Appalshop in the 1980s.
“The struggle of the 21st century is to be more human human beings.”
—Grace Lee Boggs
I write from anxiety and urgency. Maybe you share those feelings. Maybe you share the assessment: civic brokenness, ideological entrenchment, rage in place of conversation. Maybe you share a growing despair about repair. I won’t even try to describe the election season we face (you have your own description, I’m sure), except to say I fear that—this past summer’s jolt of hope aside—the project of democracy, which has always been more aspirational than actual, might fall off the menu.
Do you share the quixotic belief that theatre itself can model ways of getting along, that it rests on the values of collaboration and creative (rather than destructive) conflict? Do you believe, as I do (used to? do?) that this live theatrical form can teach many of the tools necessary for conversation across difference? Does your sense of purpose hang precariously in the balance?
When it came out a year ago, I turned to the two-volume Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater (Volume 1: The Appalachian History Plays & Volume 2: The Intercultural Plays) with high expectation of a healing example. Art in a Democracy might be hopeful as a title, but these rich volumes collect truly democratic art, in which marginalized and stigmatized communities get to speak—and sing—loudly, and, by doing so, get to see and hear themselves reflected, not through the eyes of disinterested others, but as they appear to themselves. This is art that, as the book’s unattributed introduction puts it,
displays genuine affection for people of all kinds; that expresses the inherent genius of every community; that reflects our common destiny and shared struggles for freedom and dignity; that resists elitism and the exploitation it enables; that combines beauty with justice; and that offers room for all cultures to develop and cross-pollinate.
Those words help kick off Vol. 1, which includes five plays from the 49-year history of Roadside Theater, part of the Appalshop multi-arts center in Letcher County, Kentucky, near where that state meets Virginia and West Virginia. In that volume the marginalized/stigmatized community that speaks is the one that was, at the time of Roadside’s founding in 1975, known to most of the country as “hillbillies,” as caricatured Beverly Hills Clampetts and all the “hick” bumpkins on Green Acres and Hee-Haw, with their corn-cob pipes, manure-stained overalls, and talking pigs, the butt of jokes in a world “civilized” by Hollywood. This collection offers an antidote to those images. It holds out alternative ways of seeing and being with others, and of thinking about class, something our nation doesn’t like thinking about, even as it projects its loathing on underclass grotesques like Granny and Jed.
These books anthologize plays, but they also archive history, provide economic analysis, and dissect funding practices and cultural elitism. They gather inspiring essays by outside contributors (mostly longtime colleagues) to precede each playscript. We can’t hear the music but can tell it is central to the work. (Company veteran Ron Short, who acts, sings, and plays music in most of the work, has also collaborated on much of the playwriting and composition. He’s a secret weapon in the ensemble’s art arsenal.)
Taken together, the essays and plays comprise a biography of Roadside Theater and its epic journey. There are many voices here, but mostly one story. You can feel the mastery of the storytellers who edited the books, and you can feel the pull toward self-mythologizing (which can be both earned and a bit extra at the same time). There’s one painful, problematic chunk left out of the tale, however, which I’ll return to. As with many important legacies, this one includes significant accomplishment and harm.
The Roadside plays in Vol. 1 are history plays, told in the ways of the people they chronicle: through story and song, tall tales and ballads of love and murder. These historical music-dramas span almost two centuries, from the harsh migration of the Scots-Irish in the mountains, including encounters with the Cherokee, who’d fled to those same mountains to escape the Trail of Tears death marches, through the coal-mining industrialization of the area that overtook and ultimately decimated much of the land and population, until more recent de-industrialization once again separated the people from their families, homelands, and livelihoods.
I was particularly excited to read the seminal Red Fox/Second Hangin’, which attempts to parse the complicated legend of Doc Taylor, a.k.a. Red Fox, whose hanging might or might not have happened, might or might not have been revenge-based, and yet was almost certainly convenient for the industrial interests. Having identified the timber, mineral, and especially coal resources in the area, investors started buying land off the locals, who were then put to mining work at the peril of their own lives. Doc Taylor prophesied the devastating endgame of this business and stood against it; surely he was better off dead. After premiering in Whitesburg, Kentucky, in 1976, Red Fox had two triumphant runs Off-Broadway in subsequent years, establishing Roadside’s national reputation, before touring for another 10 years. Beverly Hillbillies be damned.
Vol. 2, which offers even greater cross-cultural reach, contains selected “intercultural plays” from a 30-year collaboration between Roadside and Pregones Theater in the South Bronx—two parts of the country that had been, according to the unattributed introductory essay, “playing tag…at the bottom of the federal government’s annual poverty reports”—and an even longer alliance with Junebug Productions in New Orleans, successor to the seminal Free Southern Theater. Also here is the text of A Thousand Kites (music by Sipp Culture’s Carlton Turner and his brother Maurice), created together withprisoners, corrections officers, their families, and others living around super-maximum-security prisons—state-private partnerships built on the strip-mined ruins of the land and sold as engines of economic development.
This rich archive includes the ground-breaking Junebug/Jack from 1990, with its overlapping satchel full of stories from Junebug Jabbo Jones (a trickster character created by Black Civil Rights activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee/SNCC, and embodied by FST co-founder and Junebug leading light John O’Neal) and Appalachian “Jack” tales. As cross-stitched together by the African American Junebug company and the mountain whites of Roadside— “two groups of hard-headed people” as the play calls them—their experiences of life in this country overlap and diverge. What they always have in common is the use of story and song to make sense—and art—of those experiences. The play spells out its intent: “If we don’t listen to the stories of others, how we gonna know who they are?”
The most recent play, Betsy! (2015), is a gorgeous collaboration with Pregones about a Puerto Rican woman singer in New York, who discovers her own hidden Scots-Irish roots and the stories within stories of the mother, grandmother, all the way back to the great-great-great grandmother, that led to her birth. Betsy moves these co-creations firmly from what anthropologist/folklorist Maribel Alvarez calls, in her introductory essay, “generic multiculturality to rickety interculturality. Multiculturalism acknowledges diversity at a distance; interculturalism plunges into intimacy.” The intimacy of Betsy’s story—a heritage she never imagined—exposes, according to Alvarez, the way “American pluralism represents a kind of reprehensible family secret.”
Promise of a Love Song, the most sweeping collaboration here, investigates love through three separate love stories, devised together by Roadside, Junebug, and Pregones as part of the Exchange Project. The weave of this multivocal work is most evident in the music itself, incorporating jazz, rhythm and blues, bolero, salsa, jig, and lullaby. Pregones company member and cultural worker Arnaldo J. Lopez sets the musical stage in his introductory essay:
First we hear an Irish hand drum, the musician’s silhouette gradually revealed under a single spotlight. A Creole tambourine and a Latin conga follow in sequence….The rhythmic eruption of a drum set then rolls into crescendo. Before long, keyboards, horns, bass, and guitars join in, and the lights go up on a six-piece band in full swing, reveling in the mix of African American, Puerto Rican, and Appalachian themes.
Lopez goes on to quote musical director Ricardo Pons, who composed the music with Donald Harrison Jr., Desmar Guevara, and Ron Short, of the three companies. “It is a singular moment of fusion…and a subtle contest of musical styles.” The play ends with a full-cast song that offers the empathetic question and hope of the whole project: “If you were me/And I was you…”
High expectations, sure, but Roadside has been doing the work on the ground since 1975. And unlike, say, self-anointed Appalachian explainer J.D. Vance, they’ve worked to tie cultural heritage and economic/political analysis to progressive social change. Roadside has been part of a generational avant-garde, too often unseen by its professional colleagues, a cohort that includes Junebug and Pregones, as well as Knoxville’s Carpetbag Theatre, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Urban Bush Women, and the late greats Robbie McCauley and Company, El Teatro de la Esperanza, and A Traveling Jewish Theatre—all core companies in the important, 25-year life of the American Festival Project. (Other like-minded ensembles include Bloomsburg, Cornerstone, Touchstone, Jessica Hagedorn and Company, the late lamented Road, Dell’Arte, to first-name-check some.) Together these companies forged a place-based, community-centered, grassroots, activist American theatre. They don’t come after to tell the tale; they’ve been telling the tale against all odds with those three qualities that have become our contemporary muses: resistance, persistence, and care.
In the way of great storytellers, these folks know how to shape everyday tales into mythic ones. As the books’ editors wrap the company’s story around these plays, Roadside itself becomes a kind of mythic hero: theatre for the people, fighting the economic tides, defying capitalism and elitism at every turn, wily and strategic as hell, making work for all the right, socially just reasons.
I write from anxiety and urgency, but not only of the electoral kind. Despite my high expectations and deep admiration for Roadside and for the books themselves, I postponed reviewing them for a year and, during that time, with colleagues at the Network of Ensemble Theaters, dove into the thorny question of how to archive and honor the stories of legacy theatres in light of accusations of harm regularly leveled against them. Roadside has been, for me, at the heart of this question, and I still haven’t figured it out. This is a first attempt, and I hope you’ll read it in that spirit.
In August 2021 Amy Brooks, who had been a program manager and dramaturg at Appalshop/Roadside for about three years, contracting with the company for another 10 months after that, became one of its whistleblowers. In “Who Will Hold Appalshop Accountable?,” a post on Medium, Brooks described a hostile work environment and “employee abuse” at Appalshop. She stood with another former employee who had previously circulated allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against the company’s long-term artistic director, Dudley Cocke. (I’ve known Dudley collegially since 1986, and it was at his request that I agreed to write about the books. My understanding is that the text of these allegations against him was never made public.)
I won’t sum up Brooks’s allegations here. They are mixed with her own past admiration for the company and acknowledgment of the benefits that accrued to her while working there, as well as admission of the ways she’d compromised with a culture that openly denigrated women and, in some cases, even its own cultural partners. I urge you to read them, as well as the numerous “community responses” posted the following month, sharing similar perceptions and sometimes experiences covering many years, and calling for accountability at Appalshop and Roadside. Her writing is cogent and comprehensive, nuanced in ways I fear I would make reductive in further summary.
Initially, I felt I could incorporate Amy Brooks’s allegations into a review. But when she posted a follow-up with the book’s release, “Art in a Patriarchy,” I was out of my depth. She called attention to several marked absences. I discovered that Dudley no longer worked at Roadside, having either resigned or been quietly let go. New Village Press, meanwhile, published the books without crediting Dudley for the series or any of his writing therein. (He still appears in play production credits, the contributors page, and when cited by the essayists.) His voice—and his version of Roadside’s history, which he’s spoken of and written about consistently for years—is everywhere, including the unattributed introduction quoted above. Though invisible, he is obviously the books’ narrator and prime mover.
For her part, Brooks has described the books as a vanity project of Dudley’s and credited series editor Ben Fink, whom she sees as complicit in covering up the past. Additionally, Roadside and Appalshop have distanced themselves from their own archiving project so completely that I can’t find a single mention of the book—or the company’s long-time leaders—on either’s website. Even in the section marked “History.”
Appalshop and Roadside are not alone in their silence. So many American nonprofit theatres are protecting themselves to death, and the silence is deafening. What does accountability look like in our wider theatre community? What is reckoning? Reconciliation? How would restorative justice be applied within our own profession? In July 2021, the newly hired leaders of Appalshop circulated a list of steps it intended to take. Brooks published that list, though I haven’t found it—or found evidence of its implementation, other than that of a leadership transition—in the organization’s public statements.
- Restructure Roadside Theater to better embody Roadside’s values of equitable ensemble collaboration.
- Announce the complete transition of leadership that has taken place both within Roadside Theater and Roadside’s Performing Our Future coalition.
- Issue a statement of accountability and transparency to national partners and funders regarding the leadership transition at Roadside Theater.
- Create a permanent Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Subcommittee of the Appalshop Board with unique authority to receive and respond to staff concerns regarding equity-related issues/incidents.
- Collaborate with the Performing Our Future coalition delegations to tell a complete version of the coalition’s origin story, which is as of yet untold.
- Contract with regional educators who possess expertise in gender-based power dynamics, so we might build a more healthy institutional culture.
- Contract with regional partners to facilitate restorative justice dialogues internally at Appalshop.
- Train Roadside Theater leadership in the principles and practices of Intimacy Choreography, for all future Roadside Theater productions.
- Host convenings with our regional theatre partners to identify how we, as Roadside Theater, might better build trust and positive culture in our region.
Even as I write this, I bitterly acknowledge the way new generations of leaders are forced to clean up the environmental messes left them by their forebears, the sins of the fathers and secret histories of so many of our “legacy” organizations. Do institutional theatres and ensemble theatres have different forms of insularity and self-protection reflective of their different organizational structures? Can we, as a profession, ever start fresh? This is a conversation for our whole field, but it can’t happen behind closed doors. It’s a conversation across generations, demanding space both for celebrating history and for accountability for that history. It’s all legacy.
I’m not an investigative journalist; I don’t know the full picture and don’t claim to be presenting it here. I won’t dismiss these books or this important theatrical history. And I believe Amy Brooks and the many others who signed on to her statement. Her initial account is so moving, so balanced and sure-footed, that it belongs beside the other excellent personal essays in this collection. Might that be the true way to assess legacy: to publish it all together, to let the allegations of harm stand side by side with the celebration of positive impact?
In the past 70 years, our nation’s theatre has taken root where there was none. A whole profession has appeared, along with the professional apparatus to sustain it: educational programs, union contracts, buildings, service organizations, and organizational services. Generations of artists have emerged and continue to do so, redefining, as they go, what is meant by good, by right, by success. Certainly we are at a moment of generational collision, which includes naming names and harm done. What might have been Boomer-acceptable to folks my age—sexual relations as a collaborative strategy, or anger let loose on others as free artistic expression—now reads as hurtful, which it always was, even abusive. As Maggie Nelson theorizes in the profound On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, what we’re now seeing is a generational shift away from the old notion of the avant-garde individual disruptor-genius toward a more personalized aesthetics devoted to community healing, self-reflection, and repair, while demanding that those values be practiced at home, within the work—and the workplace.
Of course, the rural and community-based movements, like so many other radical traditions (Nelson cites the Black Arts and Chicano Art movements), have also centered groupness and community care over solitary genius (even as many also promoted “great men” of their own). But in art as in society, leadership and power too often trump (pun intended) accountability, however bad, harmful, toxic, destructive, or rapacious the behavior, allowing it to grind on, regardless who gets hurt.
How can we hold our love and appreciation for work made by those “whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms”? I’m quoting critic-essayist Claire Dederer, from her provocative Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, in which she grapples with her love of creations by many artists whose monstrous behavior has become inescapable, chiefly: Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. Her list goes on: Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Michael Jackson, Picasso, Hemingway, and many others, including women. “The person does the crime and it’s the work that gets stained,” she writes. I want to be clear: By quoting Dederer’s book, I’m not inadvertently or purposefully drawing a parallel to the Roadside and Appalshop crew. Monster is her word, and those are her subjects.
By contrast, what’s particularly distressing about a situation like Roadside’s, as described by Amy Brooks and those who signed on to her call for reflection and change, is that in community-based art, individual and organizational behaviors are part of “the work on its own terms.” The duty of care and disruption of power and hierarchy is built into the mission. Calls for accountability and restorative justice are thus calls for the theatre and its parent company to live by their professed values. Roadside aims “to affirm the value of each person’s unique story and every community’s distinctive material, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional life; and to reveal the incomparable beauty and power of coming together in communion with neighbors near and far.” A powerful vision—and a hard one to live by.
The concert party launch of Art in a Democracy at Pregones in March 2023 was dedicated to the late John O’Neal, founder of both Free Southern Theater in Mississippi as a cultural arm of the Civil Rights Movement and of Junebug, as an extension of that work. O’Neal’s ethics and methods, specifically his pioneering story circles, permeate these volumes. In a tribute to him, introducing Junebug/Jack, former Expansion Arts director at the National Endowment A.B. Spellman quotes O’Neal’s view of “art as part of the process of the individual in the context of the community and the community coming to consciousness of itself.”
This, it seems to me, is the heart of the work ahead: theatre not merely as a mirror to the social, political, and economic forces at play in the world beyond it—though it is always that—but also as a community of its own, “coming into consciousness of itself.” Through that emerging consciousness, we might find ways to celebrate our origins and legacies, like those of the important Roadside Theater, even as we seek—and require—repair.
Todd London, a longtime contributor to this magazine, is author of three novels and numerous books on the American theatre. He was the first recipient of TCG’s Visionary Leadership Award.
