Founded as a nomadic, socially engaged theatre company in 1986, Cornerstone Theater Company has been based in Los Angeles since 1992, settling in the downtown Arts District in 1999. Managing director Megan Wanlass joined the company in 2014, leading a staff of nine full-time and two part-time alongside artistic director Michael John Garces. Five of this team are also members of the artistic ensemble, 16 theatre professionals with whom the company consults artistically, and which makes decisions on consensus basis. Cornerstone’s budget fluctuates between $1.2m and just over $2m, dependent on the level of programming, of which less than 10% is earned income, the rest received via individuals, government funding, foundations, corporations and special events.

Mission: making new plays with and about communities

A relatively new addition to the Cornerstone team, Megan Wanlass none the less has a strong sense of the company’s endurance and fortitude: “The fact that Cornerstone has been around for 30 years is a testament to who we are and what we still need to do in the world.” What it does is make theatre in direct relationship with communities, particularly communities that are marginalised, peripheral or vulnerable, with a view to “igniting a civic dialogue and civic action. We act upon the conviction that artistic expression is civic engagement and that access to a creative forum is essential to the wellness and health of every individual and community.”

Cycles of activity

Cornerstone’s work follows a four-stage cycle, each of which lasts upwards of two years:

1: Identifying a line of enquiry

Working begins with mapping out “an enquiry that the company is interested in exploring artistically”. Currently the company is coming to the end of the nine-play Hunger Cycle, “exploring all different kinds of hunger, from food equity to resource scarcity”. Previous cycles have focused on faith and justice, and following hunger the company will be looking at change, “whether that’s a self-determined change or an external change that’s being imposed from the outside”, so thinking about re-segregation, climate change and migration.

2: Gathering stories

The company identifies communities it would like to engage, and begins a conversation with them: “The engagement aspect of our work can be quite lengthy and detailed and very labour intense. We go in with no preconceived idea as to what the play will be; instead we try to figure out: who do we need to talk to in this community?” The company work with church groups, service organisations and community leaders to hold a number of “Story Circles”, attended by the playwright and engagement staff. From the stories gathered at those events, the playwright writes a first draft, which is taken back to the same circles of people for a reading. That is followed by “a facilitated conversation about authenticity. Is there something missing? Did you hear your story? Is there something else you’d like to add?” The play is rewritten based on those conversations.

3: Performance

Wanlass feels that the second stage, “for a lot of companies, might be the end and they would go off and make the play. But Cornerstone take the play back into the community, and invite community participants to be a part of it, whether it’s on stage with our professional actors or helping with running backstage.” The production period will last 10 weeks, with rehearsals mostly happening in the evenings and on weekends for accessibility, and the performance taking place “somewhere in the community, to really have it be a part of the community, and to keep the resources in the community”, although Wanlass emphasises that “we mount the play with fully professional, fully realised production values”. Tickets are pay what you can, again to raise accessibility.

4: The Bridge Show

As a step towards staying in touch with communities, Cornerstone ends each cycle with “the Bridge Show”, which is “about all of the communities in that particular enquiry, and is an opportunity for them to be be involved with and maybe even participate in a play again”.

Summer Residency Institute

In addition to these cycles of work, Cornerstone ran a 10-year programme dedicated to rural and urban Californian communities: “Each summer we went to one of those communities – for instance Eureka, or Fowler, or Lost Hill – and made a play, over the course of four weeks, with the community there.” The first decade of that programme culminated with a communal work, an adaptation of The Tempest, bringing together members from all 10 communities. Returning to places the company had visited previously allowed it to see some of the impact of its work: for instance, one place on first visit “didn’t have streetlamps, didn’t have sidewalks, they had a community centre but it wasn’t very safe. And then 10 years later they had paved roads, and street lights, and they created a community, partially based on the work that they’d done with us and inspired by that, in terms of what can we do to envision what our community can become. They created a community taskforce of people that had worked to create a better living situation for everybody there.”

The legacy challenge

Inevitably, keeping track of such positive impacts meets the challenge of “capacity and lack of resources. A group of artists always has a very ambitious sense of vision and desire and interest to make work – but then that meets with reality and the practical circumstances of being a non-profit arts organisation in the US.” This year it launched a new strategic plan including the “Impact Narrative: we’re having conversations with the ensemble and the engagement staff, the artists who are out in community, to find out stories of impact in four categories, which are lives, community, practice and perspective. So ways that our work has impacted somebody in their daily life, ways that it has impacted that community, ways that our practice has changed somebody, who has gone on to do something using that methodology, and then a perspective shift.”

What next?

Key to Cornerstone’s planning for the future is to think of existence as a non-profit organisation not as a “deficit situation but a more opportunity mindset, so you’re not just jumping for grant dollars because those grant dollars are there”. Within this mindset is an ambition to “create a shared space for community engaged practice, so bring in other arts organisations, maybe across discipline, that create work with the community engagement process”. The company is also asking questions about raising “earned revenue, through client-based work or commissioned work. How can we be better at the commissioned work being in alignment with what we’re interested in artistically? Is there a way that a partner, or a partner organisation, could help us monetarily pay for projects or commission projects that’s still within the values of the company?”

Looking backwards, the company hopes to establish an electronic archive of its work, perhaps in partnership with a university, which might “establish the 30 years of Cornerstone as a unique model and a unique company”. And looking forwards, it is interested in creating “more multi-discipline, cross-sector work”, shaking up its process by introducing artists and professionals from outside theatre, whether architects or circus performers, city planners or opera singers.