Cornerstone Theater Panel

A LONG BRIDGE OVER DEEP WATERS:
A Panel on Cornerstone Theater's Faith-Based Theater Cycle
with Ramy Eletreby, Ebonie Hubbard, Baraa Kahf, Sondos Kholoki-Kahf, Bill Rauch, Lisa Robins, James Still, Mark Valdez

TCG National Conference, June 17, 2005

INTRODUCTIONS:
Cornerstone

JOAN CHANNICK, Deputy Director, TCG
We've tried to set an agenda for the conference that has a certain trajectory, with a broad theme for each day. Yesterday's talks by Ben and by Tom Frank established the context, the environment in which our theatres operate. Today's theme is understanding, trying to make sense of the world. Our two plenary sessions will, in different ways, try to explore the challenges of achieving understanding between people and cultures. To introduce the first session I give you playwright, director and TCG board member Chay Yew. [applause]

CHAY YEW, Playwright/Director, TCG Board Member
Good morning. The experiment that is the United States of America is full of glorious promise, but it is built on a legacy of bigotry and hatred and, yes, fear of the other. This is what Bill Rauch once said of a polarized world: Bill Rauch believes that the theatre is the most collaborative and all-encompassing of art forms and can be, he believes, a rehearsal for the changing world.

Bill Rauch's motivation as an artist is his keen sense of exclusion and inclusion. He's moved to make plays with the majority of a population who claim they have no stories to tell, because he has learned that they always do. Armed with these beliefs and many more, and since 1986, Bill Rauch and Allison Carey founded Cornerstone Theater. Based in Los Angeles, Cornerstone has a unique mission: to bring live theatre to communities, casting local residents alongside a small band of professional actors and adapting classical and original plays to the local setting.

"We make plays to examine multiple perspectives on community issues," says Bill. "The community of these performances are first-time community actors of all ages. Most of the plays I direct don't happen in theatres. They happen in malls, in barns, in closed factories, in public and private spaces that are transformed into sacred spaces through the highly political ritual of live performance." As the company has evolved, Rauch and Cornerstone have expanded their definition of community. While they continue to work with communities defined by geography, they are also producing plays with communities defined by occupation, by age, by culture and language and even by a shared birthday.

Recently, Cornerstone completed a four-year series of projects called the Faith-Based Theatre Cycle. During that time, Cornerstone created original community plays in collaboration with specific faith-based institutions, as well as interfaith communities, to explore how faith both unites and divides American society.

What's in store next for Cornerstone Theater is anyone's guess, but one thing is for sure. Bill Rauch and Cornerstone will continue to build bridges into the communities of this country; to represent them, challenge them, reflect them and to tell their stories. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you my friend and colleague Bill Rauch and Cornerstone Theater. [applause]

BILL RAUCH
Good morning, everybody. It is a great honor and a great pleasure for all of us to be here and to share a little bit with you. We're going to start in a very Cornerstone way, which is to put you all on the spot, if we can bring the house lights up-very brief exercise, very simple. I hate audience participation, so you don't have to be scared. But I'm going to say a couple of "I" statements and if the statement is true for you I'd like you to stand up, okay? The first "I" statement I'm going to say is "I was raised in an organized religion." If that statement is true for you, please stand. [Nearly everyone stands.] Beautiful. Take a moment, look around, look around the room. Look at the map. Thank you, have a seat, beautiful. Next statement: "I currently practice an organized religion." If that statement is true for you, please stand. [Less than a third of the room stands.] Look around the room, and stay standing please, stay standing, thank you. And one last round in this very brief exercise. For those of you who are still seated, one more "I" statement: "I consider myself spiritual or on a, I'm making up this wording, I consider myself spiritual or spiritually seeking." If that statement is true for you, please stand up. [Nearly all stand.] Take a moment, look around the room. And have a seat, and give yourselves a round of applause, that was beautiful. Thank you. [applause]

There are two stories that we could tell you today. One fits very very neatly with the conference title. It's a polarized story. At the two extremes, we have a group of professional artists who are not Muslim, many of whom are gay, who have shoved their gay agenda down the throats of a protesting community. On the other side, we have a group of community partners who are Muslim, who are not gay, who have tried to stifle the voices and, let's say it, completely erase the existence of their fellow community members who happen to be GLBT. So that's one story we can tell you. It's not the story we are going to tell you, although there's truth to that story. The story we're going to try to tell you is much more complicated, it's much more nuanced, it's much less sexy, it's much less full of sound bites. It's a story that's still raw for us because we just closed the show that culminated this work on Sunday, a few days ago. But that is in fact the story we're going to try to tell. And in that spirit, I'm going to read a quote from an email that my very wise colleague Peter Howard sent me recently.

"I think there's a really interesting connection," says my colleague Peter, "to be made between the polarization suggested by the conference title and Cornerstone's faith-based work, or at least my experience of it. I think the idea of polarization is very appealing in fearful times. It's us versus them, it's strength in numbers against a very clear enemy. I believe that fear reduces our ability to live within complexity. Fear can polarize us and make us sort ourselves into two opposing camps, especially when really difficult questions come up."

So, in that spirit, we're going to introduce ourselves. My name is Bill Rauch, I'm the co-founder and artistic director of Cornerstone, I was raised in a whole series of Protestant churches, from Congregational to Baptist and many many in between.

JAMES STILL
Good morning, my name is James Still, and I am a playwright who wrote the last play in the cycle, called A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters. I was raised United Methodist and I am not currently a member of an organized religion.

SONDOS KHOLOKI-KAHF
Hi, my name is Sondos. I was an actor in Cornerstone's collaboration with the Muslim community and I am Muslim.

BARAA KAHF
Hi, my name is Baraa Kahf and I was also an actor in Cornerstone's collaboration with the Muslim community. I also serve on the Cornerstone community advisory committee. And I also am Muslim.

MARK VALDEZ
My name is Mark Valdez and I was raised Pentecostal. I'm Cornerstone's former associate artistic director and I still consider myself Christian.

LISA ROBINS
My name is Lisa Robins and this is my second show with Cornerstone. I was raised Jew-ish [laughter], no ritual, currently trying to figure out where I fit in, looking for ritual, open.

RAMY ELETREBY
My name is Ramy Eletreby and I was an actor in the faith-based bridge show, and I was raised and still consider myself Muslim.

EBONIE HUBBARD
My name is Ebonie Hubbard. I was an actor in two of Cornerstone's faith-based shows, and I was raised Jehovah's Witness. ...I'm not, though. [laughter]

BILL RAUCH
I want to also acknowledge the presence in the audience of our managing director, Shay, who you already got to meet a little earlier; our new associate artistic director, Laurie Woolery, and a member of our ongoing ensemble, Geoff Korf. We figured eight of us was enough on stage, so they're supporting us in the house.

Chay was beautifully articulate about what Cornerstone's been trying to do over the last almost 20 years now. I do want to say one thing in addition to what he laid out about our methodology, working with first-time community-based artists alongside professionals, which is that our relationship with both the Arab Muslim and with the GLBT community, those roots go deeper, there's more history, than just this cycle. For instance, back in '91, during the first Gulf War, we conceived a project with Arab Americans citywide, Arab Americans of many different religious backgrounds in our home city of Los Angeles. And that production became Ghurba, written and directed by Shishir Kurup. We've also worked on multiple projects with different communities of sexuality. And ironically, I think, given all that followed, as we sat around and dreamed of projects that might be in the Faith-Based Cycle, the very first project that came up from an ensemble artist was to do a collaboration with gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people of faith. That was the original faith-based project for our company in terms of conception.

Back in the late '90s-Cornerstone tends to work in cycles, you're getting that, right, cycles of projects-we began to talk about what we were going to take on next. There was an actor in the company, Page Leong, who said religious communities, we should work with different religious communities. And it immediately appealed to us. We were picking between that, at the time, and working with people on Death Row and the families of the victims of people who were on Death Row. And instead, religion immediately-and that was very polarizing, see how I'm working that in?

But when we talked about religion, it immediately appealed to everyone in the company and I think it's because religion is such a personal, emotional, volatile community affiliation. It's a community affiliation that's often invisible. And one of the beautiful things in the play James wrote, actually, is how we make assumptions about people, trying to guess what their religious affiliation might be, and how often those assumptions are wrong.

So anyway, that's how we took on the faith-based work. We started it with a "Festival of Faith" in the fall of 2001. We did 21 short original pieces in five places of worship across the city. The festival began a couple of weeks after 9/11/2001. So it was timely work to be doing. The five venues for the Festival of Faith included Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights; the Los Angeles Bah‡'’ Center; the Faith United Methodist Church in south L.A.; Temple Emmanuel, a Jewish synagogue; and finally, New Horizons School, a private Islamic school in Pasadena. We did not find a mosque that was able to partner with us, but we did find this private school. This was the final venue, and I just want to say a couple things at this point with this slide. The plays, by design, there had to be at least one play dealing with the religion of the venue that we were in, and there had to be at least one play dealing with a different religion. So they were all mixed up-they were Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist plays, etc., and Muslim plays-there was a Muslim play called Life of a Muslim done in St. John's United Methodist, in an African-American Christian church. But anyway, this is a shot from one of the Muslim pieces done at New Horizons School.

Also in this festival, we did a piece called Zones. Where does your soul live, and is there sufficient parking? [laughter] And this play came about, we were challenged, we were very lucky to be part of the Animating Democracy Initiative, the Ford Foundation and Americans for the Arts joint project, to look at how civic dialogue both informs the creation of art and the performance of art. So we created a piece in which the audience had civic dialogue during the play. The play was set at a fictional zoning commission hearing, and there was a lot of dialogue that happened.

The other reason that I wanted to share this with you, this particular slide, is that throughout this four-and-a-half years one of our primary partners was the National Conference for Community and Justice, better known to some of you as the National Conference of Christians and Jews. But now known as the National Conference for Community and Justice. So dialogue with the community both to create the work and to process the work that had been created has been an especially big part of these four-and-a-half years.

So we kicked it all off with this big old festival, and then we began to do specific projects. We're going to share these out of order, but one of the big community collaborations that we did was Crossings: Journeys of Catholic Immigrants. We collaborated with five different Catholic parishes that were largely immigrant-based. There was an obscene number of playwrights and co-directors working on this project, because each Catholic parish told their own Old Testament story, their own Hebrew Bible story, in a way that reflected their immigrant experience. And it was done at the former cathedral for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

This particular shot is in the sanctuary, the gutted sanctuary of the cathedral, and this was done with Arab Catholics. Arab Catholics from across the Arab world-it was called Beyond the Jordan, this particular piece within Crossings.

Another-I'm just trying to give you background quickly on the whole faith-based cycle-As Vishnu Dreams was our Hindu community collaboration. It was written by my long-term ensemble colleague, Shishir Kurup, and directed by my ensemble colleague Juliette Carrillo. And it was Shishir's retelling of part of the Ramayana. And it was, in its own way, considered very controversial and even blasphemous by some members of the Hindu community because it really turned on its head the notion of who was good and who was evil in the story. And really looked at the characters, who was good and evil in this sacred text, having to do with racism within that part of the world. So that was As Vishnu Dreams. And I'm now going to turn it over to Lisa.

LISA ROBINS
This was Center of the Star, it was our Jewish collaboration and it was my first exposure to Cornerstone. It was written by Yehuda Hyman through the TCG/NEA playwrights program; he's a playwright in residence at Cornerstone. And it was directed by Cornerstone associate artist Tracy Young. Center of the Star traced the history of the evolution of Judaism in Los Angeles through a single family, and it was an exploration of what tragedy does to faith. I played this beautiful character of Jackie, and the journey of forgiveness and reunification with family and home and faith. This was juxtaposed with a Jewish walking tour of L.A. that gave a whole landscape of Jews in Los Angeles, and it had multiple stories, like a gay Jew, and a valley Jew, and just all sorts of Jews. [laughter]

EBONIE HUBBARD
The next play was Body of Faith. It was the first exposure I had to Cornerstone. It was written by associate artist Luis Alfaro, who's in the audience today, and it was directed by founding ensemble member Christopher Moore.

This explored the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community and faith. We had people from this community from almost every faith, from gay Christians to the leather community and gay Muslims.

MARK VALDEZ
Order My Steps was our collaboration with African-American clergy and African-Americans infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS. The idea for the project came from Phil Wilson, who's the executive director of the Black AIDS institute in Los Angeles, and what Phil wanted Cornerstone to do was to create a play that looked at homophobia in the Black Church, and the church's response or lack thereof to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The play was co-directed by Paris Barclay and myself, and it was written by Tracey Scott Wilson, and it centered on a woman whose husband, who was also a deacon in the church, was living on the down-low. He infects his wife with HIV and is kicked out of his church.

One of the many success stories of this play was that there was a prominent Los Angeles minister who had refused to mention HIV or AIDS from the pulpit. And after he saw the show, that following Sunday he delivered a sermon talking about the impact of AIDS and HIV in the African-American community. [applause]

SONDOS KHOLOKI-KAHF
This was Cornerstone's collaboration with the Muslim community, and it was also my first exposure to Cornerstone Theater. It was called You Can't Take It With You: An American Muslim Remix. [laughter] The play was adapted by founding ensemble member Peter Howard, and directed by Mark Valdez. And this was, interestingly, the first time the Kaufman and Hart estate granted anybody the right for adaptation of their original play.

The story was based on Kaufman and Hart's original play, and it takes a look at a somewhat eccentric but inclusive contemporary Muslim family, whose daughter Selma-which is the role that I played-falls in love with a Pakistani Muslim man from a wealthier family... and hilarity ensues. [laughter] I know, and people don't think I'm usually funny. [laughter]

On a personal note, to my surprise, playing the role of Selma was kind of a risk, and I wasn't expecting that. During and after the play, I had received a few comments from community members and from personal family members who thought that it was inappropriate for a Muslim girl like myself who wore the scarf to be playing a character who was romantically involved with somebody she was not married to. And that actually caused problems with some people, and I had long conversations with them over dinner tables.

It was also different, I think, for Muslims who aren't used to seeing themselves portrayed in theatre in this way. It was very raw to see me on stage, projecting my voice-the role of Selma is fiery and she's very interesting and a really moving-around-the-stage character; she gets angry, she gets frustrated, she yells. At one point I kicked a suitcase across the stage. And it's really an interactive role and I think people were not used to seeing that. And it made people a little edgy.

MARK VALDEZ
We started working on the Muslim collaboration in the late fall of 2001. And at that time we were talking with our Muslim community partners. And over and over again they were telling us about the responsibility they felt to be the perfect Muslim. And to have to defend their faith, and feeling like everybody was watching them, that America was keeping their eyes on them to make sure that they were good Muslims and good Americans. And over and over again they said that they wanted to see themselves portrayed as just another Muslim family that liked to laugh.

Cornerstone commissioned Yussef El Guindi, who I think is in the house with us today, to write this play. And his play, Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith, took a head-on look at many of the topics that were facing the Muslim community. It included a woman who was trying to decide whether or not to continue wearing the hijab, the headscarf, a man who was leaving the faith, and it included a gay Muslim character. The feedback that we got from our community partners made us realize that if we incorporated that feedback into the play, that we were going to alter Yussef's play into something completely different. And so, together with Yussef we agreed not to produce the play. However, Yussef's courage as a member of this community, as a professional artist, to bring up these hard topics, really informed this journey that we went on from this point forward. I'm happy to say, however, that Ten Acrobats is going to have two productions this year-in Michigan and in Los Angeles-so it's getting done.

I had always wanted to adapt You Can't Take it with You. I'd loved the play, and it seemed like a wonderfully weird choice to reflect the Muslim community with. And yet the reasons I loved the play was because it was about a family that cared for each other, that was inclusive, that was diverse. There was a lot of warmth and love in that play. And that had been our experience in the Muslim community. We met some amazing people who were proud that Islam brought together people from all over the world, of different races, different languages, and that was something that they were very proud of and that you could feel. So in many ways it was the perfect play. Peter Howard's adaptation reflected some of that diversity. There were Arab Muslims, Pakistani Muslims, African-American, a Latino convert, and there's a character who was from North Africa who was seeking asylum because she had protested human enslavement in her home country.

Of course, as in the original play, the FBI comes in and arrests this family at a very unfortunate time. To see that with this community took on a completely different meaning. In the play, they were suspected of being terrorists and hauled off. The original characters, for those of you who know the play, the Donald and Reba characters, Peter had written as a same-sex male couple. So there were also gay Muslim characters in this adaptation, as well.

We had a reading with our Muslim community partners at the Islamic Center of Los Angeles, which is equivalent to a mosque-services are held there. And we read excerpts of the play and got some feedback. And about 10 minutes before we had to leave the building, a community member raised her hand and said, "Is there something going on with these two male characters?" [laughter] And just to say that the depiction of these characters and their sexuality was very subtle. We weren't going to win a GLAAD award for that depiction. [Laughter] But it was a very sensitive subject for this community and so we talked about it, and people said, there was a range of opinions, people saying things like "There's no such thing as a gay Muslim." They don't exist-you can't be gay and Muslim. People saying, "The community has other important issues facing us right now and this is not one of them," or, "The communities will talk about this at some point, but we're not ready to do that now." And somebody else saying, "Well, Islam's been around for 2,000 years. When are we going to be ready to talk about it?"

So there was a range of discussions, and in this 10-minute window there were a lot of honest comments that people were sharing, and as the director of the play I felt that I needed to respect that honesty, and I came out to them. I said that I was a gay artist. In a mosque! [laughter] And it was really personally very challenging, because when the meeting started, I knew all the people there, and they all came and they welcomed me, and we said hi. And at the end of the meeting, everyone just walked out. Nobody said anything.

And the next morning, there were phone calls and e-mails from community partners, from people that we had never met, who wanted to know why we were doing a play about gay Muslims. Word spread very fast. And so we took these calls and had a lot of conversations. A couple of our community partners pulled out. A couple said that if we kept the characters that they would pull out. And we started to have a lot of internal dialogue about this, about what to do, about how to proceed.

We ultimately, Peter Howard and I, decided that it would be best for us to take out the references to their sexuality. This is just a time when Muslims weren't being portrayed beyond hijabs and hijackers. So it was really important to have this opportunity to collaborate with a broader Muslim community, to reflect that community. And so there were gay Muslims in the cast, and still to this day, one of the things I remember is them sitting there and asking us, "Why do you value their stories over ours?" It was really painful.

Ultimately, we needed to keep everyone at the table at this particular time. We knew that a Bridge show was going to come up at the end of the cycle and that would be another opportunity. But because this was the first opportunity, and this was the first time that such an event was evening happening in this community, we just felt that weight and so we made that decision.

SONDOS KHOLOKI-KAHF
On a lighter note, I really loved played the role of Selma in You Can't Take It With You. As an American Muslim who wears the headscarf, I really really appreciated the way Cornerstone, Peter Howard actually, adapted this play to portray Selma as not the stereotypical Muslim woman you see regularly on TV, who is wearing all black and she has her face covered and she's kind of keeping to the kitchen or to the shadows. Selma was a successful working woman, she had a fabulous wardrobe, and she was really out there, and she had a friendly and really bubbly personality. And I really could relate to that.

Even more so, I think the part that really touched me was walking out onstage in the first few moments of my scene and kind of taking a couple of seconds and looking out into the audience and seeing many Muslim women wearing the headscarf, sitting in the audience and watching me. And it was great joy that I felt to be able to represent them for once in a really positive and wonderful light. And so, thank you Cornerstone for giving me that opportunity.

JAMES STILL
There's a reason why writers write plays, so you don't have to do stuff like this. [Laughter] But it's hard to say no to Ben Cameron, as many of you know. [laughter] But he owes me. [laughter]

I wanted to tell you-we are now literally bridging into the Bridge show, the final play in the cycle-and I wanted to tell you, yesterday morning in my cab ride from my home in Los Angeles to the airport, my cab driver, in the course of about two minutes, told me that he's 66 years old, he was born in India, he is a Methodist, he was raised in London, and he had been in Los Angeles for 40 years, and he practices the Kabbalah. [laughter] It was a very strangely typical conversation that I have had in the last four years of working on this play. Somehow, people knew that I needed to know. And I think they still think I need to know. Although I have no plans to write another play about faith.

The most striking thing my cab driver said, though: When he asked me where I was going, and I said I was going to Seattle to the TCG conference, he wanted to know about it, I told him it was about theatre-and he said, and I wrote this down in the backseat, "Theatre is a place where you can see God." And he looked at me in the rearview mirror as he said that, to see what I was going to say. And I leaned forward, and he continued to talk.

And that was pretty much my experience of these last four years. Of sitting in story circles with people of many different faiths or not faith, where we would be talking and I would find myself leaning forward to learn more about their experience.

Very near the beginning of the cycle, Bill Rauch and Cornerstone asked me, commissioned me to write this final play, which would be the Bridge show, which eventually would be called A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters. I should say to you, I did not say yes immediately. And there were many reasons. One is because everyone, even at that time, was referring to it as "The Impossible Play." [laughter] I'm not kidding about that, by the way.

What it involved was ultimately bringing together all of the communities of faith that had been working, by the end of the time, on this nearly five-year faith-based theatre cycle. That meant that I would be writing a play that featured Catholic immigrants, African-American Christians, Buddhists, Baha'is, Hindus, Muslims and GLBT people of faith. So I didn't say yes. I thought about it. I eventually did say yes, and then I did something crazy, which is we added two more communities of faith, which was the Tongva/Gabrielino Native American community, which was the original people of the Los Angeles basin, and the atheist non-believers were added to the cycle. So now I was dealing with 10 communities of faith.

I should also point out that the first play I saw in the cycle was in the Festival of Faith, which was at New Horizons, the Islam school. It was a couple of weeks after 9/11 and what struck me was that I was going to this private Islam school, there was a lot of security there, and we had to show our picture ID to get in to see the plays.

For several years then, I shadowed all of the plays in the cycle. I attended some rehearsals, of course saw all the plays in performance. I went to community and company meetings that pertained to the cycle. And I also began hosting my own series of what we called story circles. There are many names for this, many of you out there do this kind of work, oral histories, interviews, whatever you want to call it. But in the Cornerstone tradition it was literally people sitting around in a circle, telling their stories, primarily around issues of faith. Those gatherings happened often at the Cornerstone offices in downtown Los Angeles and other times in places of worship. There were anywhere from 2 to 25 people in those story circles. They took about two hours usually, and I did dozens and dozens and dozens of those with thousands of hours of tapes.

Some of the story circles were specific communities of faith, others were interfaith. One was a story circle of converts. One was a story circle with women only, and me. One was a story circle about relationship to prayer, and how people talk to God, when people talk to God. Another story circle was centered around food from their favorite religious holidays, and the family stories that were attached to those.

So I did these for about two years while the cycle was going on. All that time I was committed to not writing the play ahead of time. To not having an agenda, to not figuring it all out neatly and then going through the motion, but instead trying to stay as completely open as I could to the process, and to absorb, as deeply as I could, the stories that my community was telling me. It was for me the ultimate act of faith.

While I wasn't writing the play, I was, hysterically and in a very big panic, thinking about the structure of the play. That was the biggest challenge to me. How was I going to bring 10 communities of faith together in something that would not feel like "We Are the World"? [laughter] We've done that.

So at some point I revisited Schnitzler's Le Ronde. And Bill and I got very excited about the idea of that structure, and how that would help us theatrically tell the story of how faith both unites and divides us, which was a credo that was on all of the Cornerstone literature around the cycle, and one that I took very seriously.

Once we decided on that structure, then it came to the big question of, what order? You know in Le Ronde how it goes from community to community and something is passed along. What order would it be in? Bill and I played many games with ourselves, little pieces of paper, putting them in all different combinations, lists. Some of those structures were more provocative. Some of them had better flow. Some of them I immediately could imagine what the scenes were about. Others, I had no idea. So I found myself getting more and more depressed, because I felt like we had a structure but I had no idea how to do it. And at the same time I was continuing to do story circles, Cornerstone was continuing to do the plays.

Finally, I decided that we needed to find a way to do this mathematically, in a way that was almost, I suppose, defensible. So we finally decided on a structure that would go in historical order of the religions and their foundings of communities in Los Angeles. We went to the Los Angeles census, we studied and cited major events, beginning with the Tongva Native Americans, obviously, the founding of the first Jewish temple, a visit to Los Angeles from a famous Bah’ai'’ leader, all the way through to the founding of the Metropolitan community church in 1968. Which was of course the GLBT community.

When we did this, wouldn't you know it, the last two communities together were the Muslim community and the GLBT community. I didn't know whether that was a sign or a punishment. [laughter] And I would like to think that it was a sign and that part of that is why we're here today.

I actually knew only the barest of facts about some of the things Mark had described in terms of the earlier struggles with the gay issue and some of our Muslim community partners. So I was not in on any of those hard meetings within the company; I was only aware of the situation. I knew obviously that it had been a controversy; I hadn't experienced it firsthand. And I really was committed to the art leading my play, and not a social agenda, and I wanted to write the most beautiful play I could as an artist. I had also met several gay Muslims in my story circles, and their stories of being a minority within a minority haunted me. At that point, I did a series of community dialogues where I brought together those two communities at a time to sit around, usually four people, purposefully kept very small, and I sat on the side, and I said, "For 90 minutes, we're going to have a conversation and the only rule is, you get to ask these people from another faith anything you've ever wanted to know about that other faith." The only other ground rule was the person being asked had the right to say, "I really don't want to talk about that or answer it." I should also say, no one ever refused to respond to the other's questions.

Eventually I went off and wrote the first draft of A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters. I had two things taped up on my wall as I was writing it. One was, "How does faith both unite and divide us?" And the other thing was, "You can't please everyone." [laughter] I later changed that to read, "You can't please anyone." [laughter] It was actually quite liberating. [laughter]

My goal was to write a play that was an authentic artistic response to what I had personally experienced as being a person in a very privileged position of getting to hear people talk honestly, openly, painfully about their struggles with faith.

We're going to show a few slides from Long Bridge. Some of these were taken in rehearsal, so I'm going to just do a little disclaimer.

This is the cast: 57 actors. The largest cast ever. I would also like to say to producers out there, it does not have to be done with 57 actors. [laughter] Let's face it-we are all here to get work. [laughter and applause]

This was a scene between a Tongva Native American woman who was raised Catholic and her ESL Catholic immigrant class that she teaches at a Catholic church in Long Beach.

This was a scene between a Jewish man who has come to meet the woman who received his mother's heart after she died. And he gets there and finds it's an African-American Methodist.

This is a scene between two astronauts in outer space who are in a crisis-they're losing oxygen. And in their crisis the African-American Methodist wants to pray, only to discover that his mate is Buddhist, and chants. [laughter] Much to his horror.

This is a scene with an atheist family, mom and dad, three kids and a dog, played by a Southeast Asian couple who many of the audience, of course, assumed was going to be the Hindu couple, and they are the atheist family who have come to buy a house only to discover that the real estate agent is trying to sell them on God.

This is a scene that takes place in a UCLA dorm room between two roommates and the friend of one of the roommates. In this scene, it is a hijab-wearing Muslim woman and her roommate, who's Hindu. I do want to talk a little bit about this scene, which is that this scene went through many, many changes. It was the first of two scenes featuring the Muslim community. In early drafts of the play, Bill very strongly and kindly, as is his style, expressed...utter dissatisfaction with the scene. [Laughter] At which I protested, of course, that it was perfect. It was not. But the problem was, everything he and others were saying to me, nothing was making sense to me in terms of what I needed to do with it.

Eventually, in one of our long heart-to-heart conversations, I finally said to Bill, you know, I think there's an elephant in the room here that we're not discussing, which is I think the thing all of us who are non-Muslim want to know is, why is she wearing the hijab? We took a deep breath, and at that point I called two community partners. One was my friend Sondos here. And we spent probably an hour, at least, on the phone, and me becoming one of those community partners saying let me ask you these questions, I hope it doesn't offend you, you don't have to tell me but...why do you wear it and can you help me understand, etc. And then I also worked with another hijab-wearing community partner and we went out for coffee and had another two-hour session.

It's also a good time to point out, and we're going to get into this, both Sondos and the other actress were at one point playing the role of Shama, which was the hijab-wearing young woman in the scene, and both dropped out, for reasons that we'll be talking about.

At the end of this scene, Shama's brother bursts into the room, a young man named Tameem, bloodied. He's bloodied and comes to see his sister and it ends very quickly, just him, that he's been beat up.

And that brings us where we're going to go to next, where Bill will be talking about Tameem-who, we find out in the next scene, actually was not beat up because he was Muslim but he was beat up because he was gay. And that began to intensify the struggle and conversations that we were having around the subject.

BILL RAUCH
Obviously there's a lot, I'm sure you're getting the sense, there's a lot of heat and a lot of discussion between Cornerstone and our Muslim community partners. But I think the thing that took a lot of us by surprise was the amount of heat and the amount of conflict within Cornerstone's own family. It became a polarizing, very divisive issue for Cornerstone. We had several company meetings devoted to this topic. We brought in a professional facilitator from outside the company and had a several-hour meeting on the topic. Of course, everybody fell in different places on the spectrum, but there were two extreme points of view. One was: Thank God Cornerstone is finally being true to its mission and respecting the voices of its Muslim community partners who are gay. The other is: After erasing those characters earlier, the other point of view was, I can't believe that this company who says that we care about community input is once again torturing the Muslim community when they've been so clear that they do not want Muslim gay characters. How can we be doing this again? This is proof that these gay artists have this agenda that is not conducive to real community collaboration.

All these internal conflicts led to two things that are especially striking. One is the resignation of a significant staff member who, because of her own religious beliefs, came to a point of crisis in terms of her relationship with the company and realized she could no longer work at Cornerstone. And she left very abruptly and in a way that was very painful, I know, to her and certainly to the rest of us as well. And the other thing lent for me, great clarity. That if Cornerstone were dictated by what the majority of community partners and participants felt, in fact we would have spent the last four-and-a-half years working with white Christians. Because white Christians are in the majority in our country. And that not only is Cornerstone dedicated to working with minority communities but also, as James referred to earlier, the minority within the minority, often.

SONDOS KHOLOKI-KAHF
This is the part where I'm supposed to explain why I left, dropped out of the role. It's very complicated and I wish I had a lot more time to explain.

Putting it very simply, I think the biggest thing for me was that playing the role of Tameem's sister, I didn't want people, especially from my community, to get the impression that I was okay with the character or the situation, because I'm not. And probably the other part playing into that is I consider myself a very active member of the community and I'm involved with a lot of different organizations who echo my beliefs and probably would have had a problem with me being in this play and being in this role. And so it took me a long time, and a lot of deliberation, and a lot of spiritual battles of my own, before coming to this decision.

But again, I want to emphasize that I did not leave the entire project, I just left the role, but I did stay on as kind of a consultant. And I helped with the hijab scene a lot.

BILL RAUCH
We were, of course, in dialogue throughout this whole process when Sondos dropped out. Sondos's husband Baraa also was cast in the play and dropped out of the play at the same time. But they were very vocal about their desire to stay involved with Cornerstone and with the project, which was very moving to me.

And so Baraa came into the office and we had a meeting, and Baraa said, "I want to know why. I want to know why you're doing this. Why are you doing this again? Why is the gay Muslim thing coming up again?" And Baraa, I'll turn it over to you to talk a little more about that.

BARAA KAHF
So basically, we had that small meeting and then we decided, or there was an idea that we should have perhaps a larger workshop or story circle, perhaps, of more members of the Muslim community to get different perspectives. So we had planned a meeting for about an hour-and-a-half to two hours, where we brought people from the Muslim community of a wide range of perspectives, gay Muslims and not gay Muslims, straight Muslims, and everything in between. Of course, it was planned for two hours and it ended up being four hours, and we were still not done, we just had to stop because it was, like, 11:30 at night. But naturally it was a somewhat heated discussion, lots of emotion, and lots of things came out of it.

BILL RAUCH
We're just going to try to share a couple of snapshots from that meeting, because we could probably spend an hour of the time we have with you on that four-hour meeting and we're not going to. So we're just going to give you some snapshots, some impressions.

For me the two things that really stay with me are one word: A very articulate, very gentle Muslim gentleman talked about his joy-because we read the two scenes aloud during this meeting-he talked about his joy during the hijab-wearing scene, the UCLA scene, how good he felt. And then when the gay Muslim character scene was read, he said, "There's only one word to describe how I felt: betrayed." And for me, having done this work for almost 20 years, and what I pride myself on about Cornerstone's work, the word "betrayed" was a little bit like electroshock therapy. Because it was the opposite of everything that Cornerstone exists to do. So that was very challenging.

The other moment that really sticks with me is turning to a lot of my professional colleagues at the end of the meeting. A lot of them were so deeply depressed, so hurt, frightened, so emotional. And I was like, on fire about "Great! Let's figure out how we can take all this and work it back into the scene!" And I was, as a gay man, I was a little bit proud, but more horrified, by how well-developed my ability to compartmentalize was. I hadn't taken in any of this, as a gay man. I was much too busy thinking about how to make the scene better. And so those are two of my strong impressions.

MARK VALDEZ
One of the people in attendance that night was a cast member from You Can't Take It With You. Somebody who's just this great, great, great person. And he was there with his mother and he told this story about how he had attempted suicide in his coming-out process. And that was just so hard to hear. And it really reinforced the need to get a gay Muslim character on stage so that that story can be heard, so that character, that person can be seen. And to this day I still remember the look on his face and his voice as he shared that story. It was very, very powerful.

SONDOS KHOLOKI-KAHF
I think for me, the thing that hit me the most was that I couldn't fathom how things that I was saying, things that I had believed from my own religion, something so personal to me, had hurt people in so many different ways, and that the more I kept talking, and trying to explain why I felt this way, the more I was looking around the room and it was like bullets shooting into people. And the way they described how they were feeling at the end, somebody said that they were deeply pained. And I couldn't handle the fact that something I had said could hurt somebody in that way. And as I was leaving the meeting, one of my good friends from Cornerstone, who is gay but he's not Muslim, just kind of-I wanted to kind of give him a hug and say, you know, thanks for being so honest. And the pain that he had in his eyes, it was too much for me, and usually he's really bubbly and happy and we kind of joke along together, and that night he was just very cold and keeping his distance, and I couldn't really take that in, that I had done something like that to somebody.

RAMY ELETREBY
For me it was the first time such a sensitive and personal issue had been discussed so openly with members of the Muslim community, a community I belong to, I was raised in L.A. And being a gay Muslim it was really hard to hear people who I'd cared about and known my entire life say things that I found personally hurtful, and these are people that I've loved my whole life. And I felt in an awkward position, as part of Cornerstone and then as part of both communities, and that issue coming together within me, and it was really difficult.

JAMES STILL
For me, it was two things. One was my horror that I was not able to compartmentalize it faster. And the other things was a phrase one of our community partners said that night, which was, "Homosexuality is like alcohol-it's something to be avoided."

BARAA KAHF
For me, it was what continued after that meeting. As a direct result of that meeting, I continued having conversations with some of my friends, gay Muslims and gay non-Muslims, and it took us-one conversation, I went out to lunch with one of them and it ended up being literally a three-hour lunch. Just talking and trying to clarify our positions. We talked so much that we reached certain points, we called them stopping points, we'd get to this point where we were like, "Okay, we disagree on this, there's no getting around it, so let's try to talk about something else." But this just shows how complex it is. It's not as straight as, this person's anti-gay or homophobic, and this person is not. It's quite complex and we came out of that meeting with a clearer understanding of our relationship and our stance and we're still, we're good friends, so.

JAMES STILL
Just because we're getting shorter on time-obviously that next step after that April 6 meeting was, what was I going to do as a writer. And I didn't know. I think any artist who goes through an experience like that obviously if you allow yourself, if you challenge yourself, if you take the risk to go deeper with it, the work I was doing was going to change. It did change-the character is in the play, we're going to do a scene from my play here in just one second-if the actors can go ahead and get in place. I'm just going to set this up really quickly, which is that because we're here-and let's face it, this is where I feel completely neurotic and nervous in front of all my colleagues- please remember this is an excerpt from a scene from a play. [Laughter] However, we do have the great honor of having three beautiful actors who did this scene in our play at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles these last two weeks.

I'll just say ironically, maybe not surprisingly, what ended up was this play finally is the most straightforward scene in the play. I say that with mixed emotions. It's the scene with the least mystery, with the least surprise. Finally, for me, the surprise has to be that it exists at all. [applause] That that, in 2005, would have to be enough. And that for eight nights on a stage on the planet Earth there was a gay Muslim in a scene. [applause]

   			 SCENE FROM A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters, by James Still

   			
			

BILL RAUCH
Just a couple of final comments and then we'll wrap it for you. We did this show eight times in the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre outdoors, 1,241 seats, it's a lot of seats for Cornerstone. And we had a tremendous response. Lots and lots and lots of people came to see the play, including members of the Muslim community.

The responses from Muslim audience members ranged from Cornerstone's board member who is Muslim who loved the show, who brought lots of her friends, all of whom loved the show. A woman who had been at the infamous April 6 meeting who was on the fence about whether or not she was going to come to the show but who came and brought her husband and stayed all the way through and was moved. Two other very close community partners, one who is a very self-identified progressive man, walked out during the scene, he and his wife. And another Muslim community partner who came, who stayed all the way through, and when the audience gave the show a standing ovation, when every person in that room was standing, he not only didn't stand, he didn't clap. So, a wide range of responses.

And a couple of responses from the three performers.

LISA ROBINS
Yeah, I was kind of oblivious, I must say, to the depth of the buttons that were being pushed. I looked at it as sort of a benign scene about coming out and such, and myself, I was struggling with trying to find the impact of being Jewish and coming out-because most of my friends are liberal-I would ask them, how do you feel about homosexuality, and it was like no big deal.

So, I'd been going to an Israeli hairdresser, and I went there about a week-and-a-half before the show opened, hoping for a miracle actually. [laughter] And I found one. I ran into this woman that I know, this Jewish woman who's very deep into the study of Judaism, and I said, "So, what do you think of homosexuality?" Well. She just read me the riot act, about how the Torah says that it's wrong, it's okay to be homosexual, but you can't act on it-just what the character in the play says. So as angering as it was, I was very grateful, because then I finally understood what was really going on in the scene. And then, of course, when we put it out in the public and there was such an uproar about the whole Muslim thing. It was very moving.

Just one other thing I wanted to say: I just found I was in awe of people who are so certain that they're right. Because I tend to be looking at all different sides of a situation-and it's really something. [Laughter]

EBONIE HUBBARD
When I originally did Body of Faith, I played a lesbian. And my mom came to see it, and of course, I look kind of gay so she already knew [laughter], but that was the first time that I was going to actually voice it. So after that I was pretty okay, like whatever.

So this scene when I first got it wasn't really that serious to me, I didn't really take it that seriously. Whatever, he's coming out, he's Muslim, whatever, it's just the same old story. And then it got really intense because I didn't know how intense the whole Muslim situation was. And so I kind of prepped my mom before she came to see the show, and she was reading newspapers and stuff, and when it was about the gay Muslim she was like, you know, they shouldn't do that to him, she was very open to it.

One of the last lines of the play was that I was raised Jehovah's Witness but now I'm a lesbian. And every night people were like "Woooh, yeah!" And the night she came, that was the discussion after it, was why did I say Jehovah's name. And the next show, my 13-year-old cousin came to the show and saw the scene-I'm sure he knew I was gay too-and heard the last line and went home and told the rest of my family and so Monday morning after the show closed, I was getting calls from everybody saying how I was disrespecting Jehovah and all this stuff. And it amazed me how it's not okay to be gay in a lot of people's eyes, but they can accept it as long as you don't put a religion to it. So as soon as I said "Jehovah" and "lesbian" in the same sentence, all the acceptance for it had been gone.

I think after the response from the general public about the scene, I remember nights, we were onstage, like one night, we heard, when his first line was like, "I forgot about being gay, I was too concerned about being Muslim." And I heard the audience laugh, and I know we'd get offstage and be like, "Ooooh, that just made me so much more mad because they didn't get it!" Or they would laugh at things in the scene that weren't necessarily funny to us and it really pumped us up in the scene. And so after all of that, I kind of understood the gist of the scene and how important it was to do the scene.

RAMY ELETREBY
For me it was when I first took on the role of Tameem, I was just excited personally and artistically to play such a great character, something so close to me. I did not expect the amount of attention it would receive from, you know, the meeting that happened, we mentioned earlier, to a huge media blitz that occurred in print before the show even opened. I wrote a piece for a magazine I write for, there was an L.A. Times article that showed up last week that kind of painted division within the Muslim community itself.

And suddenly it was much more than just this gay character on stage. It was more about me, I became the forefront of the story and I was like the poster child of Islam and homosexuality and I was not expecting this attention at all. And it was really difficult, for something that is so personal to me to be made so public, in a public forum, and it's really my personal struggle, and it resulted with a lot of conflict with my family that's still really raw right now, you know, the show just closed and they barely saw it last weekend. And with the members of the Muslim community. So I was not at all prepared for what I thought was just a role and it was just so much bigger, so much more intense. And I'm still happy I did it. [applause]

BILL RAUCH
We're out of time. I just want to say in closing that we sit here in front of you, eight people who've gone through a lot of struggle-there's also a lot of mutual respect on this stage, I respect every single person sitting up here-and there are hundreds more pieces to the puzzle, so we've just done our best to tell you a version of the story from the eight of us. Thank you so much for the privilege. Thank you. [applause]

[END]