At Home OnStage: From the Frontlines

(I don't often leave this open for others to post on; but my friend Josh Kauffman and his merry band of brothers & sisters did an amazing thing recently. This performance group put up a showcase event with New York City's homeless taking the mic and having a chance to get their story heard. I was so touched when I found out that another one of my good friends was involved with this, that I offered them this space to do some first hand reporting of how they thought the event went. What follows is Mr. Kauffman retelling his story. JS)

First Hand/Front Line

by Josh Kauffman

It started with just an idea, with someone telling me I should look deeper into my relationship with New York's homeless community. I'd been coming to terms with how jaded I'd been regarding the homeless, especially the subway and street corner panhandlers, and realizing how much I'd neglected the human being inside each of the people I'd been so successfully ignoring. I developed the idea to present these people with an outlet for expression, to allow people to see the stories they wanted to tell.

After circulating the idea among my friends and letting it take root, we generated a community of volunteers to start the project in motion.We were very improvisational as we developed our strategies and goals. We knew we wanted a show, we knew we wanted homeless performers; beyond that, we were forced to generate the questions that needed answers, and then generate those answers. We lost a few volunteers early on because of the spontaneity with which we approached the task, but the corps that remained was both dedicated and resourceful.

The plan was that we would create workshop teams of two to four volunteers. Each team would approach a community center, shelter, or some other service provider, and present our mission statement with an offer to conduct theater workshops in their space, for anyone who wished to participate. With enough teams at work, each with their own handful of participants, over the few weeks' prep time we allotted ourselves we would generate more than enough material to fill a sixty to seventy-five minute program.

While that part of the process was being developed, we were at work securing a venue and connecting all the other dots. We wanted to feed the participants and the audience, and we needed to start the publicity machine working, and it was a lot of balls to keep in the air at once. That we were able to do so, and that the people we approached for help were so accommodating and generous, were more than a minor miracle. A church in Midtown donated their space, two different restaurants offered food, Ben and Jerry's gave us ice cream, and a great photographer friend of mine recruited a friend of hers to put together some amazing publicity pictures. We're all flying high.

In the end, we had one team, usually a team of one person, working at Project ORE at a synagogue on 23rd Street. Instead of 'street' homeless, our participants came almost exclusively from shelter communities, though one of our poets had been on the streets for nearly five years. Both in terms of our volunteers and the participants we were courting, availability was always a sticky issue. The venues we approached were open for limited windows during the day, and most of the participants could only be there for those limited hours before they scattered to other obligations.

Right up till opening night, it wasn't fully clear who would be showing up to perform, or what they would show us when they did get on stage. Our commitment was to give a good experience to everyone who arrived, on both sides of the curtain, so we smiled and kept encouraging and working.We achieved our goals, for both performances, though very differently each night.

On Friday, we were short three of our expected performers, and one man came who wasn't expected at all. It was a bit of a shuffle to make sure the show was complete and on schedule, but we presented a complete program and had more than enough food afterward to make for a good reception. The second performance, we actually had two extra performers, and had to wonder whether the program would be too long. We fielded some hurt feelings and misunderstandings as we trimmed the bill a bit - we'd love to have a two hour show, but we can't overstay our welcome at our free performance space.

In the end, the church indulged us with extra time, we had a longer and better show, the audience was moved to laughter and tears, and the participants were stoically grateful and pleased.The greatest thing for me was to see the new connections that got made. Our team leader, Casey, made some fast friendships among the performers she'd been working with, which have endured even after the curtain came down on "At Home on Stage."

The audience engaged the performers, and without fail came away with smiles or looks of wonder on their faces. And to see new friendships formed, the excitement for what had been created and the energy it took to make it all work... I mean, it was totally worth it.

Here I am writing this book report or history lesson about How It All happened, but in a nutshell: We wanted to present an opportunity to perform, to people who have not been offered that opportunity, and perhaps didn't even know they could have it. We wanted to present these people to an audience of their peers and mine, to create new dialogues and levels of understanding. We did that. And then we fed everyone lasagna and salad and chicken fingers.