Theater as a ‘Cornerstone’ of Community

A group of carefully selected people lives and works together in close quarters for months, video cameras rolling. No, it’s not “The Real World” or “Road Rules.”

It’s the genuinely stirring “Cornerstone,” a 90-minute documentary about a tour across America by Cornerstone Theater Company, which subsequently moved to Los Angeles.

The Cornerstone company is known for surrounding its professional core with ordinary people from the neighborhoods where it performs its friskily updated, site-specific versions of the classics. For this 1991 tour, talented but untrained actors from 12 of the troupe’s previous productions in small towns were paid to join Cornerstone for the summer in an alfresco adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” After rehearsals and an opening in Norcatur, Kan., the tour traveled by bus to many of the participants’ hometowns, visiting 35 states.

The tour imposed a natural trajectory on Stephen Ives and Michael Kantor’s film. The group’s “Hey, let’s put on a show” spirit and its diversity across generations and economic classes is a refreshing contrast to the repetitious navel-gazing among young and well-funded adults that characterizes “The Real World.”

Three of the nonprofessionals emerge indelibly: waitress and single mom Wanda Daniels of Montgomery, W.Va.; day laborer Rod Prichard of Marmarth, N.D.; and former track star and ex-convict Edret Brinston of Port Gibson, Miss. The company’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, also comes to life, both as cheerleader and in his occasional role as a stern taskmaster.

Problems arise--Prichard falls in love and then falls off the wagon, the company runs short on funds and the actors resist accepting pay cuts, the bus breaks down. In a brief epilogue, we learn there are limits on how permanently these peoples’ lives were transformed. Still, as we see the troupe giving its final performance on the Mall in Washington, the company’s vision of an idealized American community, however ephemeral, is hard to resist.

* “Cornerstone” airs Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on HBO Signature.