32 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 What We Need to Do It was a disaster. We lay on the ground while the children threw grass at us, broken bottles and soda cans. We were supposed to be dead, the ending of our new street theatre play, “The Geronimo Show”, but we couldn’t really stay on the ground; they’d be in the performance area and kicking us any second. So I got up, like a rising ghost, the rest of our small troupe following the lead, and we began to walk, slowly, in line, out of the city park where we’d just opened our new street theatre piece, and down the sidewalk as the children followed, yelling at us in Spanish and English. At least we’d gotten away from the glass and aluminum cans, and after about three blocks, they grew tired of us, getting no reaction, and left us to nurse our mostly existential wounds. The next day, our director, John Pearson, died of an aneurism, aged 39, and we were left to pick up the pieces of a much greater grief. That was fifty years ago, and thus was born Bethlehem People’s Theatre, eventually to become, after an extraordinary struggle to survive, Touchstone Theatre. Circumstances are not, on the whole, conducive to the growth of art creation in small cities—or big ones, for that matter. Not then; not now. Some of that is because of the universal struggle involved with living in general, but too much of it is the result of a variedly limited understanding of the arts, how they work, and a similarly confused and discordant political/economic process for affecting change. Often, we professional artists ourselves accept the status quo and just do our best to make enough money “to fight again another day”, thus FEATURE What Fifty Years Making Theater in Bethlehem Taught Me About Art and Cities William George
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