Los Angeles Theater

Established in 1992 by Los Angeles's Center Theatre Group, the Latino Theatre Initiative sought to diversify audiences by diversifying theatrical programming. Until 2005, when it was suspended, the program resulted in the production of eleven new main-stage plays at the Mark Taper Forum. It was also key in the development of new and emerging Latino artists, the production of second-stage works, and the incorporation of community-based events into theater programming. Chantal Rodriguez draws on the extensive Latino Theatre Initiative/Center Theatre Group Papers, 1980-2005, housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, in this first extended historical account of the program. Rodriguez evaluates the initiative's successes and shortcomings and examines the roles played by its leaders and its significant roster of artists.

One of the most produced and anthologized actos (brief commedia-like political sketches) collectively created by the Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers Theatre) under Luis Valdez’s direction, is titled Los vendidos (The Sellouts).

This captivating study maps a history and theory of community-based theater in the United States through the Cornerstone Theater Company. Detailing how the performance-making process contributes to an ongoing negotiation of American identity, Sonja Kuftinec investigates community-based theater to trace the historical affiliations of the form and critically examines how community-based theater both enables community and challenges the very notion of “community as a stable site.

Alison Carey, the resident writer in the Cornerstone Theater ensemble, says she falls in love when she makes art with a community, and I take her very, very seriously. Even in these interview transcripts, I can feel her bubbling enthusiasm, her deep knowledge of what she experiences. Carey, an artist of considerable maturity, describes what it is to make art with someone. No weekend fling here, Carey is talking about the whole big deal – total immersion, no holds barred, even-steven equality, no-pretense honesty, and in for the long haul – a fully mature affair of the heart. Okay, great, everyone can

In the summer of 2013, Cornerstone Theater Company is making a play, Plumas Negras, by Juliette Carrillo, in the Alisal neighborhood of Salinas, California. In the scene we are rehearsing, two cast members, playing Concha, the ghost of a migrant farm worker who died in an accident, and Perla, her now-adult daughter, enact a scene in which Perla confronts Concha with her anger and anguish at being abandoned-abandoned first when Concha left her behind in Mexico to find work, and again when she died far away from home. Concha responds, trying to justify the choices she made, confronted with the terrible challenges of poverty and misogyny. Perla migrated to the United Stages herself when she was very young, and is torn between two cultures, two languages, feeling a part of neither one nor the other.

What does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? Disability Arts and Culture: Methods and Approaches seeks the answer to this question and more in an exploration of disability studies within the arts and beyond. In this collection, international scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches alongside textual and discourse analysis to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world(s). Chapters explore Deaf theatre productions, representations of disability on-screen, community engagement projects, disabled bodies in dance, and more, in a comprehensive overview of disability studies that will benefit both practitioner and scholar.

This book captures the 30-year history of the East West Players (EWP), tracing the company's representation of Asian Americans through the complex social and cultural changes of the past three decades.

California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of "Asian America" through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California's imaginary.