Creative Corps grant fuels soul-stirring new theater production in Palm Desert

If one local theater company has its way, a play about Palm Springs' much-talked-about Section 14 will further illuminate a hot topic issue. Green Room Theatre Company is up for the challenge.

Decades ago, city officials deemed the Section 14 neighborhood an unsavory blot on the landscape. In the mid-1960s, in a push to promote tourism, Black, Latino and other families were forced out of their homes, which were later destroyed, some of them with personal belongings still inside.

Palm Springs delivered a public apology in 2021, but survivors and other advocates are speaking out.

The "Know Before You Go" campaign has generated more support for reparation. It's also turned heads — literally. Perhaps you've seen the billboards coming into Palm Springs.

"We smelled the smoke, we watched out houses burn," one survivor is quoted as saying.

Enter the Green Room Theatre Company. The nonprofit entity, which has long created new works, reinvented classics, offered musical theater, toured productions and delivered site-specific performances for the Coachella Valley, is moving forward with an opportunity to shed light on Section 14.

Thanks to a recent California Creative Corps Fund grant through Inland Empire Community Foundation, the theater company will use the resources to a do a piece on the subject, beginning in late June.

"We'll be presenting it one weekend in Palm Springs and one weekend in Coachella," says David Catanzarite, the theater company's founding artistic director. "There's litigation going on right now (about Section 14). We're not trying to take a side. We're trying to give people background about how this whole thing came about so they can understand. When the lawsuit is going to be settled at some point, it will be good for people to know how and why the lawsuit happened, which goes back more than 100 years."

The company is building the piece with a collective of people — actors, designers, directors and playwrights. The playwrights will assess ideas and the notes garnered from various improvisations the company offers and then write scenes from it.

"The grant will help us do a staged reading by June, and that's phase one," Catanzarite adds. "Phase two will bring it to a full production."

It's yet another milestone for the theater company, which sprang from joint efforts and enthusiasm to create spaces for audiences to experience innovative productions. Catanzarite and his spouse, Karen Lin, the company's board president, founded the company in 2010 at the CSU San Bernardino Palm Desert Campus. The nonprofit entity went on to produce many high-quality works as well as offering educational opportunities to the desert communities.

Some of those educational courses include improv workshops, dance and movement programs, script writing workshops and creative drama classes.

Another noteworthy evolution came in 2017, when the company launched Coachella Valley Shakespeare, which included a series of readings, productions and special events that celebrated the life and works of William Shakespeare.

After running a successful summer conservatory during the organization's first decade, things shifted.

"We expanded our programming far beyond children's theater," Catanzarite says. "We were working with children and youth ages 8 to 18, and our programming now includes a lot more work that is also of interest to adult audiences.

"Some people still think of us as a children's theater because we were doing some great work back in the first years of our existence," he says. "We put on, at that time, the biggest musicals in the desert. We'd have 60 performers, and we also changed our model again to touring productions, taking theater where it was not. We want people to know that they can find us in their neighborhoods."

An added bonus: the company's productions are pay-what-you-can, making them accessible to all.

"This is our 15th year," Catanzarite says. "We're about to celebrate our quinceañera in the fall. We are the only company in the region that tours professional ballet folklórico and theater productions to people in under-resourced neighborhoods. Our mission is to go out where people don't have theater."

Learn more about Green Room Theatre Company at grtccv.org.

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This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Creative Corps grant fuels soul-stirring new theater production