Art in a Democracy: Selected Plays of Roadside Theater is the story of a rural Appalachian theater company’s 45-year search for a form of artistic expression that advances the project of American democracy.
This 2-volume work includes 9 award-winning original play scripts; a critical recounting of the theater’s history from 1975 through 2020, and 10 essays by authors from different disciplines and generations exploring the plays’ social, economic, and political circumstances.
Released March 14 2023
Published by New Village Press
The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the Vietnam War.
The plays in Volume 2 come from Roadside’s intercultural and issue-specific theater work, including long-term collaborations with the African American Junebug Productions in New Orleans and the Puerto Rican Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, as well as with residents on both sides of the walls of our region’s recently-built prisons.
Who is Roadside Theater? From its founding in 1975 until its founders’ retirement in 2020, Roadside Theater was a professional ensemble located in the heart of the Appalachian Mountain coalfields of eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. Through a commitment to artistic excellence, the company was dedicated to:
Creating a body of Appalachian drama where none existed before
Perpetuating theater as a popular art form
Co-creating plays with racially diverse professional ensemble theaters that address the pressing issues of the times
And to advancing new talent for the professional theater by helping establish new theaters and teaching in universities.
Roadside discovered that when it creates imaginative drama that is faithful to its specific Appalachian experience and collaborates with other national ensembles faithful to their cultural roots, it is able to speak to a wide cross-section of people in many places.
Between 1975-2020, the company created and co-created more than 100 plays and toured to 48 states and seven foreign countries.
Art in a Democracy shows how a small group of community-trained musicians, storytellers, and writers drew on local traditions and source material to develop Appalachia’s first professionally produced body of original plays; and how these intensely local works of art found appeal in more than 2000 communities across the United States.
And more broadly, it demonstrates how communities across race, class, religion, and rural-urban lines learned to turn away from fear and isolation, tell their own stories, and listen to the stories of their neighbors, both next door and far away.
Praise for Roadside Theater
“Red Fox/Second Hangin’ is as stirring to the audience for its historical detective work as for the vanishing art of frontier yarnspinning.” —Ben A. Franklin Special for The New York Times
"At first I didn't want to go, but I liked it a lot better than watching TV."—Bennett Morgan, Jr., Van, KY
"The variety of techniques, including actor establishing intimacy with viewer through prolonged eye contact or a touch on the sleeve of a rapt front-row child, combined into a learning experience that history books cannot approach." —Atlanta Journal
"Roadside is dramaturgy with a difference: a hybrid form of play-acting as organic to this hardbitten coal country as the Cumberland walnut."—Smithsonian Magazine
"The company will continue its barnstorming way of life, telling oft-told tales to mountain audiences, dipping into the rich reservoir of folk memory, and occasionally bringing big-city provincials a breath of authentic Americana."—The Christian Science Monitor
"Roadside Theater may be geographically from a remote region of America, but spiritually this company exposes the territory of the human heart."—Los Angeles Herald Examiner
"What emerges in Roadside Theater's work is a portrait of Americans in a locale, Appalachia, that's more rich and immediate than you're likely to read in any social history. The theatrical and artistic reverberations are unceasing."—National Public Radio, Morning Edition
"Roadside Theater was founded on such true stories and an awareness of what constitutes cultural roots, background, a whole heritage." —London Financial Times
"Roadside's theater works on the listeners in a manner that nothing else quite matches. Most stories, after all, originated this way, by straight-out word of mouth. Maybe this is why there is some curious sense of community created in their live performance." —News and Courier, Charleston, SC
"Roadside Theater's drama has a social message that never becomes propagandistic. All of the performers have a remarkable naturalness in their responses to each other and to the audience. . . . The humanity of the show is achieved by the complete credibility of the performers and their actions."—Southern Magazine
"Roadside depicts an image of America unlike the cliches." – Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden
"Your brand of theater performs a terrific service in bringing us all a little closer together and making us look at our own heritage with more pride."—Kaye Foremaster, Caliente, NV
"I wanted to let you know how enjoyable and important your recently sponsored public performance was for all involved . . . the message of preservation and sustaining the Zuni language as well as the cultural traditions which have sustained our people throughout the centuries was very important."—Hayes A. Lewis, Assistant to the Zuni Tribal Council, Zuni, NM