Spotlight: Crossroads Immersive Production

Creating empowering narratives to build community is at the heart of both Better Together Productions and Emancipation Theater Company. Rachel Farha, Chief Strategy Officer of Better Together, and Jeffrey Campbell, Creative Director of Emancipation, have known each other for over a decade. Since last year, they’ve worked together with the Denver foster care non-profit Cobbled Streets to create a combination fundraiser and immersive theater experience called Crossroads. We sat down with Farha and Campbell to talk to them about the importance of this project, which is coming to the Denver Sports Castle with a fundraising night on April 30th and a performance on May 1st.

Jamie: Do you wanna talk a little bit about the production?

Jeffrey: This is a really unique presentation/fundraiser, something that I’ve certainly never seen before. I really like this idea of showing the world why this organization [Cobbled Streets] exists, how they impact the community, and how the community can support this organization.

Rachel: Shari Shink, who’s the founder, spent 33 years working in the legal space representing kids and families in the foster care system. She started Cobbled Streets with the idea that, rather than trying to change the system, which is complex and frankly quite broken, she wanted to go straight to serving the families and the kids themselves. 

Jamie: Why do you feel this project is important now?

Rachel: Obviously, monies for organizations have shifted a lot, and the way that money is being used in our state and city budgets is being scrutinized. Cobbled Streets isn’t funded by the state or the city, but foster families are, and non-profits are that support foster families. It’s always the right time to be doing right by people, and that’s what this project is about. It’s about doing right by people who – underserved isn’t even the right word – who are invisible in our communities.

Jeffrey: It is always the right time to bring up the most vulnerable children in our society, in a time, specifically, when we see networks of the ultra-wealthy manipulating the vulnerability of children. In the wake of hearing that across the water, an elementary school is decimated as collateral damage to the conflicts of greed and political expediency, it’s never the wrong time to say that children come first.

Jamie: What do you think is most important about the collaborative process of theater in general?

Rachel: I mean, it’s in the name of our company. We are better together. What we can accomplish individually is often really cool, but I’m a big believer that any good idea is often made better by one more voice. One right voice can add something more powerful.

Jeffrey: We’re bombarded by screens and distracted by all of the choices that we have, from the vertical stories that are now coming on the phones to the multiple streaming networks. There is more television and film than we can ever consume in our lifetimes. But to get your butt up off that couch and to go down the block to your community and gather with some other folks, and to be in a live space and experience storytelling in a live atmosphere where you can sit next to a perfect stranger and share in that experience… I think folks are wanting and yearning to return to that live experience, that more personal experience, and re-engage with community and share an experience in real time.

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