Featured Member Project

Featured Member

Actors Joseph Lane, Kameshia Duncan, and Karen Stephens perform Thomas Gibbons' play, A House with No Walls.  Photo credit: Florida Stage, photo by Sig Bokalders.

Last winter, people all over Palm Beach County, FL were getting together to talk. Though it may seem mundane, the nature of the conversations was anything but ordinary. Through a collaborative effort between community organizations, participants used Florida Stage’s production of Thomas Gibbons' play, A House with No Walls, to break the ice on the topic of race and ethnic relations in South Florida. Gibbon’s play depicts a clash that erupts when a new museum glorifying American liberty is slated to be built on a site where George Washington's slave quarters once stood. The discussions were not intended to spark enormous change on a large scale, but rather they aimed to simply put people together. A diverse cross-section of the community met in small groups to talk about their personal experiences—where they have been and where they want to go.

Participants in the conversations, known as Study Circles, received discounted tickets to the show, and then participated in the conversations, which were free to all who attended. Each group organically came up with a purpose for meeting, which ranged from sharing a multicultural meal together to affecting legislation. 

Ten groups, organized into Study Circles by a local organization called Toward a More Perfect Union, met weekly after seeing the Florida Stage production. Toward a More Perfect Union volunteers facilitated the conversations as an extension of their efforts to improve relations in local multicultural neighborhoods. Palm Beach County Cultural Council served as the broker of the relationship between Toward a More Perfect Union and Florida Stage, recognizing the power of the arts to generate authentic conversations about difficult issues. Collaboration among key players in a community is one of the fundamental roles of local arts organizations, and the Study Circles project is proof of the impact those collaborations can have. One participant said of his involvement: "This was an extraordinary opportunity to have a dialogue with a diverse group of people in a safe environment about a very sensitive subject—race relations. It was draining and energizing at the same time."