Cornerstone loses a co-founder

Alison Carey, who co-founded Cornerstone Theater with Bill Rauch in the mid-’80s and has recently been its resident playwright, has left the company “because I had to make more money,” she said.

Carey and her husband, Benajah Cobb, another Cornerstone member, are the parents of an 8-year-old and a 3-year-old, and “two nonprofit salaries doesn’t cut it,” Carey said.

After watching “The West Wing,” Carey began to think about writing for TV. “It’s great to think millions of people could be talking about things you care about,” she said. She recently sold a pilot script for an hourlong drama about politics, though it wasn’t picked up. Her professional life now consists of “meetings and lunches.”

Carey wrote or contributed to 14 Cornerstone plays, perhaps most famously “For Here or to Go?,” which played the Taper in 2000. She hopes to return to Cornerstone eventually, “but I don’t know when.”

“Television is emotionally easier than Cornerstone,” Carey said. Most of Cornerstone’s plays use laypeople from particular communities, and “you’re face to face with the people you’re writing about. In TV, you get to make it up.”

-- Don Shirley