“You stole my kid!” shouts Vincent Clouse, so intensely that his body shakes, his voice booms.
Clouse is playing the role of a biological father who has arrived smelling of alcohol at the foster home where his teenage son lives. “Excuse me! I’m hugging my son!” he yells at the foster mother, played by actor Jaime Lujan, as she wags her finger at him and threatens to call the police if he doesn’t “Get out!” of his son’s birthday party.
Beside them, the quieter words of the caseworker asking them to calm down are all but drowned out. The scene ends with the teenager in foster care placing his headphones over his ears, silencing them all.
An entire minute of the fighting scene — an extremely uncomfortable, heart-palpitating minute — is improvisation. Playwright and director Jeffrey Campbell wants the audience to experience the emotion of the child welfare system, “how cold and indifferent” it can feel, when they watch this three-act play on stage in Denver on May 1.
“OK, so that was beautiful,” Campbell says after a rehearsal of the scene inside Hope Tank, an arts space near Denver’s City Park filled with bright yellow and turquoise furniture and a colorful wall of fake flowers. The actors are reading lines on a Saturday evening around a table that holds tiny cupcakes and La Croix sparking waters.
But the fighting scene is so heated that Clause and Lujan are out of their chairs, screaming at each other. The biological father and the foster mother continue their fight — but in pantomime — after the teenager they are arguing about has covered his ears with his headphones. The fight is now silent, yet still anxiety-provoking for the small audience of mostly crew. At this point in the show, the audience will put on their headsets and they will hear the prerecorded inner monologue of foster child Jayden, whose mother has died and whose father has lost him to the system.
The play, “Crossroads: The Journey of Rebecoming,” has just five characters: Jayden, who at age 15 is living in his fifth foster placement, his biological father, his foster mother, a caseworker and the judge who removed him from his father’s custody.
Before writing it, Campbell spent time interviewing and studying people who have played those roles in real life.
The show is funded by Cobbled Streets, a Colorado nonprofit that pays for children in foster care to attend art classes, sports and summer camps. It plays at the three-story Sports Castle on South Broadway, with one act taking place on each floor and the audience moving from the first floor, to the second and to the third. Opening night, on April 30, is for invited donors, while anyone can buy tickets for the May 1 performance.
Act 1 takes place in the courtroom, where the future of Jayden’s childhood is up to the judge. Act 2 is the birthday party scene at the foster home. And in the third act, Jayden is a young adult and an artist.
On a basic level, the production is the “story of why Cobbled Streets exists, and it is a role play of their theory of change,” said Campbell, founder of Denver’s Emancipation Theater Company. But the story is much deeper, told in a way that doesn’t place blame or criminalize the behavior of any character, even the biological father, but explores the anguish from every perspective.
Actor who plays bio dad has real-life experience
Clouse did not have to imagine the suffering of a father whose child was removed from his custody and placed in foster care. It happened to him.
After moving to Colorado in 2016, and struggling to find work as a union electrician, Clouse and his partner at the time ended up homeless with four kids, two of his and two of hers. The story is not simple, as child welfare stories rarely are, but the children were taken by child welfare caseworkers while the blended family lived in the Samaritan House, a homeless shelter in Denver. They lived in foster care for a while, before Clouse’s two sons were sent to live with their mothers. Clouse has since had two more children, and three out of four of them now live with him.
So perhaps this is why it feels so real when Clouse, in character, seems filled with frustration and rage because he can’t spend time with his son.
“For me, it’s important to capture the perspective of a parent who has lost a child to the system,” Clouse said. It’s unclear whether his character, DeShawn, is using alcohol or drugs, or why exactly he wasn’t taking good care of his son, but there is a mention in the courtroom scene that the boy’s mother died from multiple sclerosis.
“There are nuances — you don’t know what he’s on,” Clouse said, describing his character during a break in rehearsal. “I’m also dealing with a lot that is not getting addressed. I’m dealing with the grief that I just lost my wife. I’m feeling not ready, so I’m falling down this hole, and at the same time, I’m trying to hold on to the last little bit of me that I have, and I feel like someone has stolen that from me.”
The idea for the theatrical production came out of discussions at Cobbled Streets to answer a question that is key to changing policy and making life better for foster kids: How do we get the public to care?
“What do we need to do in order for the public to truly understand these kids’ experiences?” asked Shari Shink, executive director of Cobbled Streets. Shink was founder of the former Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center and spent 33 years as an attorney representing children in the system. “If you don’t care about something, you’re not going to do anything to change it.
“Even the leadership in Colorado, they’re flying blind when it comes to the impact of what legislation might have on a child or a family in the system.”
The play is Cobbled Streets’ latest idea to make people understand, and it follows the organization’s release last year of a 27-minute film from Better Together Productions that documents the experiences of five people who grew up in foster care. The documentary, “Rebecoming Me,” is streaming on PBS and is now used as a training module by the Colorado Department of Human Services, said Lara Smedley, CEO of Better Together Productions.
The name Cobbled Streets is a metaphor for the journey children go through during foster care, the patchwork of people and placements along their path. The organization, which began six years ago, depends on donor and foundation funding to help foster kids have some of the same experiences as other kids — space camp, drawing lessons, dance classes. The organization also has “ambassadors” in judicial districts across the state who are responsible for organizing picnics and parties for foster families so that children in foster care, who often feel isolated from their peers, can meet other children going through similar experiences.
Cobbled Streets once got the Denver Zoo to close down to the public and open to just foster families, an event that drew 1,800 people.
A bridge between activism and art
The plot of the theatrical performance might seem heavy, but playwright Campbell says the play is “for anyone and everyone who loves theater and who is looking for a date night out with a provocative conversation to have after dinner and show.”
Lujan, cast as the foster mother, wants the performance to change opinions, to spur people to action. “As a performer, as a storyteller, it’s rare that we get to actually tell a story to a community who may or may not know about it, and open their perspective as to what’s really happening to real people,” she said. “So yes, it’s theatrical, yes, it’s heightened, but that’s another way to engage the community.”
Actor Terry Burnsed, who plays Judge Holloway, called the play a “rare opportunity to build a bridge” between activism and the arts.
“It’s people with money who are asked to support organizations like Cobbled Streets, but they don’t see the actual lives that these organizations touch,” Burnsed said. “It’s going to be a bridge between the one thing and the other.”
