Words are so easily forgotten. Most of us speak with the hopes that what we say will be remembered, but there’s no guarantee of it. The Pacific Conservatory Theatre (PCPA) is presenting another production in the Community Speaks series, which seeks to give voice to locals by performing their words verbatim, but without revealing the community members’ identities.
What would you say under the cloak of anonymity? The Community Speaks series focuses on divisive or difficult subjects in the local sphere. Last year’s production was Community Speaks for the Other Side of Broadway, and included thoughts about the approved Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Santa Maria. This year’s event is titled Community Speaks for the Invisible and focuses on members of the community who are vulnerable for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, explained Karin Hendricks, a PCPA resident artist and the founder of Community Speaks.
“We are focusing on giving voice to the people you might think are disenfranchised community members,” Hendricks said. “When I say disenfranchised, I mean their level of power, but that’s just the best word I have for it; it stretches over a lot of different people, so we have a lot of stories to tell.”
Hendricks was inspired to bring verbatim theater to PCPA by the time she spent studying with Bill Rauch, current director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the work of Anna Deavere Smith, who wrote Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a verbatim piece about the LA riots. PCPA had never produced and performed a verbatim theater production before Hendricks spearheaded Community Speaks in 2008.
Since the first production, Community Speaks has continued to address difficult and painful local issues such as crime, incarceration, and even living with cancer. Each performance is truly unique, Hendricks explained, because the PCPA acting student performing the words was the person who conducted the interview with the person who spoke them.
“When there is a really rigorous training program like we have at PCPA, it is good for the students to go outside the walls and explore the community,” she said. “It also teaches them how to self-generate a performance where at first they had nothing.”
Conservatory students approached many people, literally on the street, and asked them to engage in the project and share their thoughts about the issue at hand. The interviews are recorded along with the time, place, and person who said it. The identity of the interviewer is protected, but their words are adhered to strictly to provide an honest performance.
It’s an odd occurrence that an actor actually gets to meet the character whom they will portray as, but that is the entire point of Community Speaks. The students aren’t just performing lines but words they heard spoken face-to-face by the person they’re depicting. It’s a challenge and an opportunity most actors don’t come across.
“From what I see, there is a level of compassion generated from the students to these ‘characters’ because they come to embody the people that they spoke to,” Hendricks said. “There is a realism there that shows how theater can really reach into the community and bring forth its conflicts and have a conversation.”
Tickets to Community Speaks are free but must be reserved. The single production at the Severson Theatre on the Allan Hancock College campus will fill up quickly, Hendricks explained, so tickets should be reserved early. Hendricks hopes to tour the production locally before the semester’s over, and there’s already one more performance scheduled at Cal Poly, she said.
“We are open to other offers because I think it is good for our community, and the more people that can see it the better,” she said. “There is something about the magic of live theater that touches people in a way that, really, nothing else can, as far as I can see.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne isn’t putting words in anyone’s mouth. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 13-20, 2014.