All year long the Pacific Conservatory Theatre (PCPA) trains its conservatory students to speak with inflections from across the ages, giving voice once again to Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Tennessee Williams, and contemporary playwrights. But once a year, ever since the Community Speaks! series began seven years ago, the aspiring actors give voice to people closer to home.
Community Speaks! is in the style of verbatim theater, explained Karin Hendricks, resident artist at PCPA who created the program and directs each year. Verbatim theater takes direct quotes from real people, in this case Santa Marians, and uses the exact words to create a theatrical performance.
“Every year we start the process by researching Santa Maria’s history so the students are familiar with the town and what’s happening currently,” Hendricks said. “So what we are looking for is a subject that is important specifically to Santa Maria and specifically to what’s happening here now.”
Past Community Speaks! productions have explored disenfranchised people, cancer survivors, and immigration. The themes are meant to be topical so that the locals interviewed open up about them, and free speech seemed like an important issue, Hendricks said.
Once the research is done and the topic solidified, Hendricks’ students take to the streets, recording short interactions with locals they come across.
“We did over 70 interviews, so we’ve had students just kind of spray out into the community to find people,” she said. “They went to farmers markets, high schools—they had a chance to talk to a lot of the younger people in the community this year—and the goal is to find a diverse opinion that represents our town, that’s what we do.”
Each student only performs the quotes they collected, Hendricks explained, and the sources all remain anonymous. The collected sound bites all contribute to the final production, which is itself a piece of theatrical art including music, movement, and acting.
PCPA also hired a composer named Matthew Meckes to score the play this year, Hendricks said. Meckes used the recorded interviews as inspiration.
“He listened to the recordings of the interviews, and he’s listening to the pitch variation, tempo, and rhythm with which people speak, and he’s using that as inspiration for what he composes,” Hendricks said. “So what he writes is inspired directly by what people spoke and he’s pairing that with music that is inspired by some contemporary styles of music.”
The end result is Community Speaks! on Free Speech, which shows once at the Severson Theatre. The production is free to attend, Hendricks explained, but tickets are required. She advised locals to call ahead to the box office for tickets if they want to attend, as the popular production fills up fast.
Community Speaks! has always been a single production, but not this year, Hendricks said. She has already scheduled a few performances at local colleges and high schools, and is open to add a few more at schools and community centers.
“Because of the kind of work that it is, it’s very important that it’s free and it’s important that the community feels ownership,” she said. “We are also trying to generate a new kind of audience that maybe doesn’t usually come to a PCPA show to see something for free that is directly connected to their lives.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne is intrigued by the idea of artistically rendering interviews. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 3-10, 2016.