
          Roadside Theater
          By Hatfield, SharonSharon Hatfield
          Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 14-18
          
          The small room at the Brumley Gap Coon Hunter's Club in Poor
Valley, Virginia was so cold that the slide projector had to warm up
before the show could begin. But the coal stove and the rapidly
growing crowd soon filled the room with warmth. By the time the first
lines of Red Fox/Second Hangin' were spoken, the chill
had long been forgotten.
          Framed against the projected photographs of nineteenth-century
Appalachia, the actors began spinning a tale of hardship and violence
in the early coalfields. They told of Bad Henry Adams, a man who shot
and killed his neighbor without rising from the supper table. (The
quarrel, they said, was over a dog.)
          "There was an old man sitting right up front, and he looked bored
as hell," recalls actor Don Baker. "I was determined to get some kind
of response out of him, so I said, 'You're Bad Henry Adams, pretend
you're eating.' I looked real menacing at him and pointed my fingers
like a gun. When I did that, he just put his hand in his pocket and
whipped out a knife. I jumped back and said, 'Okay, you don't have to
if you don't want to.' After the show I found out he was stone cold
deaf."
          Roadside is a folk theater that draws on the heritage of the
Cumberland Mountains in southern Appalachia. It takes its art to
people who may never have been inside a theater. On that particular
night at the Coon Hunter's Club, Roadside's benefit performance helped
pay lawyers who were representing Brumley Gap citizens in their fight
to block a proposed pump-storage electric project in their
community. The citizens eventually prevailed and were able to prevent
their bottomland farms from being flooded to make way for the
project.
          "Grassroots art means trying to have people not only be moved
aesthetically by the quality of the art presented, but to encourage
people to get up and work from their own resources," says Dudley
Cocke, director of Roadside Theater. "Art should encourage people to
do something with their lives and communities. That transformation is
an important factor in art."
          This sense of possibility that Roadside imparts to its audiences
has carried the small theater company far from its home base in the
coalfields of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia to Off-Broadway,
Lincoln Center, the 

Midwest, California and rural Nevada, and to a
host of settings in the South. They have often found urban populations
as receptive to their improvisational storytelling as people who have
grown up in the rural, oral tradition.
          A region abundant in folkways and myth as well as in coal and
timber, Appalachia carries an image of backwardness and ignorance due
to what outsiders have written and said about it. In an area where
over half the land in many counties is still owned by corporations
based elsewhere (some as far away as London), exploitation of natural
resources and native people has been an all too common occurrence
since the late 1800s. Roadside's original full-length piece,
Red Fox/Second Hangin', for example, tells the story of
the collision of ways of life that led to a legal lynching in Wise,
Virginia, during the country's first coal boom in the 1890s.
          When Roadside founder Don Baker returned to his native Wise County
from a job as arts counselor in Washington, DC, in 1971, he did not
encounter the pristine environment often sentimentalized in novels
about Appalachia. Cars, electricity, radio and TV had been present for
decades, but a more recent technology--strip mining--was on the verge
of an unprecedented and unencumbered heydey. Another coal boom was
underway with it would come another alteration of both the social and
actual landscape.
          Roadside Theater's director, Cocke, believes that despoilation of
the land goes hand in hand with the uprooting of indigenous cultures
in southern Appalachia. "It's a whole process of impersonalization."
Perhaps it was this sense of loss that led Don Baker and his fellow
actors to seek out the richness of the past through the oral tradition
instead of more contemporary, conventional forms. "We tried to figure
out what kind of theater made sense here," Baker explains. "We had
neither the time nor the inclination for costumes, or elaborate
staging but we all had storytelling in common."
          The framework for Roadside Theater's existence was already ID place
when Baker returned to the coalfields. Appalshop (The Appalachian Film
Workshop) was a collective set up in Whitesburg, Kentucky, by the
Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969 to train mountain people for
media careers. Paradoxically, there were almost no media jobs
available in the region. After OEO funds dried up in 1972, Appalshop
secured grants from private foundations and the National Endowment for
the Arts. Today, Appalshop's media center in Whitesburg is home to a
record company and recording studio, film and video artists,
photographers, the theater company, a central administrative corps and
a soon-to-be-completed community radio station.
          Roadside was formed in 1974 from the Appalachia Actors' Workshop,
which had performed traditional plays like Peter Pan
and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Instead of using
established scripts, Roadside chose to draw its resources directly
from the collective memories of the community. The young theater
company acknowledged that conventional theater seldom reaches the
hollows, farm communities and mining camps that make up so much of
central Appalachia; and when it does, it makes little
impression. Roadside chose to build upon the strong theatrical
heritage of the mountains--the church services, music and
storytelling.
          What emerged was a style of storytelling that did not depend on
props, costumes or staging effects. The human voice, magnified by two
or three storytellers speaking simultaneously, could reach an audience
of five-hundred with the same power as when it entertained a few
neighbors on a summer evening. "We began by telling traditional tales
that we had all grown up hearing," explains Baker. "We told these
tales together, batting lines back and forth, saying some phrases in
unison, feeding off each other's rhythms."
          Roadside's first show was a collection of stories called
Mountain Tales. The stories combines familiar
Appalachian settings and music with archetypes found in folk
literature throughout the world: Mutsmeg and her two wicked sisters
(similar to Snow White and her wicked stepkin); Wicked John and the
Devil (a humorous Faustian tale) and the Jack or quest tales -- all
contain symbols identifiable to many people.
          "We were in Zuni three days," recalls actor and writer Ron Short
about a recent Roadside visit to the Zuni pueblo in New
Mexico. "There, our stories became real. Many of them deal with
hunting, tending sheep, spirits, giants. The Indian kids understood
every bit of that. We told the story of the swamp snake, and after the
show they calmly showed us a picture of theirs. On the other hand,
kids in Arlington, Virginia, for example, would say, 'That's
impossible, that snake died millions of years ago."
          "Kids in places like Arlington have been deprived of the chance to
believe in myth," agrees Cocke. "That's why they turn to figures like
ET. People like myth and need it. Our mountain tales, like those of
the Native Americans, are mythological."
          Roadside's second project was to script an original fulllength
production in the mobile, popular form they had developed with
Mountain Tales. The result, Red Fox/Second
Hangin', is a departure from the whimsy of 
Mountain
Tales to what might be called revisionist history at its
best. Don Baker had long heard tales of M.B. "Doc" Taylor, a preacher
and former US marshal! who was the second of seven men hanged in Wise
County before 1900. Red Fox, as Taylor was called, was revered by many
mountain people but was convicted of murdering an entire family. Baker
decided that this was a paradox worth exploring.
          In researching the Red Fox story, Baker enlisted the help of Dudley
Cocke, a friend from his study days at Washington and Lee
University. "We began by reading history books," says Baker. "It
wasn't until we began interviewing older people who had known Doc
Taylor or whose families passed along stories about him, that our
research began to differ markedly from the written version. We sensed
that in these interviews we were getting closer to the truth."
          Baker and Cocke collected old newspaper clippings, as well as
letters and diaries of the period. They spoke with one elderly man who
actually witnessed the hanging. The breakthrough came in the attic of
the Wise County Courthouse when they found the original transcript of
the Red Fox trial. The transcript suggested that the preacher had been
framed by powerful men in the burgeoning coal industry.
          Using a conversational tone, actors Gary Slemp, Frankie Taylor and
Don Baker merge sixty different characters into a gripping detective
story. A series of slides made from original photos of Doc Taylor's
life and times gives the story a firm setting, and a ten-minute file
segment re-enacts a crucial event.
          Like Red Fox/Second Hangin', the musical
Brother Jack also draws from folk memory and old
documents. While the title story and several of the songs were written
by actor Ron Short, other tales were adapted by Baker from material
collected within fifty miles of Roadside's home by the Federal
Writer's Project in the 1930s. In Brother Jack,
storytellers Angelyn DeBord, Tom Bledsoe and Short spin yarns alone
and in unison, trade-off lines and sing to banjo and fiddle
accompaniment. The mood changes from that of "acting a fool" in a
wrestling story to one of quiet drama in the tales of murder and coal
mining disasters. A sense of the despair and fatalism that sometimes
pervades mountain life is offset by the protagonist Jack (the
archetypal Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk), who is
always "wishing for something better."
          "The whole concept behind Brother Jack is how we in
the mountains got here," says Baker. "We talk about death, about men
and women, about the Civil War--and we've tried to deal with them in a
lot of different ways." The play also explores the perpetual question
of human purpose. "We use religion, prayer, mystical stuff, even jokes
to try to understand it, so we have a good time. But right in the
middle of the good times, something taps us on the shoulder and says,
'Hey, you can't forget'."
          Roadside's fourth major production, South of the
Mountain, premiered in October 1982 at the Regional
Organization of Theatres South (ROOTS) festival in Atlanta and enjoyed
a three-week run at the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City in
September 1983. In this musical, author Ron Short depicts his boyhood
world in Dickenson County, Virginia, through original songs and the
reflections of his family.
          A common thread which runs through Roadside's productions is a
search for cultural identity. In the words of Short, the 1980s are "a
time of conflict" for many ethnic groups in this country. "Like here
in Appalachia, people are asking, 'Should we mainstream? Should we
change the way we talk or think?'"
          In South of the Mountain, Short deals with these
questions directly as he explores the choices that individuals must
make when their society changes from an agriculturally-based one to an
industrial, coal-mining community. One New York drama critic
complained that questions like these are no longer valid in today's
modern world. In contrast, Short recalls being overwhelmed after the
performances by people from the audiences who could relate. "The
second generation Italian people were saying to me, 'This is the story
of my life'," Short says. "the hillbilly thing was less important."
          In April, Roadside toured several predominantly Navajo communities
in southern Utah on a Western States Art Foundation tour sponsored by
the Utah Rural Arts Consortium. In the West, Cocke and Short were
amazed by parallels between the Native American cultures and their own
rural Southern one. In the Indian villages the actors found a strong
affinity for the land, an oral history tradition, and conflicts
between old and new.
          In the Native American communities, says Cocke, "There's a wide
deep gulf between the traditional way and the modern way. Two
seemingly irreconcilable ways of 

being. The two tracks go parallel but
it's a no-man's land in between. I was sitting in a house waiting for
an ancient religious dance to begin, and ever so often out the door
I'd hear bells and see a dancer or two running by to join his
group. Directly the drumming started, and in the corner I noticed that
Love Boat was on TV. The program never looked so
strange."
          The tour was perhaps a learning experience for both visitors and
hosts. Some of the Roadside cast members, with their long beards, were
objects of curiosity to be sure. Actor Tom Bledsoe, who sports a red
beard and long blond hair, was the object of some good-natured teasing
from Indian children who thought he looked like a band member of ZZ
Top. But beyond that, the Roadside cast may have been quite unlike
most Anglo people the Native Americans had seen, an example of a
possible bridge between the modern and the traditional. "After all,"
notes Cocke, "we were white people doing something between the two
extremes."
          In talking with some of the teachers at Montezuma Creek, Short
learned a truth about his own art. "They were wondering about the
possibility of developing their own kind of Appalshop. The great
conflict was how do they cross over from that religious all-sense and
tell their story so it still has meaning. I had to ask this question
of myself and my work too."
          During the past year Roadside has enjoyed the artistic fellowship
of other regional theater companies who are attempting to maintain a
sense of cultural identity. Roadside was a part of Tell Me a
Story, Sing Me a Song, a touring performance festival which
included the Free Southern Theater from New Orleans, A Traveling
Jewish Theater from San Francisco and El Theatro Campesino from San
Juan Bautista, California. Through their use of indigenous
storytelling and music, and by re-examining their people's history,
the four companies have produced some of the past decade's most
exciting original American theater.
          In the spring of 1983, the four groups performed simultaneously in
the San Franciso Bay area. Last December, the joint tour included a
festival at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama,
produced by Josephine Ayers, a pest producer of the Alabama
Shakespeare Festival. The show also traveled to Roadside's home base
in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the groups will probably collaborate on
future tours.
          In bringing their art to a large, non-theater-going audience,
Roadside has spent nearly ten years on the road. The company maintains
a schedule of two hundred performances and workshops annually, as well
as a summer tent tour of coal camps and back hollows. Many of these
are one-day stands.
          For most of its existence, Roadside has had no resident theater,
instead rehearsing in church halls, living rooms or even
outdoors. According to Cocke, the peripatetic lifestyle has given
Roadside an uncanny ability to size up an audience and set the tone
accordingly. "You can imagine that some of the groups we run into have
no clue who we are," he says. "But the idea has always been to go with
the space we find ourselves in and to meet the audience more than
halfway."
          Coupled with the rigors of the traveling life is the need
for Even with the opening of the 160-seat Appalshop theater
in 1982, the theater-going audience in the Whitesburg area is so small
that the company could never hope to survive on ticket sales
alone. Government grants play a large part in keeping Roadside
afloat.
          In Lee County, Virginia, a man auctioned off a cow and used the
proceeds to help pay for the performance. Roadside was able to match
the cow's sale price with a state arts grant.
          "Theater is losing ground nationally," observes Roadside's
director, "and some smaller theaters are falling by the way. We just
keep trying to hold on. We're like a company with just one car (in
this case a blue Ford van), while other larger companies have a fleet
of limos. They may lose their limos because they can't pay for them,
but we keep plugging along with our one car."
          Finances have played a large part in Roadside's decision to tour
beyond Appalachia. The actors reject the notion that one must leave
the mountains "to be somebody" but they know the value of media
exposure and interaction with other professionals. "Touring outside
the region wasn't necessarily what we wanted to do at first," explains
Cocke, "but we made the decision to do so in 1976 or 1977. We had to
get some stamp of approval before we could convince the national
funding agencies--and ironically, the even less flexible state
agencies--that we did qualify. We'd still like to find a way to travel
less."
          Roadside's five full-time and eight part-time employees form a
community that stretches over the three counties and two states in
which they live. Touring is sometimes a family affair. Eight-month-old
Jubel Slone has been traveling with actress-mother Angelyn De Bord
since he was eight weeks old. A full-time staff at Roadside's
Whitesburg office handles bookings, mailings and fundraising. For the
most part, the company is traditionally taught. Roadside tries to keep
a reservoir of trained talent that can be called upon for various
productions. Writers Short and Baker are both currently working on new
plays.
          A criticism of Roadside's work voiced by some political activists
is the charge that the shows aren't political enought.
          "There are a lot of ways to get at politics," responds Cocke. "Some
would say a Zuni dance isn't political. Much of Roadside's work comes
from the perspective of a whole culture, way of life."
          Adds Short, "Our work takes something as fragile as cultural
identity and places it in a public forum." Short says his work has
been termed apolitical because it does not openly advocate social
change. "I feel that a political statement, like life, is a whole lot
broader than that," he says: "It's an exploration of human values that
I'm most interested in. In watching a play which explores these
values, people are free to get their own ideas."
          One way in which the theater company is exerting considerable
influence is through their work in the nation's school
systems. "Taking it to the schools is just like taking it to the
streets," observes Jack Wright, an early Roadside member.
          The actors are committed to the idea that a good performance
doesn't end with the applause. Cocke notes: "One criticism of arts
programs in general is that they don't have a conception of the more
basic values they're trying to promote beyond the immediate
performance. I'm interested 

in things that go beyond immediate
aesthetic value. We hope the people who see our shows will gain a
sense of possibility about their own lives and communities."
          In many of the school tours, the ability of the actors to ignite
this sense of worth in one's own heritage is evident. A teacher from
Chincoteague, an island off the coast of Virginia that was isolated
from the mainland until 1930, wrote to say that she hoped Roadside
could return to "help the students appreciate and develop the
marvelous supply of tales and remembrances in their own area. Our area
is very rich in this valuable resources, but there have been only
isolated efforts to explore and appreciate what we have. It would be a
wonderful experience for our entire community to have someone direct
efforts to explore our own folk history."
          According to Cocke, Roadside would like to develop the financial
resources to be able to embark on these community treasure hunts for
two or three weeks at a time in different localities. He notes that
funding sources generally lean more toward the
twenty-shows-in-twenty-four days tour than to supporting a long term
residency in one community.
          A climate of uncertain financial support places pressure on the
company to come up with consistently good productions. While this may
explain Roadside's good track record, Cocke says it "doesn't encourage
chance taking with new writing. We know some things we'd like to try,
like a summer works-in-progress festival to encourage local people to
write for us, but we just are not in a financial position to do
so."
          One indication of an outreach toward new writers is a play opening
in May at the Appalshop theater in Whitesburg. Drama students at
Whitesburg High School will present In Ya Blood, which
is based on a film by the same name which was produced by Appalshop in
1973. Under the direction of Roadside's Jeff Hawkins, the students
wrote an original script about the choices young people must make in
deciding whether to leave the mountains or stay and face the limited
opportunities for employment.
          After a decade of writing and production, another challenge facing
Roadside is one which confronts many independent artists across the
country: how does one gain access to the media? While the company has
succeeded in keeping a busy touring schedule, it has yet to reach a
wide radio and TV audience. Both Red Fox and
Brother Jack have been recorded as radio serials, but
both have yet to find a buyer. Similarly, a video presentation of Red
Fox was completed in 1983, but is still awaiting nationwide
distribution.
          "What we're facing with TV--I mean all of Appalshop's work--is that
the PBS system is not responding to independent artists," says
Roadside's director. "It's very difficult for film and video people to
get their work on PBS and get paid for it. It's a political problem
because our message generally is contrary to the message that has been
selected for viewing. Also, there is a certain style that producers
getting the money have figured out. But what PBS is forgetting is that
audiences will respond to content."
          "The gulf between traditional and modern life is not just a concern
of a particular ethnic group like the Native Americans," Cocke
maintains. "Appalachian people are struggling with the same things as
people in other parts of the country. More than anything, it's a
question of finding a path through life."
          
            Sharon Hatfield is a free lance writer who lives in
Virginia.
          
        