Cornerstone mobilizes the troupe

FOR 20 years, Cornerstone Theater Company has made a mark living up to its name and not being afraid to gather some moss.

The L.A. ensemble goes into a community, tries to learn all about it, painstakingly builds foundations of trust and understanding, then uses people encountered and insights gleaned to make plays out of the street-level realities confronting L.A.’s multifarious neighborhoods and identity groups.

Last week, for the first time, several members of Cornerstone decided to dispense with the gathering and just roll. After preparing for five days -- compared with the months and sometimes years the company typically devotes to plays -- a handful of Cornerstoners assembled on a contention-fraught street corner in solidarity with displaced farmers and led readings from John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”

South Central Farm was big news June 13, when sheriff’s deputies carried out a court-backed eviction of community farmers who’d been growing their own food on the 14-acre, inner-city property for more than 10 years. The owner, with a possible warehouse development in mind and angered by what he said were anti-Semitic slurs during protests, had turned down a last-minute, $16-million offer from city officials and philanthropists to buy the property and preserve it as a farm.

The next day, Cornerstone members led by Antonia Glenn, part of the nonprofit company’s fundraising team, visited and talked to protesters who continued to keep a vigil outside the locked site. The theater company decided to join the cause -- having satisfied themselves that any slurs were unauthorized individual bursts of bigotry rather than part of some hate-filled agenda -- and Monday they brought 30 minutes’ worth of Steinbeck’s tale of dispossessed Depression-era Oklahoma farmers to the site, at Alameda Street and East Martin Luther King Boulevard. E-mails and Web postings for L.A.’s theater community brought out a handful of other actors who wanted to help, and a little boy and girl from the neighborhood stepped forward to read parts from photocopied scripts.

“The owners of the land came onto the land,” began the first reader, Charles Sloan, eschewing the weak, portable public-address system that the farm protest organization had rustled up, and intoning Steinbeck’s biblical-style cadences in a firm, clear voice for about 100 listeners, many of them Spanish speakers, who stood on the opposite side of the cracked gray pavement of Martin Luther King. The audience applauded politely for each of four scenes -- the two children getting the biggest response.

A struggling, “between gigs” actor from Florida, Sloan has gotten to know Cornerstone members while living lean in a downtown hotel near their office. He took Glenn’s invitation to join the protest. “I didn’t grow up easy, and the premise of ‘This land belongs to the people, this land should feed the people,’ is very close to my core beliefs,” he said.

The land, in fact, belongs to Ralph Horowitz, and many would disagree that farmers, a grass-roots theater company or Steinbeck’s populist ideals should come between him and his right not to have others use it without his permission. That’s what makes the South Central Farm an issue for the city and the Cornerstone members’ protest sortie a significant moment for the company.

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Action and reaction

THE idea of “rapid response” theater has been kicking around the company since the 1992 L.A. riots, which broke out shortly after the previously itinerant Cornerstone settled here. Co-founder Alison Carey says it’s time to come up with a formal policy for jumping on issues that move company members. “Cornerstone’s very slow and careful methodology is something we’re deeply proud of,” she says, but that’s no reason for a socially conscious company not to have an outlet for artists who want to deploy their talents in response to fast-moving events.

Michael John Garces, three months into his tenure as the new artistic director, took part in the reading. There’s been a lively but not rancorous debate within the company, he says, over whether this was the right cause to back, whether reading Steinbeck to Spanish speakers on a noisy street corner was the right theatrical approach for backing it, and whether representing one side of an issue meets Cornerstone’s goal of promoting dialogue.

The upshot, Garces expects, will be more formal deliberations within Cornerstone, leading to a set of procedures for deciding when and how to unleash a theatrical rapid response.

He and Carey say they’re not concerned that taking sides could alienate the donors Cornerstone relies on.

“We need to follow our instincts as artists and let the chips fall where they may,” Garces says. “It will be offensive to some people, I’m sure, but I’m not going to base decisions on whether some donor will be worried.”

At the farm, Garces and Glenn agree, Cornerstone learned that a stand-and-read method isn’t a great idea for street protest, that bilingual presentation is a must and that in similar future circumstances, they should strongly consider humorous, action-filled scenes in which the performers can move in close to the crowd.

Early outside reaction has been mixed. Glenn, who sees that as part of a helpful discussion, said one e-mail response to her call for actors read, “You guys have too much time on your hands, get back to work.” But for Cornerstone, making quick work of activist theater could soon officially be one of the tasks at hand.