Gerry Stropnicky: Story, Civic Empathy, & Social Change

Bill Cleveland: 00:00:00

So what happens when a theater director steps into a struggling town and ignites community change through the power of shared stories from the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, the chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the skills and strategies they need to thrive as creative community leaders.

Now, in a world where communities face trauma, disconnection, and invisibility, this episode explores how the ancient impulse to gather and perform stories can foster healing agency and real world change.

If you've ever wondered how art can truly make a difference, this conversation with Jerry Straupnicki, the internationally recognized stage director, playwright, and creative change agent, will give you a pretty good picture of what it takes.

In it, we'll learn how ensemble based, community driven theater projects have tackled crises like the opioid epidemic and flood response with lasting impact.

We'll hear firsthand how community story making catalyzes civic empathy and even reshapes local policy as told by someone who's witnessed communities reclaim power through their own narratives.

We'll also learn about the seven principles that guide ethical, effective, and deeply human community arts practice From Agency to Accessibility Part 1 Drums, Gravity, and Gravy so I'll just begin by asking you, where are you hailing from?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:01:55

Well, I'm in. I'm in Danville, Pennsylvania, which is in the Susquehanna Valley.

I'm an uninvited settler in the lands of the Leno, Napi, the Susquehannock, and the Munshi who each displaced one another as settler culture arrived in the Chesapeake Bay. So here I am.

Bill Cleveland: 00:02:17

And I am in the unceded lands of the Ohlone people in Alameda, California. So if you ever been stuck with a street name or handle that, that represents what you're up to.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:02:34

Oh, that's a hard one. Lots of them. But many are not repeatable.

Story worker, instigator, revolutionary listener, community healer is one that I'm thinking about a lot these days.

Bill Cleveland: 00:02:48

Yeah, I bet you are. So what is your work in the world that adds up to all those I've had?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:02:56

To me, it's all one arc. But the last several decades I go where I'm invited, and only when I'm invited. I never parachute in anywhere.

I just think that enough damage has been done by people that look like me coming in and saying, oh, I know how to fix that. So.

But I. I get invited into communities and, and some stress or post trauma, maybe after a natural disaster, maybe after a war or during a war sometimes, or places that just feel like they Better get their story out or better use their story with one another, like Harlan County, Kentucky, or Toga County, Pennsylvania. And then I work in that community.

And what happens next, once invitation happens and we figured out to gather stories, to listen to stories, and usually make art of those stories with the people in the community that can allow them to hear each other differently and then perhaps take action. So it's a catalytic action. That's maybe why they would call me an instigator. And so, yeah, the last several decades, I've done a bunch of these.

Was dragged into it by Joe Carson, but that's another story.

Bill Cleveland: 00:04:23

And that's my next question is, how did you get that way? How did you end up doing this?

What I think at one time probably was thought of as marginal and esoteric and probably now has a much greater audience and expectation attached to it.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:04:41

Yeah, well, Bill, I hope it's gained some traction over these years, so. Ooh, ooh, ooh, that's hard. Again, you ask hard questions. But that's why we're here, right?

I grew up outside New York City, and so I saw a lot of theater growing up, and I love theater.

But it always seemed to me to not quite get to what it could do, that it reached a place sometimes of beauty, sometimes of wonder, sometimes of spectacle. Amazing acting. But I always felt frustrated by it. I went to Northwestern back in the 70s. That was there, the start of the Chicago renaissance.

I sold office supplies with John Malkovich. That's how old I am.

Bill Cleveland: 00:05:28

That's great.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:05:29

That's great. Oh, yeah, he was a good friend. And we were both broke.

And when I left Chicago to go study with Ravana Kraus, I gave him all my furniture because he couldn't afford any. But, yeah, we sold pencils together. And then I. Even while I was at Northwestern, I was reading stuff and thinking, ooh, maybe there is a better way.

And with Whit McLaughlin, the new paradise Laboratories in Philadelphia, and Jim Good and myself, we went to Europe for about six months. And this predates semester abroad or a year abroad. I mean, we had to convince Northwestern to let us do it without dropping out.

But it was also the time, if you made connections with letters and through the mail, and Martha Coigney at International Theater Institute.

So I got to watch Peter Brook direct at the International center for Theater Research in Paris, and they were working on Conference of the Birds, and they were working on Timon of Athens in Paris. We got to hang out with Jean Louis Barrot in Poland. We visited WROCAW and watched Polish Theater lab at work.

Mostly hung out with this guy, Sri Shek Senkoutis, who was part of that company. Eduardo Di Filippo. I mean, Royal Shakespeare Company.

We got to hang out with all these folks and came away from that having seen a ton of theater, that the best work was being done by resident ensembles, by ensembles that worked together over a long period of time that didn't guarantee great work. We saw a lot of crap work in what was then called Eastern Europe. Fully subsidized companies that were coasting on whatever it was.

But some of the companies, oh, man, they owned it, especially in Poland, and some in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Bill Cleveland: 00:07:22

Wow. A quick sidebar for anyone who's not super deep in into the theater. Peter, Brook, De Filippo and Barraud.

They all have front seats in the pantheon of Western theater. Well, Jerry, what a trip you were on.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:07:43

Oh, yeah. And so came back with a real desire to make ensemble theater.

That led us to go study with Alvina Krauss and Bloomsburg, great and complex acting teacher and got to study with her for the last five years of her life. But by then we started Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble, and we were making great work because it does work.

A company and kind of in isolation because Bloomsburg is not near any city. We were. We were all getting paid. We had health insurance. We built a theater. I mean, all this in a town of 12,000 people. We developed a language.

We made terrific stuff. Good enough that we got recognized by the State Department, who sent us to tour Sub Saharan Africa for them.

Bill Cleveland: 00:08:30

Oh, yeah. An ensemble theater company from rural Pennsylvania. Off to Sub Saharan Africa. That makes sense.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:08:39

And so around: 1991

In that time, we were also starting the network of ensemble theaters. We were part of the groups that set that up. But nothing is more official than touring for the State Department. You're staying in five star hotels.

You've got marine guards. You're going to embassy parties. You're actually meeting heads of state. Things are different.

Bill Cleveland: 00:09:16

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:09:18

And we were all white. And we're performing American theater in Zambia and Zimbabwe and Kenya and Botswana and Namibia.

We couldn't perform in South Africa because the anti apartheid boycott was ongoing. But we did go there and do workshops. But we were doing workshops in all these countries.

And very quickly I realized that I was learning far more than I was getting. And we were in Zambia, in Lusaka, doing workshops. And these artists, younger we were pretty young men, but these guys were younger than me.

And they were all guys because women could not perform in that culture at that time. Just listening to their stories, and they invited us to see their work in Chapatra compound outside of Lusaka. And it was.

Our minders did not want us to go. Not safe. Not safe. A compound is like a township in South Africa. Compound is where all the poor people live.

So 40,000 people on free water taps, no sewer system. It was that, and we wanted to go. They wouldn't let us bring cameras or recording devices. Our Marine guards were out of uniform, but they were there.

We get to the place and this red dirt circle outside the police station and this compound, and no one was there for the performance. And so these dudes say, let's drum up an audience.

They got their drums out of the van and they started running through the compounds, jumping across the open sewers, drumming as they go. Families, kids start following them. The word gets around.

By the time we got back to the circle, there was about a couple thousand people there waiting for the show to start. And the show was an HIV AIDS play. At that time, HIV was about 35, 36% infection rate in the general public. It was a big deal.

And it was a farce comedy, Bill. It was a farce. Among other things. All the women were played by guys in drag, and they were going all the way with it.

The play had been built from stories collected in that community. They called it Theater for Development or Theater for Social Development, related to bowl, but different. Quite different.

And they had a contortionist in the cast. So whenever they lose the audience, this guy come out, and he'd stick the lit cigarette between his toes, throw his leg over his back and smoke it.

There was call and response. It was very funny. And it was about monogamy.

Bill Cleveland: 00:11:59

Wow.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:12:00

It was really about monogamy, about being faithful. Because they didn't have the drugs yet, and they.

And if they didn't have the refrigeration and if they did, it was all too expensive to bring to communities like that. And so they were doing this work, and it knocked me out. Just knocked me out. And then I find out that, well, we keep talking to these guys later.

By the way, we got a grant from the Ford foundation to bring several of these folks to Bloomsburg for six months so we could learn more from them. And we also made a play called Under African Skies that would tour Pennsylvania elementary and middle schools. That's how we got to pay for it.

Thank you, Ford Foundation. So we were able to do that. But. So where did this all come from? Well, among other things.

Well, most of their funding came from usaid, the Agency for International Development, and it was part of that Bush campaign to battle AIDS in Africa. And it worked. These plays were literally reducing infection rate because it was changing people's behavior.

Bill Cleveland: 00:13:13

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:13:14

And it was so much damn fun. And so that's the first time Africa changed my life. And so came back and I.

You might not tell it now, but I really don't like, you know, talking to people asking for their stories. At the time, I was really quite introverted, which is why I think I got into theater, because I could memorize dialogue.

I didn't really have to do it. I was trying to, when they were here, think of how I might translate that into an American context.

And that led to creating Letters to the Editor, which was this play we made. Devised from 200 years of letters to local newspapers in and around Bloomsburg.

WVIA Announcer: 00:13:58

The Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble is Now approaching its 50th season, and the company has been realizing that goal of civic engagement with original plays like Letters to the Editor.

Gerard Straupnicki, one of the co founders, asks what could be more perfect project for a community centered professional theater than to revisit two centuries of life in its hometown and honestly present the townspeople's voices found in the town's newspaper? The play was a hit in the region and it's been performed all around the country.

Bill Cleveland: 00:14:31

That was From PBS affiliate WVIA's special program called American Dreams on the arts and civic engagement in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:14:44

And holy cow, we made that play. We workshopped it for a couple years, and ensemble can do that. When we finally showed it in its fullness.

And we'd made great work in Bloomsburg, but this was the first time the audience wouldn't leave the theater.

Bill Cleveland: 00:15:02

Whoa.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:15:02

They just wouldn't leave. We couldn't get them out.

Bill Cleveland: 00:15:05

Well, of course, you had something that belonged to them because it was their story.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:15:12

It was their story and it was reflecting their story. And so then I felt that power that I had felt. We had done it, we had made something. And then, you know, word gets out, we're on npr.

Scott Simon did the longest interview ever in his show with that. And then we're touring it and Simon and Schuster approaches us to make a book, a trade paperback. Cornerstone brings us to la.

It's all weaves, it's all. We perform it at Blue Lake, at dell'.

Bill Cleveland: 00:15:47

Arte.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:15:49

Later we perform it at, like, the National Society of Newspaper Editors. Oh, in Washington, D.C. for editors of all the newspapers, like in America, at a conference.

Bill Clinton was going to be there, and Secretary of State Albright and Shannon Lucid the astronaut. And we were the evening's entertainment.

And because for these editors, they're seeing something that they deal with every day through a light that gives a portrait, we're doing that.

Joe Carson sees it because I'm working on one of her normal plays, whispering to voices as her director, and we're having a great time as director, playwright. And she sees that. And Bill, she literally grabbed me by the collar and says, come here. Because she was working at Swamp Gravy.

Bill Cleveland: 00:16:40

Yeah.

And colk it a ground groundbreaking community devised and presented play that literally changed the social and economic story of that town, Colquitt, Georgia.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:16:52

And she felt like she needed a new director. And before long, I was her director for the last 10 years of her life, making pieces and projects when I learned.

And I was scared because I didn't know how to deal with avocational actors. Artistry was what I was trained to do through Northwestern and Alvinocross. And how do I deal with a peanut farmer? How do I do that?

ter in Bethlehem, this was in: 1999

And I called the Bills, Bill George at Touchstone and Bill Rausch, of course, who I already knew from network of ensemble theaters and said, can I come watch? And Bill Rausch, who was directing, said, no, but you can come help. And so he put me to work.

And so I just got thrown in the pond dealing with avocational actors. At the same time, my daughter was having a crisis. She said, you're into listening to people. Why don't you ever listen to me?

And so we made a teen project here called Gravity Hill. We ended up doing it twice. Of Teen Stories, the only prompt question was, what do you do in your spare time?

And we promised and delivered anonymity as best we could. And it was another situation where the audience wouldn't leave the theater. As a matter of fact, after the show, there were community meetings.

The Gravity Hill meetings came up with stuff to do. Skate parks, stuff like that.

Because there's gotta be more than alcohol and booze, because the stories were largely about alcohol, drugs, getting into trouble. And we got to do the site specific and a teen dance club, and then later at an empty mall store I had 80,000 square feet to stage in.

Bill Cleveland: 00:18:52

So were there a lot of kids in that audience? And were the kids from the community there to see that?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:18:57

Yeah, and. Well, There were about 40 or 50 kids in the play. Yes, including a GarageBand.

Bill Cleveland: 00:19:02

And their parents came, obviously, and their.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:19:05

Parents and their families came, and they were pretty shocked and astonished. And it was great. And it brought change. And so ended up doing a lot of this work. So for me, the impetus was born early.

As a kid growing up outside New York, seeing a potential in the art of performance and theater, feeling it un, unrealized going to Europe at the same time, watching Steppenwolf take their first steps, going to Africa, being inspired, and then trying to make that work. And then Joe and then John o' Neill and then, et cetera, et cetera.

Bill Cleveland: 00:19:45

It all fits together. Do you ever think of yourself as resurrecting the original seeds and intentions of the theater impulse in humans that goes back 10,000 years?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:20:00

Yeah, absolutely. And some projects bring you to that. And we gather around. We gather in a circle.

We might gather around a fire to share stories, and then that becomes performance. So you're very close to the beginning of it.

And 20 years after that, Steel Boundary, I got commissioned by Touchstone to do the sequel to it, which was called Prometheus Redux, and helped kick off their now annual festival Unbound, that they do every year, which is a gorgeous idea of using art to fire up community, a lightly curated big festival. And we used some. We had some of the same actors that were in the Steel Bound originally. And we follow the story of the character Bill George played.

He played Prometheus again, but now he's homeless, he's in a hospital and doing all the story work with medical people and with government and people working with the houseless. It was an amazing way to touch that. And that happened because the steelworkers said, we need to make another play. We're different now.

Bill Cleveland: 00:21:09

Yeah. Yes, of course. So do you know the play Lady Beth?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:21:14

I don't.

Bill Cleveland: 00:21:15

Well, on the other side of America, they were doing the same thing in Long beach that they were doing in your part of the world, closing a Bethlehem Steel plant. Yeah. And Susan Tanner.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:21:29

Really?

Bill Cleveland: 00:21:29

Yeah, Susan Tanner, following a very similar sort of verbatim theater kind of process. The plant was closed and the workers were wrecked.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:21:42

Yeah.

Bill Cleveland: 00:21:43

And Susie came into that and said, we gotta pick ourselves up. She was married to one of the workers. And they did that play.

And they were lucky enough to cross the paths of Bruce Springsteen, who took it on the Road.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:22:01

Really? Yes.

Bill Cleveland: 00:22:02

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:22:03

Want.

Bill Cleveland: 00:22:03

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:22:04

So I have a Bruce story.

Bill Cleveland: 00:22:06

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:22:07

When we were doing letters, I wanted to use contemporary music, and there was a sequence about unemployment, and I wanted to use the river. I wanted to use Bruce as the river. And it was clear by then that this piece was going to get attention and we couldn't just use it.

So I wrote to Bruce and said, can we use the river in this play? This is what we're doing. This is what the piece is. Would it be possible? And what would it cost?

And we got a fax from John Landau that says, the boss thinks it's a great idea. You can use it for this production whenever you do it forever, with no charge.

Bill Cleveland: 00:22:47

There you go. Wouldn't expect any less. Part two, two, Chemistry.

So I have a seminal question for you, and it's one of the questions that I ask often, because so many of the people that I talk to, they've done work like this in all disciplines with a rigor and intention the same that you describe. And they know deep in there, heart and soul, what is going to happen and why. And most people who are not in this forest are.

And because of the story that's been told about what art making is and what theater is. And, you know, you visit a theater, you don't stay there for hours afterwards having arguments or conversations. Right.

So what was happening 10,000 years ago when Aboriginal storymakers were around that ritual fire? And what is still going on with humans, with theater?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:24:09

Well, a lot depends upon how you do it. The intentionality and the rigor you bring to it, but also a real understanding. Joe Carson's brother was a neuroscientist. And so that's full.

It's all through spider speculations. The subtitle of her book is Physics and a Biophysics of Storytelling, and she goes into some pretty specific answers to that, Bill.

One is that we kind of have to understand how manipulative we're being when we're making theater. And I know manipulation is an awful word. People shy away from it. But we are controlling people's breathing. We're controlling the respiration.

If we want to laugh at a certain point, we structure it in such a way so everybody inhales at the same time and exhales with a laugh, exhales with that explosion of laughter. We're also controlling their heartbeat. So if you're building suspense in a sequence, a monologue or a letter or a scene, their heart speeds up.

Now, most of the studies on this have been done putting sensors and armrests in concert halls. But in concert halls, not only does the heartbeat respond to the music, the audience largely syncs up with their heartbeat.

So the same thing is happening here.

Joe quotes neuroscientists pointing out that we changing chemically inside that the tears from the same person, the tears of grief and the tears of joy are chemically not the same in the same human. So we're changing something.

When people after a piece about themselves with their own stories reflected are hugging each other and crying, the chemistry has changed in them from perhaps when they walked in. And more so there's the chemical reaction of. I think they're called neuropeptides, which are those chemical washes that we know about.

The flight and fight or fight response under great fear. Very powerful. Which is why it's in so much of our mass media.

Bill Cleveland: 00:26:18

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:26:18

And all our news broadcasting now. Pretty much news 11 breaking. Everything's freaking breaking. But that is to get that response going. Because it becomes addictive.

Bill Cleveland: 00:26:30

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:26:30

Ourselves build responders to it. But the same thing happens with love and joy. They're different responders. And so we fill our lives with that. We will be more responsive to that.

People watch Fox News because they're addicted to it. And it's built to addict you just like Oxy, just like any of the addictors are. So there's the biological thing that's going.

I also have a way of building projects. So I'm working with Joe when she's writing all this and we're talking about it endlessly. And I took a different tack.

I thought about what it would take to make sure your projects have impact. And to be clear, I don't think the impact is the play itself. The play is the catalyst for the community to make its own impact.

So like in Harlan County, Kentucky, we went from the highest oxy death rate in America to the lowest in Kentucky in eight years.

Bill Cleveland: 00:27:30

So you're going to have to. You've broached that you're going to have to tell that story because that's a seminal story.

So, Jerry, I know you've told this story a lot, so I hope you don't mind my sharing some background.

You partner with a community at the literal epicenter of the opioid crisis to create a community based theater piece that from my understanding, became a platform for people to share their grief and hope with each other. And I know it's impossible to say this without absolute certainty, but from every indication, the impact was enormous.

Community members told hard truths. Schools found a new way to address prevention and empathy. And policymakers started paying attention. Bottom line, more than just a story on the stage.

Have I got that right?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:28:24

Well, but the thing is, correlation is not the same as causality. And it's very hard to prove.

Bill Cleveland: 00:28:30

Oh, absolutely.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:28:30

But the people there who continue to do the plays believe that's what happened. But we can point to the changes that occurred in the community. Electing a new sheriff.

Bill Cleveland: 00:28:43

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:28:43

Changing law enforcement in the area because there was some corruption previously. Beginning of drug court, churches taking on teaching people how to do job interviews. And a clothing bank that people could go to. Stopping resisting.

Talking about.

Bill Cleveland: 00:28:59

Yes. The invisible visible.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:29:00

Oh, my gosh. In 04, the only time they talked about Oxy was at funerals because it was always the cause. And so the change happens over time in a place.

Bill Cleveland: 00:29:12

So the other piece of this is certainly, you go to a Broadway play, there are people that are very good at creating drama, both in design and in text. And I mean, it's extraordinary how. How sophisticated they can get. You have two things here that don't happen on Broadway.

A story that is of and with the audience and the people on stage. And number two is often the people on stage and the people in the audience are kin.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:29:49

They're connected in so many ways.

Bill Cleveland: 00:29:57

Part three, seven lessons. You know, Jerry, your work and the journey of it is kind of like one big school. So what have you learned?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:30:13

So.

So while Joe was working on the writing and I was being the director and later her co writer, and because she made me learn how to do that, I came up with what I call 7A principles by which I can help a community design a project, conduct a project, and assess a project. And the first, and this, you were just talking about this agency. And that is the people closest to the issue are the ones that make the decisions.

It's not only their story, it's their control over how their story is told, and they have to own it. Authenticity is the second, and that is discovering that as good a director as I am, I'm pretty good.

I can't get a really good professional actor to play a coal miner better than a coal miner can play a coal miner. They know how to work the stuff. They know what it is. They know what the relationships are. And so authenticity.

Bill Cleveland: 00:31:06

But you trust that which is counter to the way you were trained.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:31:10

Well, you have to absolutely count. But it's the same thing. I wouldn't ask.

I wouldn't ask one of my coal miner, wonderful performer actors to play Hamlet or do a play that requires 12 different dialects. They're going to do what they're going to do, but within that sphere of what they know, their lives, who's going to do it better?

Bill Cleveland: 00:31:31

Exactly.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:31:31

We don't travel to a museum to see reproductions. We don't. We want to go taste the real food. Artistry is really important. That's my third a. This is not a hierarchy. This is more like.

Well, you would remember this. It's more like a graphic equalizer. Whatever we bring to artistry has to be brought full bore.

Everything we've learned from all that training has to come up. But understanding that artistry is going to be culturally specific. My sense of artistry and timing might not work in Uganda, as I learned.

As we made a play and brought it to the National Theater in Kampala. Or. I once almost got killed by a bluegrass band because we had a bluegrass band in the first Higher Ground.

And we're building this and we needed a break because we had a really hard moment and we're going to something comic. So I asked for a breakdown.

And Orbi Hunley, who wrote down in Harlan county, he's one of the great bluegrass performers, was the band, and they did this great breakdown and I was like, that's perfect, Orbee, but can it be a little bit shorter? Maybe you could cut out the mandolin solo. I didn't know squat about bluegrass, clearly. And they about all quit.

Bill Cleveland: 00:32:45

Yes, they did. Absolutely. I understand this completely.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:32:49

And so then it takes humility.

Bill Cleveland: 00:32:51

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:32:51

To understand how desperately wrong you can get.

Bill Cleveland: 00:32:57

Yes, exactly.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:32:58

I can get. But. But artistry can. Tempered by the fact that what I know is artistry is primarily English speaking, Western European.

Bill Cleveland: 00:33:09

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:33:10

Accuracy. We better get it right. If we're talking about something that's a shared experience, we got to get it right. We can make anonymous lots of things.

Number of siblings, when it happened, where it happened for family story. But if it's talking about like a flood, you better get the date right.

Bill Cleveland: 00:33:25

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:33:26

And the storm right. Then it just. If you get something important wrong.

Bill Cleveland: 00:33:30

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:33:31

You're done.

Bill Cleveland: 00:33:31

They're going to question the whole thing. Exactly.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:33:33

But if the cast. If you have a cast of 50, 80, 100 people and they have agency, they'll tell you. Yes, they will try it in rehearsal. It gets cut.

Bill Cleveland: 00:33:41

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:33:41

We wouldn't say it that way. That's not how it happened. Let me tell you how it happened. And everything changes. Let's see. That was accuracy. Audacity. The Greeks loves. They talk.

Arceau talks about spectacle, which we normally see as big Las Vegas stuff.

Bill Cleveland: 00:33:57

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:33:57

But audacity is just seeing something done in a way you've never seen it before. Having a five year old girl give a monologue, that's audacious.

Bill Cleveland: 00:34:06

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:34:07

Or like those wonderful folks at Monte Bazaro and Art Spot doing a piece about land loss on the bayou with the performers in boats. That's audacious.

Bill Cleveland: 00:34:19

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:34:20

That's audacity. And then audiences knowing who your audience is, who it's for. John o' Neill always would say, who is it for?

And what do you want them to take away from you?

Bill Cleveland: 00:34:29

Yep, exactly.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:34:30

And I can do kids shows, but I'm not going to bring that audience to my King Lear.

Bill Cleveland: 00:34:35

Right.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:34:36

And last is accessibility. We're never going to build a beloved community if people are systematically left out of the space.

Bill Cleveland: 00:34:46

And every one of those violated is a deal breaker when you're.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:34:53

Exactly.

Bill Cleveland: 00:34:54

When you're in a community. And even if you hadn't created seven A's out of it, they would raise their ugly head the minute that you cross one of those lines.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:35:06

And Bill, this was created because I think I screwed up on every one of them.

Every one of them is a diary of my failure or our failure and healing through it to get it done, to make the work happen in a way we want it to happen.

But nothing is more fulfilling to me than to watch change happen, to watch a community come together on flood strategy that hadn't come together in 150 years.

Bill Cleveland: 00:35:35

Yeah, yeah. That's Bloomberg story, right?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:35:38

Flood stories and watch it happen kind.

Bill Cleveland: 00:35:41

vastating floods of September: 2011

Well, Scott, the play is based on roughly 160 interviews with those affected by the floodwaters that washed out Bloomsburg. Those with the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble say it's a way to educate, entertain and heal.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:36:08

They delivered us 6,700 trays of vegetable lasagna. Each tray could serve 10 people.

Bill Cleveland: 00:36:17

These actors are part of the latest original play at the Alvina Krause Theatre in Bloomsburg. And they're telling real stories of the.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:36:24

Hardships faced after the September floods of.

Bill Cleveland: 00:36:27

2011 washed out much of the town. Written and directed by Gerard Straupnicki.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:36:32

And then had the political leaders say, we want to thank you for that because every time we had a flood before then, there were these huge arguments about what to do about it. But because of the story circles.

You did hundreds of people, 80 people in the play, thousands of people singing it, redefining Bloomsburg, from Bloomsburg to Floodsburg, that this is going to happen, it's going to happen more often. Understanding what the dynamics of it are. True story. The debate was done.

Bill Cleveland: 00:36:58

And what you're doing, you're handing people a vehicle, a process, a practice. And the thing that, to me, that is most revolutionary. Okay. And also as old school as you can get, is that, in essence, you're not the 76 trombones.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:37:20

Right?

Bill Cleveland: 00:37:20

No.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:37:21

It feels that way sometimes.

Bill Cleveland: 00:37:22

Yes, I'm sure it does. But at the end of the day, the play is not the thing. It's important. It's obviously a foundation, but it's just the beginning.

And once people believe that, because we've all been trained, that we go into a building, there's a stage, the play happens, and then it's over. Right.

But in the course of making it possible for this kind of theater to happen, you have introduced people to each other in ways they have never known. There are strangers that have become the closest friends.

And many of the secrets that tyrannize a community, the closely held silences that are there, are released in a way that is probably both challenging and often healing.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:38:14

Exactly right.

Bill Cleveland: 00:38:15

And finally, the thing to me that is just, I don't know, makes my hair stand. That is, whatever the hell you're doing creates a critical mass.

So in some circumstances, you do leave and they stay and they continue with the impetus and the momentum because of that thing that happens. I'm going to quote you here. The more people who know they matter, the less people fall into despair.

And the less people fall into despair, the more they will find ways to be healthy with each other.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:38:55

Did I say that?

Bill Cleveland: 00:38:56

Yes, you did. And that's a healing circle.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:38:59

That is a healing circle, but it's also more. I was really fortunate this summer to be invited to be part of the National Institute of Directing and Ensemble Creation in Minneapolis.

And it was a great group of.

Bill Cleveland: 00:39:12

People at Pangea, among the people.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:39:14

Yeah, yeah, at Pangea. And Art to Action and just fabulous people, many of whom I know, you will know.

But one of the people there was Lori woolery, who for 10 years has been making the public works projects happen with the Public Theater in New York, in Central Park.

And one of the things we talked about is that not only does the project, the play, not start when you arrive at the theater, when you're negotiating with community and building involvement and talking to the folks who run the park, or talking with the folks in this church and how to get their choir. All of that is the work.

Bill Cleveland: 00:39:54

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:39:54

Not like that stuff you have to do before you get into rehearsal.

Bill Cleveland: 00:39:58

Yeah. You're making community.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:40:00

All that negotiation is the work.

Bill Cleveland: 00:40:04

Absolutely.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:40:05

And. And once, I don't know, you enter this monastery of this work, then that becomes clear.

Early on, before I got dragged into this, I think I. I felt, oh, but you have to do all this stuff because we actually get to do the work. But no, all that stuff is it. And making something in and of community, our world right now.

Well, we're in a celebrity culture where folks know what the Kardashians had for breakfast. I don't need to know what they had for breakfast, but you can know that.

But what that does is also disempowers everybody that doesn't have the spotlight on them. It makes them feel less valuable, less important, less able to make change, less capable of even adjusting their neighborhood. Yes, Right.

And so one of these projects does is it throws that spotlight. And even if it's just a couple hundred people watching or 50 people watching, it's going to make a difference in how one views oneself.

Bill Cleveland: 00:41:13

So here's my soapbox. We live in a country that has created an iconic idea for itself.

We call it democracy, but people have completely forgotten what it is or why it is or how it is. So my friend Harry Boit, who is a democracy maven, basically says, it's never, ever been anything other than a practice. It's a way of life.

And if you have a country in which people look at you as though you're crazy when you say something like, let's do democracy, let's practice democracy, let's have a democratic behavior, they have no idea what you're talking about, and that's just not good.

But what you're creating is not just community, but the messy process that you go through when you make these things is in fact the musculature and the sinew that needs to be exercised in the practice of democracy. And when people actually discover that it's an elixir, it is energizing.

It is the reason that democracy was exciting and people fought a revolutionary war for it, because they knew the difference. Right. So my final question. I think we'll all agree that we are supremely challenged in this country and around the world.

But that elixir, I think, is important. The practice is there, the muscles are there, the history is there. How do we introduce this into this new odd force field we're confronting?

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:43:08

That's my challenge. And I do know that this stuff works. It's not theoretical to me.

I've watched communities alter themselves, change because of using performance to crack open conversation and realizing we can make something pretty damn beautiful together, funny, exciting, musically. Great that we can do that. But I get stymied in how to scale it up.

Bill Cleveland: 00:43:33

Mm.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:43:33

I'm stymied there. I'm a little stuck. But I'm working.

I've got a project going here in central Pennsylvania where one of the things we're doing is I'm mostly doing, largely doing trainings of people to do story circle teaching. John's methodology.

Bill Cleveland: 00:43:50

Yeah.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:43:50

And now in central Pennsylvania, there's a couple story circles happening every week.

Bill Cleveland: 00:43:55

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:43:56

That I'm not doing. I get the transcripts because I'm supposed to make a play out of it.

Bill Cleveland: 00:44:00

Yes.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:44:01

But I'm very interested in how. How that is building in and of itself, civic empathy, how that works. And maybe that can be a strategy that can be played out.

Bill Cleveland: 00:44:14

That, my friend, is the next episode. So to be continued. Thank you.

Gerry Stropnicky: 00:44:23

Thank you.

Bill Cleveland: 00:44:25

And thanks to you listeners for lending your ears. I'm sure you'll agree that was quite a ride.

From literally drumming up audiences in Zambian townships to helping a Kentucky community confront the opioid crisis with courage and creativity, Jerry's stories are a powerful reminder of what happens when community and the power story come together with the discipline of craft and respectful intention. Here are a few things that rose up for me. First, I think we're reminded once again that theater can be a powerful tool for transformation.

You know, performance isn't just about entertainment. It can be a catalyst for deep listening, healing, new ideas, and most importantly, demonstrable and sustained change.

When people manifest and see their own stories in the flesh, something really shifts. Next, another reminder that the power we're talking about here is in the process. It's not just about the play.

It's about everything that happens to get there. The trust built, the voices shared, the conversation sparked, and all that hard sweat and love infused work, that that's where the real magic is.

And finally, I think it's important to keep in mind that community ownership is just not an option. It's the secret sauce in that elixir we were talking about.

From rural Pennsylvania to Harlan County, Kentucky, Jerry shows that when people have agency over how their stories are told, the result isn't just more truthful, it's way more powerful. So before I leave, there are a couple things I wanted to note.

First, most of the theater historical references that popped up in our conversation will also be referenced in our show notes with plenty of links for further exploration.

I also wanted to point out that the story about the Bethlehem Steelworker's play Lady Beth is shared in much greater depth in our Art is change episodes 59 and 60 and will also be linked in our show notes. Art is Change is a product of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the Maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235.

So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. Once again, please know this episode has been 100% human.