Founders, actors, directors, and the next generation — the company behind the work.

Stan Edelson was Caravan’s co-founder and co-artistic director, and the author of many of its plays. His vision, determination, and belief in using the arts toward a just world were what brought Caravan into being — and what kept it alive, in those same values, throughout its existence.

Born in 1929 into a secular Jewish family in and around New York City, Stan watched his father’s belief that women should stay home thwart his mother’s ambition to become a social worker — an early spark of his awareness of women’s struggles. A natural-born artist, he left home at sixteen to hitchhike west and to Mexico, taking odd jobs that sharpened his sense of working-class life. Back in New York he studied at the Art Students League and earned a Fine Arts degree at Brooklyn College, where he led the square-dancing club — and met Bobbi, his future wife. He built an extensive body of woodcuts, lithographs, drawings, and paintings, and taught art at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for 58 years.

Though he came from the visual arts, Stan increasingly committed to theater, arguing that the “act” in “acting” is the root of both “activist” and “action.” In 1960–61, inspired by the civil rights movement, he formed the short-lived Social Action Theater, then Forum Theater on the dangers of nuclear weapons. From those efforts came the skills that let him and Bobbi co-found Caravan. His Caravan years — as artistic director, set designer, playwright, director, and mentor, while parenting two daughters — were, he said, the happiest of his life.

After Caravan dissolved in 1979, Stan earned an MA and moved into clinical psychology, while never giving up directing or teaching. He founded Diversity Lab Theater, built around a multicultural ensemble and socially engaged work. At 87, mounting a retrospective of his art, he said: “From my birth in 1929 until now, I have been a learner, listener, and teacher… All my life I have done what I can to make all of our lives better — often through the arts.” He died in 2020 at 90, still coaching actors and writing plays in his final year. See his productions →

Those who worked with him remember a rare combination of artist and activist. Barbara Fleischmann MacKenzie-Wood recalled his boundless curiosity — a drive to “explore people” and understand “what made people and society different” — and how he built trust by listening intently and guiding actors with questions rather than commands. She called him “a painter, a writer, a director,” and ultimately “a creator.”

“[Stan] was nourishing. He nourished my thoughts, my abilities… a grower. A grower of thoughts, a grower of yourself.” — AILI PAAL SINGER

Under his direction, Aili said, “we became his colors and his palette.” Peter Kovner remembered his intimacy as a director and called him a “centrifugal force” whose energy touched everyone in his orbit, his leadership like his drawings: “bold strokes.” David Klein was struck by Stan’s “certain sureness in who he was and what he felt.” And once, when a daughter spilled milk at dinner, Stan simply cleaned it up and poured another glass — “not a word… just fix the problem. I thought, this is the kind of parent I want to be.”

“Stan taught me to take risks. I am enormously grateful for that.” — BOBBI AUSUBEL

Aili tied his drive to his Jewish background; Peter, who hadn’t noticed it then, now sees how much the idea of repairing the world shaped the theater: “My God. We were steeped in it.”

More on Stan: oral history (2012) · a 2017 celebration · honored for six decades.

Bobbi Ausubel grew up in a Jewish family in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and ’50s, among immigrant neighbors whose talk of fleeing oppression in Europe gave her an early ear for politics. Her father, Beresh, had fled conscription in Poland at fourteen and spent years hiding across Europe through World War I; her mother, Ethel, lived with schizophrenia, cared for at home by Beresh for decades. Watching her father work hard for little, Bobbi kept asking what would have made her parents’ lives better.

Her political awakening came as a teenager at Hashomer Hatzair, a progressive-socialist Jewish youth movement, where she first encountered talk of women’s equality and read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House — “I felt I had found a home where women were considered equal.” She enrolled at Brooklyn College against her mother’s wishes, met Stan at a folk-dance club, studied biology, and won a full scholarship to Harvard, where she studied under Nobel laureates including Watson and Crick. But she was unhappy at the microscope, and when she became pregnant with her first daughter she left science behind — grappling with the loss of her identity and the prospect of becoming “just a housewife.”

Theater offered a way out and forward. With Stan she co-founded Caravan, earned a Master’s in theater directing at Boston University, and — carrying a lifelong belief in gender equality — proposed in 1967 that the troupe make a play about women’s lives. That became How to Make a Woman, which she directed, and which put Caravan at the center of the rising women’s movement. She went on to write and direct Focus on Me on a Radcliffe Institute grant and to adapt Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, a Boston Globe “Ten Best” play.

After leaving Caravan, Bobbi taught acting for over twenty years at the Boston Conservatory, chairing its theater division. With her daughter Rivka Solomon she created the women’s empowerment project That Takes Ovaries, staged around the world, and later spent ten years leading empowerment work with sex-trafficked women and girls in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Guyana. Now nearing 90, she advocates for the chronic illness ME, co-founded the international writing group Pillow Writers, and still teaches acting. Her papers are archived at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library.

Amid the upheaval of World War II, Aili and her family fled Estonia for Germany, moving through displaced-persons camps before arriving in the United States in 1949. In New York she was raised deeply within Estonian culture — the Estonian House, the Girl Guides, the choir, dance classes. Nicknamed “twinkle toes,” she chose the arts over her father’s dream that she become a chemist, attending a performing-arts high school and then Boston University, where she first felt free to question politics and the world: “I decided to open my mind.”

She found Caravan by answering an ad for actors, and it became central to her life. Her husband often attended the men’s discussion groups after How to Make a Woman, which deepened his feminism; their daughter Maya spent her earliest months backstage. Aili performed in the play across its entire run.

“Caravan was food for thought… It made me grow as an actress. We experimented with how to use our body, how to use our voice. It was a discovery — of relationships, of the world, and of how I can contribute.”AILI PAAL SINGER

Barbara found Caravan as an acting major at Boston University, answering a bulletin-board ad for a summer company doing Brecht’s Mother Courage under Bobbi Ausubel — whose Waiting for Godot at BU had astonished her. The audition was at Bobbi and Stan’s Cambridge flat, art on every wall, two small children running around: “it felt ‘messy wonderful,’ like nothing this midwestern girl had ever seen.” She was a member for five seasons.

“In my now sixty-plus years of working professionally I have never encountered such a supportive environment. I cherish my memories of Caravan Theatre.”BARBARA MACKENZIE-WOOD

She played Mary in How to Make a Woman across its five-year run — “I believe this piece of theater… helped to spearhead the Second Women’s Movement” — and toured it to the International Festival of Festivals in Wrocław, Poland, through an East Germany of tanks, checkpoints, and bugged rooms. Over a long career she acted for directors including Lloyd Richards and Joanne Akalaitis and spent five seasons with Long Wharf Theatre. She is a founding member of New York’s Obie-winning Irondale Ensemble Project, and held the Raymond W. Smith endowed chair at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama, where she taught for thirty-seven years and is named among the fifty most influential acting teachers in the United States.

Born in 1945 and raised in a racially diverse stretch of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, David grew up among radicals — both parents were Communists, a fact they kept from him until he was fifteen, “because we thought it was safer for you not to know.” He spent summers at Camp Kinderland and studied at the youth division of the New York School for Marxist Studies, protested “duck and cover” drills, joined civil rights demonstrations and anti-war marches, and later, in Berkeley, took part in efforts to shut down the Oakland draft board.

His passion for the arts ran just as deep — he studied with Uta Hagen at HB Studio and absorbed Grotowski-based physical technique — which led him to answer an ad for Caravan in BackStage. Hired in 1969, he was a company member through 1973, performing in How to Make a Woman, Caucasian Chalk Circle, Hands Off!, Waiting for Godot, The Jewish Wife, and Come Closer, You’re Smothering Me, and directing The Exception and the Rule. In 1973 he left with the group that formed The Cambridge Ensemble. He met his life partner, Virginia, at a post-show discussion group.

A long acting life followed — in Vermont, then Seattle, where he joined Actors’ Equity in 1986 and played more than 150 roles over forty years, from Willy Loman to Shylock. He helped found three theaters, including Book-It Repertory, whose narration-in-character approach “Caravan people would recognize.” Now 80, he reflects on it all with a shrug worthy of the company: sic transit gloria.

Raised in Pennsylvania by a mother who prized education and politics, Joe formed a close bond with his Polish grandmother, a gardener who spoke no English — they communicated through shared tasks, and he sketched and labeled her flowers. Those afternoons sparked a lifelong love of design and nature that led him to landscape architecture.

His way into theater was dance — the polka, which he’d watched his father perform. Urged on by friends John Furlong and Mike Appleby, Joe joined Caravan with no stage experience and threw himself into set and prop design, but it was movement that set him apart: his gift for physicalizing ideas helped bring Bobbi’s vision of “movement theater” to life, and he became one of How to Make a Woman‘s earliest and strongest supporters. Completing a master’s at Harvard amid the anti-war ferment of Cambridge, he found Caravan’s blend of art and advocacy entirely natural: “with Caravan, it always felt right.”

He later taught landscape architecture at UMass Amherst for over twenty years, with design work across South America, New Zealand, France, and North America. He and his wife, Pauline Volpe, have two sons.

Lynn moved to Boston in 1966 and soon met Bobbi Ausubel, who — learning she’d studied children’s drama — invited her to perform and build the puppets for How Nanabozho Brought Fire to His People. She went on to the street-theater piece Myths and Tales of the Maori and, later, The Millie Cartoon with Peter Kovner, a sequel of sorts to How to Make a Woman that dramatized the double standard between men and women. She taught children’s drama and puppetry under the company and made props, watching closely how Bobbi and Stan honed scripts with input from actors and audience.

In 1982 — the year she entered recovery — Lynn founded the nonprofit Improbable Players to teach about addiction and recovery, hiring young actors in long-term recovery to build plays from their own stories. Over thirty-five years she trained more than 200 actors and wrote and directed ten applied-theater works. “Theater is a powerful way to reach people about the burning issues faced by society,” she writes — a conviction that runs straight back to Caravan.

Peter is blunt about why he came: “I did not join Caravan because it was a feminist theater. To say that would be rewriting the past to suit the present.” In the early years the Vietnam War and civil rights dominated everything, and women running a theater “didn’t seem unique.” He wanted to make theater with meaning and impact, get out of New York, and be near his wife and closest friends in Boston.

He’d come to acting sideways — pulled on stage in college, then trained with Stella Adler before heading downtown to the avant-garde of the Open Theater, the Performance Group, and Grotowski- and Spolin-inspired workshops. After his own collective theater foundered for lack of leadership, he answered the one ad Caravan could afford that week. He arrived hours late — the car blew up in Connecticut — auditioned wild and desperate for the role of Jason, and got it.

The first year was hard: Jason-Medea never broke through, and he was unhappy and often sick. He stayed, he says, partly because Stan sat him on the church steps and said, “I can see you’re unhappy… whenever I am stuck, I try to find something there I want to do. Look for that for yourself.” Partly because Aili reached out with unexpected encouragement. And partly because summer children’s shows — “having a bunch of six-year-olds cry out ‘You’re a stupid!’ clears the mind and swells the heart” — rekindled his love of the work.

What followed were two whirlwind years — Beckett and Brecht, How to Make a Woman at the church and in Wrocław, new original work, actors directing and directors acting. When Bobbi and Stan reclaimed leadership of the theater, Peter was furious; only later did he understand “how long and hard those two had been struggling to build that theater… Of course Caravan was their theater. And yet — the productions were ours too.” He went on to a long New England career in theater, film, and radio.

“I never again felt less creatively worthy because I appeared ‘normal,’ was married, loved my wife, nurtured a family… That all was and remains why Caravan is important to me.”PETER KOVNER

Naomi Edelson and Rivka Solomon, daughters of Bobbi and Stan, grew up surrounded by artists and activists and absorbed their parents’ passion for social justice. Rivka credits them for her ability to “organize in my sleep”; Naomi attributes her boldness and creativity to them too.

Naomi Edelson grew up amid Caravan’s costume rooms and half-meeting, half-party gatherings, with a feminist father who shared the cooking and cleaning and parents who spoke constantly of changing the world. She became a wildlife biologist and then a national leader in conservation — building coalitions to strengthen state wildlife agencies, founding a Women’s Conservation Network, and creating “Sacred Grounds,” which mobilizes synagogues, mosques, and historically Black churches to restore their grounds with native plants. She considers it part of the family business of repairing the world — tikkun olam.

Rivka Solomon grew up treating Caravan as a second home — a place that was equal parts playground and “serious land,” where adults in wild costumes danced with puppets and spoke with urgency about things that mattered. Because of Bobbi’s leadership, she found it strange, later, to encounter rooms where women weren’t obviously in charge. She became a writer, compiled the anthology That Takes Ovaries, and — with Bobbi — adapted it into a play and a worldwide open-mic movement (over 1,000 events) used as far away as India to empower women and girls who had been trafficked. She also organizes for disability rights, including for people living with ME and Long COVID.

Several longtime members of the Caravan company are no longer living. We remember them and the work they made possible.

David Baker — an early member, in the first How to Make a Woman and Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Maggi Helmer (also known as Jane Dylan) — Caucasian Chalk Circle and Jason-Medea.
Ann Barclay Priest — the Mannequin in How to Make a Woman, and many other Caravan productions.
Julie Ince — an original cast member of Suppose I Fall.