Thank you for joining us at California: The Tempest

“Cornerstone cofounder and playwright Alison Carey’s clever ear not only recreates the iambic lilt of the original play, but freshens it with a Walt Whitmanesque, lusty zest for life.”
– LA Weekly

“Weaving some of the Bard’s text into the script, Carey lets virtually all of the characters do some California dreaming.” – LA Times

“By bringing theater to towns that wouldn’t otherwise experience Shakespeare, Cornerstone touches hundreds of lives in a positive way.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“Cornerstone has become the gold standard for a now-established brand of socially engaged, community-embedded theatre.” – American Theatre Magazine

California: The Tempest (Bridge Tour)

From 2004 through 2013 Cornerstone created plays across California through our Institute Summer Residency program. We spent a month each summer living and working with diverse California communities, and brought along other artists, activists and educators from all over the country to collaborate and make community-engaged theater.

Cornerstone is celebrating a decade of Summer Residencies with a new production, California: The Tempest, uniting these 10 California communities onstage and touring to each location.

Take the journey…

Join Cornerstone Theater Company for an epic, year-long, ten-city, decade-in-the making, once-in-a-lifetime, world premiere theatrical road-trip across the greatest state in the nation! Journey with us from the downtown Los Angeles Arts District to Arvin, Lost Hills, Grayson & Westley, Pacoima, East Salinas, Fowler, Holtville, Eureka, San Francisco and then back to Downtown L.A. where it all began as each of these ten communities contributes to writing the play they inspire.

In California: The Tempest, “What’s past is prologue,” as playwright Alison Carey’s adaptation of The Tempest meets the challenges of the Golden State head-on in this traveling experience that conjures love, disaster, revenge, forgiveness & music (all that you would expect from Shakespeare!); mixed with earthquakes, drought, overdevelopment, food equity, state politics, fracking and immigration policy (all that you would expect from California!) as Prosper, Minerva, Caliban and Californians from across the state yearn to find the commonality in our diversity and imagine a healthy and inclusive future for California!

Illustration by Nephelie Andonyadis / Design by Ray Tejada.

California: The Tempest is made possible in part by the Ahmanson Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Driscoll’s, the Ford Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the MAP Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Surdna Foundation, the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation and Wilbur-Ellis.