New York Street Theatre Caravan Poster for the Production of ‘Molly Maguire’, 1980

Description

The New York Street Theatre Caravan (NYSTC), formerly the City Street Theater, was a New York City-based socialist theater collective. First conceived by Marketa Kimbrell and Richard Levy in 1967, the company was founded on the principle of bringing theater to underprivileged and geographically isolated communities. NYSTC performed plays, puppet shows, skits, and concerts with themes meaningful to their audiences, such as racial inequality, workers’ rights, homelessness, and other sociopolitical issues.

In 1968, the company purchased an International Harvester flatbed truck, which they used as their stage, and began performing in the ghettos of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Soon after, they began touring the country. They performed for migrant workers in camps in Texas, California, and Mexico; on Navajo, Sioux, Crow, and Cheyenne reservations; for rural southern farm towns; union halls; coal mining communities in Appalachia; schools, community centers, and churches; and prisons and detention centers, including Davidson County Prison in Tennessee, Attica, North Carolina’s Central Prison, and other correctional facilities in New York, Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Georgia. In Nicaragua they performed at the Theater Popular in Managua, in barrios, prison camps, Salvadorian refugee camps, and for the Sandinista Popular Army. NYSTC held free drama workshops in schools, community centers, churches, universities, and prisons, including the Queens House of Detention for Men in New York City and NYSTC’s rehearsal and performance spaces in Coney Island and St. Peter’s Cathedral in Chelsea. NYSTC also played in professional theaters and festivals nationally and abroad, especially from the 1980s onward. The company toured internationally in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, and in several countries in Central America.

Many of NYSTC’s plays were written by Kimbrell, as well as other company members. The company’s repertoire was thoroughly developed by the mid-1970s and remained relatively consistent throughout NYSTC’s history. The plays were frequently readapted for different audiences and performance spaces, and sometimes to adhere with a particular actor’s style. Production titles include Lorca-Poems, Puppets, Plays and the Life of a Man; The Mother; Gold; Molly McGuire; Hard Time Blues; The Fugitives; Street Corner Cabaret; Blues in Rags in B Sharp; and Sacco & Vanzetti, for which they won a 1977 Obie Award for sustained excellence. They also produced an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule and their version of The Grapes of Wrath, titled Bitter Harvest. Some of the themes in their plays included Irish struggle under British rule in the United States (Molly McGuire), homelessness (The Mother, Blues in Rags in B Sharp), racial inequality (Hard Time Blues), and the mistreatment of animals (The Fugitives).