Seeking heart in the country

It’s Sunday. As I drive north on Interstate 5, I can’t stop thinking about where I’m headed.

I co-founded Cornerstone Theater Company with Alison Carey in 1986. For the last 18 years, we’ve collaborated with communities all over the country to make theater that involves dozens of local people, usually first-time artists, in plays that examine and celebrate the local community.

Our earliest projects were epic interactions between classic texts and small towns: a Wild West “Hamlet” with ranchers in North Dakota, the ancient rituals of the “Oresteia” adapted to a Nevada Native American reservation, and a biracial “Romeo and Juliet” in the segregated streets of Mississippi. We began urban work in Los Angeles on the Monday after the civil unrest in 1992, and have been working in Southern California ever since.

But right now I’m driving north toward Cornerstone’s first collaboration with a rural community in more than 14 years.

Lost Hills is best known to travelers for its truck stop at I-5 and California 46, the road that connects the Central Valley to the Central Coast, the road where James Dean made his last drive. But two miles west of fast-food restaurants and gas stations, there’s a town of over 1,900 residents: mostly Latino families whose primary source of income is the local almond harvesting and packaging industry. I drive past a baseball field that’s filled with men playing soccer and drinking beer, surrounded by playing families.

This is one of the richest pieces of land in the world, worked by some of our country’s poorest residents. There are no streetlights or stoplights in Lost Hills. Most streets are unpaved, creating problematic dust in the summer and more problematic mud in the winter. The town has the lowest ratio of high school graduates in California, and the highest average number of people living in each home, roughly half of which are trailers.

Over the last eight months, playwright Jose Cruz Gonzalez has written “Waking Up in Lost Hills,” a loose adaptation of “Rip Van Winkle.” The play has grown directly out of our process of interviews and story circles with members of the Lost Hills community. We’ll be living, rehearsing and performing on the campus of the local elementary and middle school. Air-conditioned and modern, the school is the town’s oasis.

In four weeks, by working 14 hours a day on average, Cornerstone will mount a full production of an original, bilingual musical play with town residents onstage and backstage and with the highest possible professional artistic standards. I’m the director.

Monday

Cornerstone’s multiethnic staff Is not the only group of visitors in Lost Hills. This project is the first incarnation of the Cornerstone Institute. Eighteen students, ages 21 to 59, have flown in from all over the country to study the company’s methodology and to experience it by participating in the production. These students are the present and future leaders of community-based theater in the U.S.

As I listen to each one share his or her experience and passion, I’m struck by the fact that when Cornerstone began operations almost two decades ago, the term “community-based” was not on our field’s radar screen. Today, Cornerstone is part of a vibrant national movement of making art that is participatory, art that is life-changing for everyone involved.

After a three-hour orientation, we head into town, split into small teams. I’m with three students, and we’re knocking on random doors in a subsidized housing project, trying to drum up folks for tonight’s auditions. Usually women and small children answer, and we observe a consistent dance: When they see our non-Latino faces, they begin to move back and shut the door. As I speak my inadequate Spanish, they smile and come forward. We leave them with bilingual audition fliers, and they leave us with hearts full of gratitude for their willingness to listen and at least pretend they might show up.

Thirty-one community members show up -- mostly kids but also a handful of adults. Some read aloud from a newspaper (English or Spanish), others perform lively improvisations, while many tackle scenes from our play. After several passes with suggested adjustments from the directorial team, one teenager says with surprise, “Oh, you want me to act it?” The professional team and students talk over the auditioning pool well into the night.

Tuesday

“What a great first week we had yesterday,” jokes one participant.

But we’re just getting started. After the students view a four-hour slide show history of Cornerstone, we do a round of auditions that yield 19 hopefuls. In the evening, we have callbacks. In a Cornerstone community collaboration, everyone is asked to return for a second audition partly to affirm their efforts and partly to see whose lives allow them to actually show up a second time. In Lost Hills, most people do.

In the acting room, I hand a middle-aged woman a scene featuring Older Valentina. (This pivotal character is based on a woman from the Lost Hills Visioning Committee, a real-life group of outside and local activists trying to improve the town). I give the scene some context: It’s a tense reunion with the character’s adult daughter, a recovering meth addict (drug addiction is a widespread problem in the rural Central Valley). The auditioner interrupts my explanation to talk at length about her son, an addict who had called her the night before from jail. She is tearful. Those of us listening are emotional. And we’re now 10 minutes behind in our carefully crafted timeline for the evening. Finally, she reads the scene aloud. It’s genuine and moving.

We’ve found our Older Valentina.

Wednesday

We spend the day wrestling with further casting. With Institute students and community members, we have just enough adults for the roles we need to fill. However, we have at least 20 children more than we have roles for young people. An idea develops. We’ll create a pre-show scene, perhaps a 10-minute history of Lost Hills, to be performed in the lobby, and we’ll cast every kid who auditioned. We debate the idea; it will inevitably affect everyone’s workload, already overwhelming. In the end, our perceptions of community needs trump our perceptions of how much sleep we need, and we commit to the pre-show.

Our final cast ranges from 4 to 78 years of age. That includes grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins from the same families. It’s rare in contemporary American society that three generations of families participate in anything together. Involving multiple generations of several families is one of the gifts of community-based theater that I most cherish. Days later, we’ll discover that certain Lost Hills cast members are related to others.

Thursday

The first reading of the play is tonight, and Jose has made more than 20 pages of changes, many necessitated by our community casting. The only copier we have access to can’t handle the load, so each script is a slightly different version of the play. It’s an apt metaphor, I’m thinking, that none of us is on the same page.

Other unhappy surprises await us. Our oldest cast member is dropping out because she’s returning to Mexico. Our youngest cast member is quitting because a teenage fellow cast member who would bring him to rehearsal has also quit; he is moving to L.A. to seek work.

There are others too who don’t show -- most painfully, the woman playing Older Valentina. Three phone calls in both English and Spanish can’t persuade her to change her mind. Still, by 6:30 p.m. there are more than 50 Lost Hills residents in the school cafeteria, excited and nervous. Some kids tell us they have to leave early, but they stay because they’re transfixed by the antic reading of professional actors Winston Rocha and Peter Howard and the celebratory songs by composer Michael Archuleta. Some community actors struggle with the language, but we make it through the first read-through.

Friday

Our first staging rehearsal with members of the community is scheduled from 6 to 10 p.m. Some cast members have just arrived from work shifts that lasted from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and have work again the next morning at 6. One woman has to leave early to make dinner for her husband before he leaves for his graveyard shift. Kids who have come to hang out and watch friends or parents are grabbed to replace cast members who don’t show up. .

Late in the day, after the only other community auditioner for the role of Older Valentina turns us down, I’m feeling a little desperate. As I said to the cast last night, we have the talent in the room to pull off our play; what we lack is time.

Saturday

It’s late morning and the playwright’s mother has arrived to help him cook tonight’s dinner for Institute students and staff. By 2:25 p.m., she has read for and been cast in the role of Older Valentina. This will be 72-year-old Mary Gonzalez’ first acting experience. Although she lives on the coast three hours away, she’ll spend most of the next three weeks living in the Days Inn at the truck stop, rehearsing her son’s play.

While choreography and music rehearsals happen in other spaces, I spend most of the rest of the day rehearsing a pivotal scene that involves Anthony Chavez, a 15-year-old community participant. He’s playing the young version of the main character we meet in flashbacks, and he’s struggling: especially with the language and the need to open himself physically and emotionally in a completely unknown way.

A seamless blending of professionals and amateurs is the hallmark of Cornerstone’s best work, but it’s never easy to achieve. By 10 p.m., after hours of pulling apart the text, syllable by syllable, relentless coaching in Spanish as well as English, we’ve all been through the ringer. But Anthony has made progress.

Sunday again

After another joyfully productive and exhausting day of rehearsal, I’m back on I-5, driving home for my day off. I’m thinking about my 4-year-old son, whom I’ve been missing ferociously. I’m thinking about the spirited children of Lost Hills and the people of all ages all over the country with whom I’ve been lucky enough to make plays during the last two decades. We have only 2 1/2 weeks until “Waking Up in Lost Hills” opens. It’s going to be a steep climb. But as the sun sets over the main artery of the Golden State, I can’t help but smile to think of what lies ahead.

*

‘Waking Up’

Where: Lost Hills School Auditorium, 21109 Highway 46, Lost Hills

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday and next Sunday.

Ends: Next Sunday

Price: Pay what you can (suggested donation: $10)

Contact: (213) 613-1700, Ext. 33

Bill Rauch is artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company.