3 Truths, presented by Cornerstone Theatre, opens June 4; plays Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; through June 12. Outdoors on the Water Court Stage at Grand Performances, California Plaza, 350 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. No reservations. Admission on a first-come, first-serve basis. Large groups encouraged to attend.

Which TV show begins with the narration: In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups…?

Scold yourself if you said Judge Judy. The notion of law and order permeates Cornerstone Theatre’s final production in its multi-year series of social justice plays. 3 Truths combines professional actors with local residents, some of whom have witnessed the criminal justice system firsthand.

Michael John Garcés

Director Michael John Garcés describes 3 Truths (The Justice Cycle Bridge Show) as my truth, your truth and the truth. “It’s based on the Oresteia Greek trilogy written by Aeschylus and deals with the issue of justice and how to justly deal with sin in an unjust world. There’s a cycle of violence in the family and a moment when the gods, essentially, hold a trial and stop it from going on,” he says.

You know, just like on Law & Order.

Neetu Badhan, by day, is an attorney in the LA County public defender’s office. By night, she’s rehearsing 3 Truths as Leila Patel, Public Defender. “The role - any role,” she says, “is not the same as your real life. My real life job has people who are actually going to prison or who are actually mentally ill or need help in other ways. I can bring some insight into what public defenders really do in this play.”

Badhan had taken a 13 year break from theatre to attend law school and begin her career. She readily correlates elements of her day job with the Greek historical aspects of this play. “I work with a group of people who have lived tragedies for most of their lives. They feel so deeply that injustice has spanned many generations and can’t be resolved.”

Neetu Badhan

Most, she says, are trying to break cycles within their families or their lives. “And they live in these cyclical realms, whether it comes from society, lack of money or lack of resources. A lot of my clients are treated as though they are invisible because they are the rejects - the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill. Well, this is their injustice and their story is constantly being tried, and trying to be told.”

Telling stories of “the people” is one of Garcés primary goals. He left New York in 2006 to join Cornerstone as Artistic Director. During the transition, he directed a piece in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Bogota, Columbia native says rehearsals were held miles inland from the coastal theatre.

“On the coast, it’s very wealthy,” he says. “But if you go inland a ways, you’re among really poor communities. When I shopped for food, I found myself often surrounded by Columbians, mostly undocumented laborers. I talked with them. And that coincided with discussions I was having in LA about what to do at Cornerstone, and people here were talking about immigration and documentation. So we went through various communities in downtown LA, talked to residents, rich and poor, and that activated us, made us excited to embark on a series of social justice plays.”

3 Truths is the final show in a series of six plays, the culminating “bridge show” of Cornerstone’s four-year Justice Cycle. This “Bridge” work pulls together people who took part in the previous plays or who are members of the communities the plays represent. “This,” Garcés says, “is an over-arching piece looking at justice in Los Angeles.

“We’ve looked at documentation, immigration and workers’ rights. We did a reproductive rights piece. We did one working primarily with incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated people and victims of violent crime. We also did a piece looking at the environment - our LA River piece.”

Naomi Iizuka

In writing 3 Truths, Naomi Iizuka considered all the stories told in the previous works. “Hearing these stories in their totality compels us to revisit all these assumptions we have, whether those assumptions are about the rule of law or the American Dream, and it makes those most basic questions of what is right, what is just and what is humane very alive and very real.”

Garcés acknowledges 3 Truths is big. Each act corresponds to one of the plays in the Greek trilogy. “Naomi has done an amazing job incorporating the many stories she’s heard. She’s kept it taut and dramatic with a cast of nearly 50.”

Iizuka says it’s been an exciting challenge. “It’s about finding interconnections and making a structure for the play that’s big enough. I also feel a very strong sense of responsibility for taking care of the stories people shared with me, articulating them in a way that honors them and frames them in resonant ways.”

Garcés says most of Cornerstone’s shows are “community engaged” pieces. They come out of year-long periods in which members are in various communities. “We interview residents and do story circles with large groups to gather experiences and details of events. The play comes from all of these experiences.” And then, he says, “We audition members of the community to be in the plays with professional actors.”

Justice may be on the minds of nearly everyone who lives and works in LA’s Arts District. It’s sandwiched between Little Tokyo and Skid Row. “When we started this idea, we were in the middle of the second term of the Bush Administration,” says Garcés. “We were looking at a lot of issues affecting us. When you walk down the street here, you see a lot of inequities.”

If this sounds like activism theatre, it is, to a point. Playwright Julie Hébert, who wrote Touch the Water, the play Cornerstone produced last year about the LA River, says, “It’s the process that’s radical, not necessarily the product.”

Garcés takes that a step further. “It’s primarily getting to a root cause for doing theatre in general which is people telling stories around a campfire. There is often a deep impact from doing the work. You can see a Cornerstone show and not find it political at all, or it can be very political. What’s activist about this is taking the voices of people to make the work even more accessible.”

Those voices sometimes sing. “We’re doing a musical in West Hollywood this October and it may have a real political impact or it may have none at all. My goal is that it be a really great musical, regardless. But, he admits, “No question. We do work with an activist bent.”

The musical, so far, is nameless. Tom Jacobson (The Twentieth Century Way) is writing the book; Deborah Wicks La Puma, the lyrics.

Cornerstone has administrative and rehearsal space in the Arts District but not a stage of its own. It generally co-produces with other venues. In the case of 3 Truths, Cornerstone has teamed with Grand Performances.

Partnerships come at others times, too. “Every other year we take a summer show out of town,” Garcés explains. “Two years ago, we were in Holtville, California. This summer, we’re not going quite so far - Pacoima - but it lets us get out of downtown Los Angeles and into new communities.”

Cornerstone’s approach, says Garcés, comes from a sense of mission and passion. “I find the aesthetic experience of an audience that’s activated by seeing their stories on stage to be of a very high order and very exciting. I’ve done a lot of theatre in a lot of wonderful places across the country but I’ve often felt a real disconnect with the audience. People would sit back, watch, applaud politely but that is not what I was most interested in.”

Andres Munar

Three-year ensemble member Andres Munar, who has taught acting to inmates at New York’s Ryker Island Prison, says, “We try to structure society so we can live as best we can but that structuring, I think, is a war zone of perspectives. We’re always engaged and, ultimately, there is a relative peace we can come to in certain sections of society. But I don’t think ‘truth’ is something we ever really arrive at.”

Does that leave us having to agree to disagree? He continues, “I think there is a given circumstance of that in life but I don’t think the play is falling back on that. That implies we are okay with the status quo and I really don’t think that’s what the play is doing.”

Real-life public defender Neetu Badhan believes 3 Truths gives many options for what justice really is. “Justice isn’t only what we see on TV and in courtrooms. There’s justice about the relationships between people, what we can do with our bodies, who can have families and who can’t, what we’re doing to the environment, who’s allowed to be in countries and who’s not - the word justice takes on a multi-faceted meaning.”

“What’s funny about this play,” interjects Munar, “is that it doesn’t rely on the cheapness of being able to cheer for a side. Every side gets deep and complicated. I think it’s that way when you’re really inside the criminal justice system. You don’t even know where to start. I get that from the play. We tilt that idea of a court closer to what it really is.”

And justice, Badhan says, can have more than one dimension, unlike the television narrator who intones, “…the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”

Article by Steve Julian