Plays and stories from four decades of Roadside Theater

It’s commonplace today to hear that democracy’s future is at risk. And as social media feeds us our daily diet of rancorous extremism, there is a growing recognition that culture is a central battleground for democracy’s survival. What is missing, and what we need, is a cultural strategy to fight back.

The authoritarian Right has long understood that culture is upstream from politics. In his bid for the presidential nomination at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas, Pat Buchanan put it this way:

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in the country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. (Buchanan 1992)

Buchanan’s declaration of the culture war was a direct challenge to the victories of the civil rights movement and all the other social justice movements that had sprung from it. There, too, culture played a central role. Beginning in the 1960s, artists across the US realized their communities shared the common plight of being exploited for profit by a relative few in powerful positions. They also recognized that prominent in the exploiter’s playbook was the plan to replace a community’s deep, distinctive histories and traditions with shallow, generic stereotypes. In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o described this tactic as “the cultural bomb,” intended “to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves” (1986:28). Once communities stopped believing in themselves, they could easily be played off against one another in the time-tested winning strategy of divide and conquer.

Dudley Cocke

John O’Neal, 1940-2019, helped build a theater movement that supported voting rights and crossed cultural frontiers. His work is part of a new book featuring the plays of Appalachia’s Roadside Theater. Roadside and O’Neal collaborated for decades on plays that built common ground across race and geography while honoring individual cultural identity. This is A.B. Spellman’s essay on that story, republished in the Daily Yonder.

A.B. Spellman, former deputy chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

BIG STONE GAP, Va. — The Southwest Virginia Walk of Fame will add 12 new members at the 15th Annual “Gathering in the Gap” Music Festival on May 27.

New inductees include Ron Short, musician, playwright, composer, and performer, from Dickenson County. For more than 35 years, he traveled locally, nationally and internationally with other members of Roadside Theater, telling the stories, performing in the plays and singing the songs of his Appalachian heritage, always with the goal of teaching others to value and share their own stories. His original plays and other work from Roadside Theater have been recently published in a two-volume collection entitled Art in a Democracy for which he also served as an editor. In April of 2023, Ron won the Tennessee Songwriters Competition out of over 1,000 entries. After residing in Big Stone Gap for 38 years, Ron now lives in Duffield, and enjoys playing in his band, Ron Short and the Possum Playboys.

David McGee