets that the mechanics owned and were worth a lot of money. Scratching a cabinet was the equivalent of scratching a new BMW. The mechanics would leave us lots of “do not touch” notes and eventually started to (playfully?) hide lights and other equipment. Often, the hidden equipment would show up in their manager’s office to remind her how they felt about our presence. Over the course of our time at Wentworth Subaru, we tried to tread lightly, not only on their building but also on how we represented them in our performance.

Sojourn Theatre's “GOOD,” June/July 2007, Wentworth Subaru, Portland, Oregon. All photos courtesy of Sojourn Theatre - Click for slideshow

Issues of representation were a major concern for both Sojourn and the Wentworths. Rohd was hyper-aware that “our performance of their occupations had to be responsible and empathetic.” Rohd and choreographer Mike Barber created a playful and glitzy mechanic’s dance that would prevent the mechanics from being stereotyped or sidelined to the voices of management. As the script was being developed, Megan Wentworth would approve certain provocative sections, such as when we were trying to find a balance between discussing the downfalls of consumerism without devaluing the role of business. “No one wanted to tread on the creative process but we also didn’t want car dealerships to be misrepresented,” said Megan in an interview.

The Wentworths’ main motivation in entering into this partnership was to benefit the arts community, though there were also some secondary benefits. “GOOD” was used as a promotional tool in some ways, but as Megan Wentworth said, this type of advertising was “way outside the box.” During the initial discussions that began this project, it helped that Sojourn requested to work in a Subaru building as opposed to some of the other car brands that the Wentworth family deals. Subaru customers tend to be environmentally and socially conscious – they are also more likely to be arts audiences. So, the people that Sojourn was bringing into the building were potential customers. We joked that a chapter of the piece could be used as a commercial: two shapely acrobats tumbled on, over and through a new, white Subaru. And Sojourn did not shy away from trying to sell cars; after all, that was the purpose of the building. An entire chapter of the play focused around a car salesman, James Ingersoll Hart, trying to sell the audiences a Subaru Outback while covertly reflecting on the nature of consumption in contemporary society. James was so convincing that, upon seeing his performance, the Wentworths offered to hire him on the spot. Wentworth Subaru was able to present the Sojourn partnership to a national meeting of Subaru dealers as a model for how to create unique targeted marketing.

Though entirely unspoken of by both partners, there were definitely financial benefits. The rehearsal and performance space that Wentworth Subaru offered to Sojourn was entirely free; it saved Sojourn tens of thousands of dollars. The Wentworths, presumably, will receive a similar benefit on their end through tax write-offs.

Acrobats, Rogue Actors and a Dirty Subaru

Despite the Wentworths’ trust in us, there were still days that we feared our athletic activities would jeopardize our partnership. The aforementioned white Subaru was dirtied and nicked by the acrobats (which eventually prevented the car from being sold); our stellar salesman chipped paint all over the showroom; some rogue actors helped themselves to Internet access in the offices. We apologized, negotiated and were treated as true partners by the Wentworths. They did not hold it over our heads that they were lending us the space — they saw our work as benefiting them as much as their space was benefiting us. (We also paid for certain damages after the production, to help fix the things we had broken.)

Sojourn Theatre's “GOOD,” June/July 2007, Wentworth Subaru, Portland, Oregon. All photos courtesy of Sojourn Theatre - Click for slideshow

Our stage manager, Liam Kaas-Lentz, became a key figure in maintaining a healthy partnership. It was Liam’s heroic efforts that made the set-up and break-down possible. Sojourn has had site-specific homes for its projects in the past (i.e., an abandoned courthouse, a multilevel warehouse) but never had they attempted to work in a building that was actually a functioning business. Because of this, Liam and his crew had to build the set and break it down before and after every performance. To be a responsible partner, we had to be invisible during business hours. Even with help from the entire cast, the set-up/break-down took two hours on each end of the performance.

Despite the many ways Sojourn pushed the space, the way Rohd chose to open the play represented an important overflow into the local community. “When car dealerships or other stores want to connect with people out in the neighborhood, they do stuff in their parking lots. They become public,” said Michael Rohd. “GOOD” began with the cast and audience milling around in a parking lot filled with food, music and balloons. “This helped our story connect with the public sphere.”

Not Just Money and Stories

The partnership with the Wentworths was revelatory for Sojourn in a number of ways. It expanded our notion of what a partner could provide. Considering Megan’s idea of “land-rich, cash-poor” made us think about the unorthodox riches of other potential community partners. Partnerships need not center only around money or stories. Also, being in the Wentworth building and working so closely with the family created among the artists a greater sense of responsibility about those we were representing and how we were telling our story. Foremost, the Wentworths gave us a lot of hope for the intentions of partners outside the arts community. Although there were secondary benefits to our partnership, the Wentworths really helped us out of good will. They saw the chance to help with an exciting, creative project and they jumped on it.

The show sold out within days of opening and was well received by audiences and critics. The Oregonian said:

A multilayered, multimedia performance piece, staged in the lobby, lunchroom, offices and service bays of a Subaru dealership, GOOD presents a tricky thicket of moral quandaries: Are you your brother's keeper? With limited resources, how do you decide whom to help? In a world of inequality and uncertainty, what does it mean to be a good person? In that it bids us to untangle these ethical knots, the show is hard work. As an evening at the theater, however, GOOD is neither difficult nor demanding. It is a marvelously entertaining production that leads you, quite literally, through its time-shifting, perspective-sifting story with so much intelligence and inventiveness, wit and flair, that the path to the philosophical conundrum at its heart seems like a magic portal, never a trap door.

The enthusiasm from the surrounding community was exciting, but what would the Wentworths think?

On opening night, the entire Wentworth family was in attendance. This kept everyone from Sojourn on edge, especially because at first the Wentworth men seemed slow to be led around their own property by a bunch of eager actors. But, by the end, they were all engaged and excited by what we had done. Greg Wentworth toasted Sojourn in front of the entire audience and later told Rohd, “If you need to be in here again, let us know. This was great for us.”

Maureen Towey, through the support of a Princess Grace Fellowship, was a guest director with Sojourn Theatre in 2007; she is now a Sojourn associate artist. During her residency, she assisted Michael Rohd on “GOOD” and directed a workshop of “Throwing Bones,” which will be Sojourn's mainstage production in 2008. She was a 2005-2006 Fulbright Scholar in South Africa where she adapted and directed “Swallow What You Steal,” which toured rural villages. Towey served as development director for Anne Bogart's SITI Company and toured internationally with the rock group Arcade Fire, working in a variety of creative and management capacities.

Original CAN/API publication: November 2007