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At first blush the subjects of these two books could not be more dissimilar: one treating with 1990's Africa and the other with 1930's midwestern America. And yet both writers seek the same beating heart of a theatre that could be called "grassroots", "community based" or "people's theatre". What ultimately separates them, however, is not time, place, or custom, but language; not the language of the different theater makers but only the language, one open and enthusiastic, the other stilted and dense, of these two authors.
Reading Robert Gard's book, reissued seven years after the author's death and thirty five year's after its original publication, is like opening a time capsule. Gard offers a snapshot of rural life in the 1920's and 30's; a look at a way of life that no longer exists.
Born in 1910 on the plains of Kansas, Gard pursued a full theatrical life that never came within a hundred miles of Broadway. In Kansas, upstate New York, the Canadian prairie province of Alberta, and, finally, Wisconsin, Gard collected stories, wrote plays, and encouraged other playwrights in the most unlikely places. His was a life-long quest for a people's theatre and an unbroken commitment to let as many folk as possible into the process of theatrical creation. "The true people's theater, as I see it, will be the creation for the community of a drama in which the whole community may participate..." (xviii).
Gard reminds us of a time when Professor George Pierce Baker taught playwriting at Harvard, influencing not only Eugene O'Neill but other students like Alexander Drummond, who went on to found the Cornell Dramatic Club, and Frederick Koch, who pioneered "Carolina Folk Plays" at the University of North Carolina. A student of Drummond's at Cornell, Gard began to wonder whether the people of America might be drawn together in tolerance and joy...in a theatre whose stages were everywhere and whose actors were the folks in the cities and on the farms.."(59).
Gard grounded his work away from the cities, out in "the sticks" because for him a feeling for place...seems basic to the creative process..."(141). For the first two months he tramped the back roads of upstate New York. Sometimes when he went out searching for authors and stories he found himself on a farm at evening milking the cows. He and Drummond sent out letters soliciting playwrights. One enthusiastic response appended this P.S.: "What shall I write about?" (43). But others had ideas and plays poured in. The transition from page to stage was even harder, and Gard, traveling to one small, stageless town hall to another, had to adapt to circumstances, demonstrating theatre in the round to those who imagined all stages were proscenium.
At first I found Grad's talk of place and country a bit old fashioned. But his descriptions of New York, from the Erie Canal to the St. Lawrence River, from tales of the Cardiff Giant to stories of rural ghosts, took me home in a most unexpected way. I was born in the Bronx, raised on long Island at Glen Cove and Great Neck, and went to college way up north at Canton. Madrid, Peru, and Massena are New York, not foreign, towns to me and Gard transported me back to a state and a state of mind where I have not lived for thirty-five years in a surprisingly emotional way.
Invited to teach in Madison, Gard adapted the "Wisconsin Idea" of reformers like "Fighting" Bob La Follette, to the theatre. Meant to democratize society, the Wisconsin Idea embraced adult education and university extension programs. Grad founded "The Wisconsin Idea Theatre". Combining the first theatre lab on the campus of the University of Wisconsin with annual three day state wide theatre conferences, Gard also reached out to found both the Wisconsin Rural Writers Association and The Rural Art Project, which brought traveling exhibitions into the smallest hamlet.
Prefiguring Augusto Boal and his "Forum Theatre", Gard improvised plays to tackle contemporary controversies, pressing audience members into actors on the spot. The result was hundreds of grassroots plays written and produced on stage and radio. One Wisconsin playwright, Zona Gale, waived royalties to her play "The Neighbors" for "any country theatre which will use part of the funds so raised...to plant at least one long-lived shade tree in the community...furthermore it is understood that the producers, cast, and the audience at such a performance shall all be neighbors to everyone, as long as they live" (15-16).
If that sounds a little hokey, so be it. If we've lost our love of place and our romance for small towns and rural folk, with a McDonald's on every corner and a Walmart in every town, we've traded the savory salt of the earth for a homogenized bowl of mush. Broadway's touring musicals are no match for indigenous drama developed by the local residents of our country's towns and hamlets. Today's renewed interest in grassroots theatre, seen in the work of Boal, Michael Rohd, Mady Schutzman, and companies like Cornerstone, City at Peace, The Albany Theatre Project, The Virginia Avenue Project and a hundred others, stands in direct descent from Robert Gard and reflects the timelessness of work he did seventy years ago.
L. Dale Byam investigates grassroots theatre in contemporary Africa in her 1999 book but where Grad's effort is open and welcoming, buoying the reader along on a rush of shared enthusiasm, Byam appears closed and distant, her book a slightly rewritten dissertation placed between hard covers; the academic jargon and dense detail will recommend this book to other researchers rather than the general reader.
This grassroots theatre is theatre for development: theatre specifically designed to teach the audience and improve their social and political life. Drawn from Fanon, Brecht, and Boal, theatre for development encourages the spectator through dialogue to analyze their social environment and then to act upon that analysis.
Too often these efforts have relied upon a transmission of ideas from the top down. If, using the distinction of Panamanian sociologist Raul Leis, they were theatre "for" and "by" the community, they were not the always theatre "of" the people.
In Africa, Byam, discovers many faces of "theatre for development" and adds to our knowledge by evaluating their efficacy. Efficacy is something too many theatre practitioners shy away from. What does it mean to ask "does theatre work?" Can we judge the effect of a piece of theatre upon an audience, not only in their immediate reaction but in the long term impact it has upon their lives?
In Africa, a continent of many nations exhibiting both similarities and differences, political independence has been followed too often by neo-colonialism in which an urban elite, at the behest often of non African powers, reimposes cultural conformity through a national theatre, relying upon European classics performed in lavish theatres in capital cities. Grassroots indigenous cultural and ritual forms are denigrated and ignored under a theatre designed for entertainment and the transmission of urban and European values. Here culture is bought and sold and the artist is a person apart form the mass who creates their art for money. Since, according to Byam, "Pre colonial African performance were always communal" (8) and exhibited a constant exchange between audience and performer, today's cultural rebellion against neocolonialism harks back to a traditional and grassroots past.
But can the past be replicated in the present? In the most valuable part of the book Byam examines specific companies engaged in theatre for development. In Botswana she finds that the troupe Laedza Batanani had "minimal success" (43) based on their top down organization and lack of traditional dramatic elements. In Zambia, she writes, the company Chikwakwa, a traveling university theatre, took its plays into the countryside but accomplished no cross fertilization of rural needs and values. As Byam notes: "The implications are that popular theatre has been more effective for the participants than it has been for those who observe" (84).
Byam contrasts these failures with with a detailed description and analysis of the Zimbabwe Association of Community Theatre which takes up two of the five chapters in this book. Byam offers a detailed chronology of the Z.A.C.T. work and analyzes their success at establishing a dialogue for community action. This is exactly the kind of exploration we need of the efficacy of theatrical work. However, Byam's description of an independent Zimbabwe, "replete with socialist ideals" (180), including this successful community theatre movement, stands in stark contrast to recent news reports of President Mugabe's increasingly unpopular and authoritarian rule there. Byam offers no analysis of ZACT's relations with a government sponsor that seems to be progressively losing touch with its grassroots.
