Coming to a Theater Near You: The National Civil War Project (Now Without African Americans?)

Blog Post
Friday, March 29, 2013
By Keryl McCord
This situation makes me want to scream. It’s 2013 and American theater has not evolved, has not progressed on issues of race and racism, of authentic diversity, nor addressed critical issues of cultural equity within the arts. If anything, cultural, racially, and ethnically specific communities of color have lost ground.
Originally published by Alternate ROOTS, "An Open Letter To The National Civil War Project"

Art and Political Power

Blog Post
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
By Dudley Cocke
When we started touring nationally in 1978, we unexpectedly found ourselves looking out at a very different audience, one that appeared to represent only the wealthy slice of the host community. It didn’t bother us too much at first – we were full of ourselves – but as the 1980s rolled on and the nation’s income gap widened, we found ourselves facing a life-threatening artistic problem: now with no low-income and working class people in the house, our plays were becoming something we didn’t recognize as ours.
Published as part of 'Clout: A Blogfest On Art & Political Power'

Director's Statement - 2010

Blog Post
By Dudley Cocke
For the past 120 years, our region's economy has been organized by absentee energy conglomerates and marked by high rates of poverty. Culture has been our saving grace. So many pickers and singers and songwriters and storytellers have risen from these hills that just outside my window I can see Country Music Highway, Route 23. Here is a rich place from which to make theater.

Director's Statement - 2009

Blog Post
Thursday, January 1, 2009
By Dudley Cocke
Thirty-three years ago, Roadside Theater’s founding artists asked: Can a theater that taps local life at its source appeal to a variety of people at home and away? How would such a theater fare against the increasingly strong waves of homogenization generated by commercial art with its mass advertising engines?

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