Over the past year Cornerstone Theater Company has been on an epic, year-long, ten-city, decade-in-the making, once-in-a-lifetime, world premiere theatrical road-trip across California. They’ve journeyed from the downtown Los Angeles Arts District to Arvin, Lost Hills, Grayson & Westley, Pacoima, East Salinas, Fowler, Holtville, Eureka, and San Francisco; along the way they’ve worked with twenty four local partners and advisors, seven local residents in the touring cast and crew, and performed over twenty shows in these communities.
From 2004 through 2013 Cornerstone Theater Company created plays across California through their Institute Summer Residency program. Cornerstone spent a month each summer living and working with diverse California communities, and brought along other artists, activists and educators from all over the country to collaborate and make community-engaged theater. Cornerstone is celebrating a decade of Summer Residencies with California: The Tempest (MAP 2014), uniting these 10 California communities onstage and touring to each location.
In California: The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue,” as playwright Alison Carey’s adaptation of The Tempest meets the challenges of the Golden State head-on in this traveling experience that conjures love, disaster, revenge, forgiveness & music (all that you would expect from Shakespeare!); mixed with earthquakes, drought, overdevelopment, food equity, state politics, fracking and immigration policy (all that you would expect from California!) as Prosper, Minerva, Caliban and Californians from across the state yearn to find the commonality in their diversity and imagine a healthy and inclusive future for California.
This week Cornerstone returns back to Downtown L.A. — where it all began — as each of these ten communities contributes to writing the play they inspire.
Performances are June 18, 19 & 20, outdoors at Grand Park.
Admission is free and no reservations required. For more information about the venue, visit GrandParkLA.org.
