The Conciliation Project Marks 10th Anniversary, Celebrates at Edinburgh Fringe Festival

By Tom Gresham

Courtney McCullough and Nick Webster first appeared in the play “uncle tom: deconstructed” two years ago as sophomores in the Theater Department of the VCU School of the Arts. Both acknowledge they were wary at first of being in the piece, which confronts racism and the troublesome racial history of the United States with a headlong directness that can be unsettling. Actors employ the charged façade of black face minstrelsy during the performance, and then discuss the play and the issues it raises with the audience afterward. Despite their initial fears, though, McCullough and Webster found that their work in “uncle tom” was nothing less than life-altering.

“It was a spiritual awakening,” McCullough said. “It was like seeing the light.”

Webster said, “I’d never seen art used in such a productive way to create healing. It’s the most rewarding art form I know.”

McCullough and Webster appeared in “uncle tom” again this month in four performances at the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. The festival, the largest theater festival in the world with thousands of performances from artists from dozens of countries, provides a fitting capstone for the first 10 years of The Conciliation Project, the social justice-focused theater company that VCU theater professor Tawnya Pettiford-Wates founded soon after the first-ever performance of “uncle tom” a decade ago in Seattle, where she was teaching at the time.  

The Conciliation Project, which is a nonprofit, has created and performed works with an impressive prolificacy, taking on such topics as bullying in schools, equal access to fair housing, homelessness, the history of the American Indian, the Japanese-American internment during World War II, the prison industrial complex, ethnic and racial stereotypes in mass media, immigration and border control and America’s racial history.

The company increasingly is forming partnerships with community groups, such as The Daily Planet, The Healing Place, the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities and Housing Opportunities Made Equal. It also produces workshops, training sessions and other programs for local schools, businesses and organizations.

The Theatre VCU community, including students, faculty and alumni, has become an integral part of the Conciliation Project mission since Pettiford-Wates moved to Richmond to join the VCU faculty in 2005. Students have taken especially active roles, such as in the case of Webster, who is the current president of the company’s executive committee, and McCullough, who is the committee’s secretary and treasurer.

Several VCU students and graduates are among the cast for the Edinburgh showings of “uncle tom,” and Pettiford-Wates said before the trip it promised to be a memorable experience.

“To put on this play in front of an international audience like the one at this festival is going to be amazing, and it’s going to be particularly amazing for our students,” said Pettiford-Wates, who currently serves as the company’s artistic director and conceptualist.

Webster said the Edinburgh show, which is part of the International College Theatre Festival within the Fringe Festival, provides an opportunity for the company to reflect on its first 10 years and to look forward to the next 10, returning to the play that launched the mission as it is performed in its most prominent setting yet.

“It’s the right place, the right step right now for the Conciliation Project,” Webster said.

In Edinburgh, the cast and crew of “uncle tom” will need to do some hustling off the stage in order to attract an audience. Edinburgh is so heavily populated with entrancing entertainment options during the Fringe Festival that performers turn into marketers, taking to the street and elsewhere to try to sell their production to the public.

“They’ve got to do everything, soup-to-nuts, while they’re there,” Pettiford-Wates said. “It’s going to be a real vaudevillian type of experience for them.”

Pettiford-Wates said that she watched three or four shows every day during the five days she attended the festival last year and found the city’s pervasive enthusiasm infectious and invigorating. “The culture of performance is everywhere there,” she said.

McCullough said that she was excited to be a part of it.

“I’m very grateful that I can do this and embrace it fully,” McCullough said. “It’s an opportunity to strike up conversations with other artists and to make connections and to be exposed to so much art.”

“Uncle tom” is a particularly intriguing play from the Conciliation Project repertory to play for an international crowd. Although the play is concerned with a distinctly American struggle with race, it is a struggle that other cultures have also faced, Webster said, and he believes that audience members in Edinburgh will view the play with their own experiences in mind.

Webster said “uncle tom” forces viewers to question themselves and their assumptions. Cast members speak their lines to the audience, rather than to each other, heightening the sense of confrontation and the audience’s direct involvement. Responses from audience members range from “crying appreciation to denial.”

“What we’re attempting to do is tell the truth,” Pettiford-Wates said. “Sometimes the truth is difficult to look at.”

“Uncle tom” ends with a discussion period when audience members are given an opportunity to interact with cast members, discussing their reaction to the play and to the questions that are raised. Trained facilitators manage the discussion period. McCullough said the “comments sometimes can be difficult. It’s because this work is so powerful.”

Pettiford-Wates said the Conciliation Project chiefly works to use theater to explore issues that people too often are reluctant to explore, often to the detriment of any efforts toward progress. She said that naming a problem and defining it is an important step toward solving it.

“These plays speak about these topics in a way that they’re not usually spoken about,” Pettiford-Wates said.

Pettiford-Wates said any criticism that The Conciliation Project focuses only on the problems of the United States is right on – because that is the point.

“It’s like if there’s a ticking under the hood of this great car that you love,” Pettiford-Wates said. “We want to focus on that ticking, not all of the great stuff about the car, because that ticking is what needs to be addressed. We’re like mechanics figuring that ticking out.”

Webster said, “We talk a lot about how far we’ve come and not enough about how far we need to go.”

Cast members engage in a great deal of research to prepare for their roles, ensuring that they understand their characters in the context of the broad, societal issues that the plays inhabit.

“You tap into more than you traditionally do when you prepare for these plays,” McCullough said.

Still, the Conciliation Project’s plays, no matter how heavy the theme or subject matter, are designed to be works of art first. They are created to engage the audience with characters and narrative and to get them invested in the story.

“We attempt to put some fun into it by making it theatrical – cracking some jokes along the way, singing some songs – so that when we scratch the wound it’s not going to hurt so much,” Pettiford-Wates said.

Webster and McCullough agreed that the Conciliation Project’s growth and impact over the past decade is directly tied to Pettiford-Wates.

“There’s not another person in my life who radiates such passion and enthusiasm for the work that she has decided to do,” Webster said.

McCullough agreed, saying “She is a lioness. She exudes warmth and compassion and honesty. She’s a wonderful human being, not just a great mentor and teacher.”

Conciliation Project members see a great deal of work ahead of them, and an infinite array of topics to examine in future works. The burgeoning relationships the company has formed in the community are promising, and company members would like to start a repertory company that tours and performs the plays in the Conciliation Project canon.

“I see a lot of big things happening for the Conciliation Project in the next five to 10 years,” McCullough said. “We have a big support system in Richmond that has taken a lot of work to cultivate.”

Pettiford-Wates is proud of the way her project has evolved.

“The energy of the people involved has really sustained it and brought it forward,” Pettiford-Wates said. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”