Just Plain Folks Sharing the Stage

In 1967, the Mark Taper Forum was launched with a considerable dose of renegade spirit. It was to be the experimental wing of what was then called the Music Center.

Over the decades, however, the Taper became the cornerstone of L.A. theater--the one company, for example, that most guidebooks are sure to mention in their few lines about the L.A. stage. The Taper produces new plays and tries to serve a staggering variety of constituencies, but no one doubts that in L.A. theater, the Taper is the establishment.

Across the country, about 15 years ago, a group of recent Harvard graduates decided to bypass theaters like the Taper, which they feared were dying. They took theater directly to the grass roots.

Their Cornerstone Theater Company visited towns throughout America and enlisted the active participation of the locals. Nearly nine years ago, Cornerstone settled permanently in Los Angeles and applied the same methods to some of the communities that make up greater L.A.

Now, with “For Here or to Go?” opening next Sunday, Cornerstone is bringing those grass roots back into the inner sanctum of L.A. theater--the Taper main stage.

It’s the first time the Taper has invited a local theater company to do a show there. The closest precedent was when the irreverent comedy trio Culture Clash did “Carpa Clash” on the main stage in 1993. But the cast of “For Here or to Go?” is about 10 times the size of Culture Clash, and the number of distinct communities represented in this production--14, including at least one individual from each of the groups with which Cornerstone has worked in L.A.--makes just about any previous Taper production look relatively homogeneous.

Written by Cornerstone co-founder Alison Carey and directed by Bill Rauch, “For Here or to Go?” spins a wild, good-humored yarn about a disparate collection of Angelenos. It also serves as a holiday show, incorporating elements of Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan and Kwanzaa.

In Cornerstone parlance, it’s a “bridge” show--one that unites people from different neighborhoods. With a budget of $200,000, it’s also the company’s biggest L.A. production.

Cornerstone began small. Carey and Rauch met in a Cambridge bookstore in 1980. Although theater was not offered as a major at Harvard, they both participated in student productions. They credit Harvard theater professor and critic Robert Brustein’s pessimism about the organized theater with steering them away from the usual models and into a company of their own devising.

At first they were thinking of a “truck theater” that would simply drive from town to town, presenting shows to people who weren’t regular theatergoers. “Then we thought we wouldn’t learn much that way, and we began to dream of staying longer in each community,” Rauch said.

Community involvement became an essential part of the plan. The concept was tested in a dry run in two Massachusetts productions in 1984-85, in a mental hospital and a school.

In 1985, Rauch assisted director Peter Sellars in running a short-lived national theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Carey was by now an actress-paralegal-junior staffer for Women’s Wear Daily in New York. But the two kept in touch, and they were finally goaded into action by the example of a mutual friend of about the same age who had already bought and renovated a building. Rauch noted the irony that it was a for-profit real estate deal that inspired them to build a nonprofit theater company. They decided to use the name Cornerstone because they hoped their efforts would provide the foundation of continuing theatrical activity in the towns they would visit.

The pair eventually obtained a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts for school-related theater residencies--”though we had a cross-generational agenda from the beginning,” Rauch said. But after an initial production of “Our Town” in Newport News, Va., another Virginia production fell through. They seized the moment to go national, picking “the place we knew the least about”--North Dakota.

They homed in on the tiny hamlet of Marmarth, because the state historical society told them that it contained an old railroad bunkhouse that could sleep 30, with a little vaudeville theater across the street. The production was an updated, localized “Hamlet” that involved nearly a third of the town’s 200 residents. It brought Cornerstone national attention.

For the next five years, Cornerstone traveled, mostly to rural communities, creating 10 productions. The troupe landed on the cover of American Theatre magazine with an interracial “Romeo and Juliet” in Port Gibson, Miss., featuring amateur Edret Brinston as Romeo and Cornerstone member Amy Brenneman as Juliet. Brenneman, who would later become a TV star (“Judging Amy”), now serves as chairwoman of the Cornerstone board.

The tours culminated in a 1991 “bridge” trek that brought an adaptation of “The Winter’s Tale” back to the previously visited communities plus three big cities, and used selected amateurs from the earlier productions alongside the Cornerstone professionals. The tour was filmed for a documentary, “Cornerstone,” that aired on cable last year.

By 1991, members of the group wanted to settle down. They looked for a big city where they could continue their work with a variety of communities. Newark, N.J., and Baltimore were in the running, but the choices were finally narrowed to Washington and Los Angeles.

“Washington was attractive because of the decisions made there about the direction of the country,” Carey said, “but the decisions about how the country is portrayed are often made in L.A., and the diversity of L.A. was too exciting to turn down.”

Also, she said, like North Dakota five years earlier, “L.A. was a place we didn’t know about. The itch for the frontier was part of it.”

Rauch added that L.A. appeared, from his research, to be more open to the idea of professional-community collaborations. Early on, a National Endowment for the Arts official in Washington had told him that Cornerstone would never receive federal money because its members worked with amateurs.

The NEA man was quite mistaken. Cornerstone’s grantsmanship has been remarkable, with successes that included a $125,000 NEA grant when the company moved to L.A. Still, at the time of the move, recalled managing director Leslie Tamaribuchi, some foundation officials were skeptical, wondering “why the company was selling out its rural mission to bask in the bright lights of Hollywood.”

As it turned out, the move to L.A. did allow some members to work in Hollywood, which came in handy because--with the higher cost of living in L.A. compared with rural sites--the company couldn’t afford to pay all 17 ensemble members on a full-time basis, Tamaribuchi said. Currently, only five are full time, but all 17 receive health insurance.

Yet contributors apparently paid no attention to the notion that Cornerstone might be selling out. Two years ago, the company received its biggest grant: $550,000 (over four years) from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, which paid for a move from Santa Monica to much larger headquarters in downtown L.A. Of the $700,000 budget for fiscal year 2000, 90% was contributed as opposed to earned income (by comparison, only 48% of the Taper’s budget came from donors).

Half of the 14 ensemble members in 1992 didn’t move to L.A. with the company. But their ranks were filled with new recruits, expanding the company’s racial diversity beyond the initial group of white college buddies.

*

Cornerstone certainly didn’t bask much at the beginning of its L.A. tenure. Arriving in the wake of the 1992 riots, the company presented its first L.A. show, “The Toy Truck,” at the Angelus Plaza senior complex near Bunker Hill. Rauch found himself directing seniors who couldn’t understand each other’s languages.

This was followed by residencies in Pacoima, Watts, Boyle Heights, Chinatown, Baldwin Hills and Beverly Hills, plus projects with such groups as Arab Americans, postal workers, police and library employees, MTA workers, the Bus Riders Union and people who were born on June 30 (Cornerstone’s first birthday). The Watts efforts climaxed with the award-winning “The Central Ave. Chalk Circle,” adapted from Brecht. “Candude,” at the downtown L.A. library, used people from the civil service groups. Members of three of the geographical groups were brought together in an acclaimed “bridge” show, “Broken Hearts,” last year. For the next three years, Cornerstone plans to work with faith-based communities.

The company also has performed shows without community collaborators, including the innovative “Everyman in the Mall” and “Mallplays” in shopping centers, and a project that was done with Taper assistance--a gender-bent “Twelfth Night,” set on a naval base, that tackled the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Several Taper staffers have also worked with Cornerstone, so the alliance wasn’t entirely new when Cornerstone approached the Taper about the upcoming show.

Rauch and Carey long ago overcame their initial resistance to big resident theaters. The first such collaboration was a 1993 adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” at Arena Stage in Washington, involving people from Anacostia, a nearby low-income neighborhood. It created “soul searching about whether we were selling out,” Rauch said; it marked the first time the company didn’t perform in the neighborhood from which its collaborators came.

But the company concluded that “bringing those people into the cultural palace was also very attractive,” Carey said. That’s also what’s happening at the Taper--Cornerstone is distributing 50 tickets at each performance to people from the represented communities.

Each of the amateurs in the production will be paid between $500 and $1,500, depending on experience and role. Though this isn’t much compared with the nearly $6,000 that each Actors’ Equity cast member and stage manager will receive, the amateurs started out at Cornerstone as unpaid volunteers.

Taper associate artistic director Corey Madden cited the ability of Cornerstone to handle payments and other production details as one of the attractions of the collaboration. She also said it makes sense for the Taper to form a partnership with a company that lacks its own performing space.

Most important, she said, Cornerstone’s vision is in sync with the Taper’s outreach effort. “They can help us grow so the institution is more available and porous to a wider group of people,” she said. “Cultural edifices have walls that sometimes make people feel they can’t go in. We want them to think of us like they do of the library, where people know there’s something in there for them, and it’s easy to come and go.”

Whether Cornerstone can help unify L.A. is debatable, but Rauch said he believes in “the power of art to change people’s lives.”

Certainly the work’s impact on the people involved is substantial. “Cornerstone gives me an excuse to talk to people in a lot of corners of the city,” Tamaribuchi said. “It makes me feel that L.A. is a welcoming place--and I don’t know how many people can say that.”

*

“For Here or to Go?,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Previews Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Opens next Sunday, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 19-23, 8 p.m.; Dec. 21, 23 and 24, 2:30 p.m. $25. (213) 628-2772.