December 22, 2025
Looking ahead, together. Can you support Cornerstone today?
Dear Friend,
Daylight is sneaking back in, gifts are being wrapped or worried about, and amidst the full spectrum of feelings that the holiday season brings about – we’ve been thinking about kitchen tables, dressing rooms, libraries, and gardens.
We’ve been asking people – where in your life do you experience equitable, vulnerable, and intimate human connection?
It’s an interesting inventory of responses so far:
-The kitchen before and sometimes during a dinner party but not really the dinner table itself.
-The dressing room with its panoramic mirrored wall, and people in various states of transformation – everyone readying themselves for what’s about to happen, for what they’ll make together, and chatting across long silences.
-The quiet circle of seekers in the reading room at the local library or the back room of a bookshop.
-Tending to the earth with friends, strangers, and everyone in between.
We’re writing to you from a kind of symbolic dressing room – at the close of this difficult and beautiful year in Los Angeles, and the beginning of a new one that’s yet to be defined; between holidays, and all the accomplishments of the year that’s almost passed, and the universe of possibilities for the year ahead. Like everyone, it seems, we’re stepping forward into uncertainty – but we’re doing so grounded in our purpose: to create theater out of intimate and equitable human connection. We’re going to try some new things this coming year. We’re asking ourselves, what is a theater-making process that moves with the fluid and joyful curiosity of the kitchen, the quiet co-presence of the reading room, or the humble collective labor of the community garden?
We’re starting the year with a radical, queer adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Assemblywomen with students at California State University Long Beach and then we’re turning towards fire recovery. Much of this coming year will be invested in creating the container for a piece of theater that tells stories of rebuilding, rebirth, and renewal after the tragedy of the Eaton and Palisades fires. Our work is transformative when it’s made from a place of intimate and honest connection and so we might also start a knitting circle, a quilting club, a reading group, or perhaps all three, and a vegetable garden too.
To build this next chapter—these circles, conversations, and the new work rising from fire recovery—we need the support of those who believe in community-rooted theater. If you’re able, we invite you to make an end-of-year gift. Your contribution keeps these spaces of imagination and connection alive.
With Gratitude,
Megan and Sunder
