Project Description
City Theatre's mission is to provide an artistic home for the development and production of contemporary plays of substance and ideas that engage and challenge diverse audiences. For each play produced (five per season), City Theatre identifies an organization or agency whose constituents can benefit from creatively expressing their concerns. These community people relate their work to City Theatre's by paralleling the themes and ideas in the City Theatre mainstage production with the issues they face. Dialogue about contemporary issues takes place in the process of creating the work and in post-performance talk-backs both on City Theatre's mainstage and in the community where the residency took place.

For example, City Theatre staged an arrangement of Woody Guthrie's songs and poetry called Woody Guthrie's American Song. Guthrie's compassionate understanding of the American consciousness provided the backdrop for an Outreach project with Just Harvest, an agency of the Hunger Project. Women residents of Pittsburgh housing projects who use Welfare Services were given voice to tell their own stories through the residency project and created a play about welfare reform. The play has been performed at City Theatre, in the community, and before the state legislature to educate about these women's perspectives regarding welfare reform.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities
In the residency project, a professional playwright worked with community-based participants to first improvise and then rehearse their own plays. The richest exchange about issues occurred in the process of creating the play. City Theatre also regularly holds talk-backs after mainstage plays that lend themselves to discussion about issues and/or artistic matters. After City Theatre's staging of Fires in the Mirror a Black-Jewish organization took on discussions stimulated by the play. After David Mamet's play Oleanna, a panel, including representatives of women's and men's groups, and humanities scholars discussed issues of sexual harassment. This particular panel taught City Theatre organizers that discussions do not necessarily have to involve the artists, particularly if the discussion intends to focus more on issues as opposed to artistry. Post-performance discussions were often led by City Theatre's artistic director for outreach.

Information Sources
Program materials, City Theatre; interview, Marc Masterson, producing director, City Theatre.