Staging America : cornerstone and community-based theater

Abstract

This captivating study maps a history and theory of community-based theater in the United States through the Cornerstone Theater Company. Detailing how the performance-making process contributes to an ongoing negotiation of American identity, Sonja Kuftinec investigates community-based theater to trace the historical affiliations of the form and critically examines how community-based theater both enables and challenges the very notion of community as a stable site. This process of making and unmaking is vividly illuminated in the work of the Cornerstone Theater Company, a Los Angeles-based ensemble founded in 1986. From 1986 to 1991, Cornerstone toured nationwide, working mainly with rural towns to create adaptations of classical texts. A Wild West musical Hamlet was performed with residents of Marmarth, North Dakota, and The House on Walker River, an adaptation of the Oresteia trilogy, was developed with a Native American reservation in Nevada. Since 1991, Cornerstone has performed with urban communities, developing original shows and adaptations of Western and non-Western texts incorporating local histories and players. These performances rearticulate distinctions among various urban groups and between amateur and professional theater. While Cornerstone's contemporary work can be contextualized within a historical tradition of grassroots performance, it also complicates this tradition, suggesting that identity may be more dynamic than rooted. By using Cornerstone as a case study, Kuftinec's analysis proposes that community and America are vital terms of negotiation rather than fixed entities.