Immigrant Experiences as Old as the Bible

Avisionary, wrote the poet William Blake, sees the world in a grain of sand.

The aim of “Crossings,” the latest production from Cornerstone Theater Company, is to envision the world atop a mound of dirt--specifically the one heaped in front of St. Vibiana’s, the defunct, earthquake-damaged cathedral that was the seat of the Catholic Church in Los Angeles for 120 years.

The play, subtitled “Journeys of Catholic Immigrants,” draws its story outlines from the Bible. But many of the incidents and details reflect the experiences of everyday Southern Californians who emigrated from Cambodia, Africa, Mexico and Arab nations. It shows each group leaving troubled homelands and finding refuge here, as well as new challenges and discontents.

The world that comes together atop that dusty pile in the final act is not tidy or comfortable. Before culminating in a vision of hope and peace, “Crossings” jostles against some of the most explosive and headline-dominating issues now facing the church and humankind.

* Rey, an embittered Mexican American who has rejected his faith, goes into a tirade against Catholicism that climaxes with a blanket condemnation of priests as sexual abusers. “We place a sacred trust in the hands of these people. And look what they do with it!”

* John and Jawdette, Arab Catholic cousins from Jordan, nearly come to blows over whether Palestinian suicide bombers deserve to be included under the rubric of Jesus’ teaching that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

* Sonunthear, a Cambodian woman, keeps her silence about the genocidal horror she lived through under the Khmer Rouge. She fears that if she opens her mouth, she will blame God.

Bill Rauch, Cornerstone’s artistic director and co-founder, chuckled at the suggestion that the company must have some prophetic inspiration of its own, given how its Faith-Based Cycle, a 3 1/2-year project that began last fall, is touching hot buttons from today’s front pages.

“I wish I were the kind of artist to say, ‘We’re on the cutting edge, we anticipated these things.’ But I think that would be disingenuous.”

The cycle began with the Festival of Faith--21 smaller plays staged at houses of worship, including a Muslim school shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It will continue through the end of 2004 and possibly into 2005. On the way are a play by Luis Alfaro about faith from the perspective of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people, a play inspired by African American clergy’s attempts to grapple with the AIDS crisis in the black community, and “Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith,” a comedy about Muslim life in L.A. Other projects are planned from the perspective of Jewish, Hindu, Pentecostal and secular humanist viewpoints.

Cornerstone’s modus operandi since it was formed in 1986 has been for professional actors, writers and directors to forge links with particular ethnic, racial or social groups, find out what issues and events are on their minds, and turn the stories folks tell into plays--with amateurs from each community acting many of the roles.

“Issues of faith had come up in just about every project we’d ever done, but we’d never made it the primary subject of the work,” Rauch said. “It felt like time to take that on.”

“Crossings,” which opened Saturday, is based on five stories from the Hebrew Bible and one episode from the New Testament. Each section from the Old Testament features a different parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as creative partner. The play begins on the dirt mound in front of St. Vibiana’s with “Replenish the Earth,” a retelling of the Tower of Babel story. The question: In sowing division and diversity among the peoples of the world, was God punishing the human race or doing it a favor?

Playgoers then take a theatrical tour of the former cathedral. In “Beyond the Jordan,” the Arab Catholic experience is seen as a reflection of the Israelites’ journey out of Egypt. It takes place in the sanctuary, with its white marble altarpiece and oak confessional booths. “Esther and the Exodus” plays out in a basement classroom, and tells, a la the book of Esther, the story of immigrants in peril--only this time it’s Mexican illegals in L.A. instead of Jews in ancient Persia. “Authenticite” radically reworks the story of Ruth and Naomi, set against revolutionary chaos in Zaire. It will be played in a courtyard with a fountain, overlooked by the former residence of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. “Afloat,” staged on a roof five stories above ground, recasts the story of Noah’s ark as a Cambodian survival tale. Finally, “The Upper Room” unites characters from the previous stories in a concluding evocation of Pentecost--the New Testament episode that gathers together what was scattered at Babel. It envisions God’s word miraculously overcoming language barriers and being universally understood.

The OK to use St. Vibiana’s came from Gilmore Associates, the developer restoring the cathedral as a complex that will include apartments and a performing arts center. Although retrofitting of the damaged main church building probably won’t begin until late summer, the city has allowed limited uses, said project director Robert Jones. Only “Beyond the Jordan” will take place inside the damaged structure.

Before any of this could come to pass, Cornerstone’s crew of writer-actors had to win the trust of each parish--while also safeguarding the company’s prerogative to tell stories without censorship.

Cornerstone members explained their methods and objectives in an initial meeting last year at the archdiocese offices. Rauch says he nervously broached the idea that the plays in “Crossings” would take interpretive liberties with Bible stories, sometimes transforming them in light of the experiences of today’s immigrants. Would that be blasphemous?

“A fantastic woman representing one of the parishes said, ‘I’ll tell you what’s blasphemous. What’s blasphemous is priests who stand up in church and do not find a way to connect the word to our daily lives. What you want to do is exactly what needs to be done.’ ”

Would the church help Cornerstone find immigrant parishes to work with? As director of ethnic groups ministry for the archdiocese, Irma Isip says, it was her call. “There was a trust,” she says. Knowing that Catholic clergy and lay people would be intimately involved in helping to create the plays, she saw no need to ask for script approval.

Some of the playwrights attended Mass regularly at their partner parishes to show their sincerity and to gain trust. Cornerstone member Page Leong, the Chinese American writer of “Afloat,” learned about small details of Cambodian life. A shovel used in the play should be made of tin scraps, her cast members said, because that is all they had in the refugee camps after they escaped to Thailand. She also witnessed rare exchanges within families for whom the horror of the “killing fields” had been a subject to forget.

“The youth sometimes don’t know, and their parents didn’t tell them the stories,” says Mary Blatz, director of the church-run Cambodian Center at Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish in Long Beach. “This play has made the two generations speak to each other.”

Father Hisham Dabaen, pastor to the 650 predominantly Jordanian families that make up Southern California’s far-flung Arab Catholic community, said he knew instinctively that the project Cornerstone outlined would be worthwhile. “I just felt a click--this is a good thing.”

For actor-playwright Bernard White, working with the Arab Catholic congregation meant having to walk the minefield of issues raised by the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the thorniest, he said, has been how to handle stories parishioners told of Arab Christians being disparaged by some Muslims. It’s a powerful subject for drama. But community members were leery of such portrayals, saying they are exceptions, not the rule. This, they told White, is not a time for Arabs to air their differences, but to show solidarity in support of the Palestinians. White kept the story of Muslim-Catholic friction, but toned down language he thought could be offensive.

“I want to represent the community and be true to them, but ultimately these are my thoughts and I am responsible for what’s there,” he says.

Bernardo Solano, who wrote “The Upper Room,” says he came up with a good laugh line, then scratched it because the joke might be seen as mocking the core Catholic concept of bread and wine being sacramentally transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

But Solano left several other potential hot buttons in his script. The best defense against offending religiously committed playgoers, he thinks, is to tell the stories well and make the characters believable. “By following the characters’ stories,” he says, “they’re more willing to listen and not have a knee-jerk reaction.”

White, who considers himself a devout Catholic, says he knew going in that art which addresses questions of religious doctrine and belief is always risky.

“My biggest concern was that we show the faith in a complex light. To show the warts and pitfalls, but also capture the complexity of spiritual arguments and not go for just the headlines.”

Throw in genocide, the Middle East powder keg, the hardships of undocumented Mexican workers in America and depictions of the West abandoning impoverished, strife-ridden Africa, and “Crossings” has, if not the whole world in its sand, at least a good chunk of it.

“That’s what made me want to be a part of it,” White says. “That kind of feeling that the whole world is watching. We’re at the old cathedral, down the street from the new cathedral, in this year after the twin towers fell. There are no bigger issues right now than the things we’re talking about. I hope we do it justice. I hope God is with us.”

Mike Boehm is a Times staff writer.