In the early 1960s, Bobbi Ausubel, a scientist, and Stan Edelson, a visual artist, were a young couple who had moved from New York City to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hoping to find a vehicle for social and political change, in 1963 they stepped into a world unknown to them: theater.

It was the start of the civil rights movement. They began at a picket line at the F. W. Woolworth store in Central Square, where protesters demanded the chain desegregate its Southern lunch counters. Bobbi, 28, and Stan, 34, called out to the marchers, “Who wants to act in a play about sit-ins?” Right away they had a group of excited Black and white volunteers. Stan wrote an original play, Sit Down, directed by Joan Blackett — who had been in one play before, which to Stan and Bobbi meant she was experienced. The non-actors performed it in Black churches around Cambridge, and the couple’s theater life began.

Neither had ever been theater-goers. “Likely due to our ignorance,” Bobbi recalls, the lack of knowledge didn’t stop them. A friend from South Africa, Josie Simon, offered an idea she called “theater of change,” born from how theater was used under Apartheid. They dove in.

Caravan Theater officially began in 1963, funded as a two-summer project by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker-sponsored organization with peace aims. Stan convinced them theater could help people question the rising danger of nuclear armament. First the Quakers sent the couple to a week-long conference in Pennsylvania to learn meditation and consensus leadership — which, for a broke young family, “felt like an exciting vacation, complete with clean towels, bedding, and food.”

Then AFSC lent them a big yellow school bus. A bus? That’s how the name “Caravan” popped up. They toured New England stuffed in together — the two directors, their two small children, the family dog, sixteen young actors, everyone’s luggage, the props, and piles of disassembled wooden bleachers (designed by Stan, built and painted black by everyone) that seated about a hundred. It took hours to assemble and break them down at each stop. They performed anywhere that offered a place to sleep, food, and $25 for gas.

That first summer they performed two plays — a pattern that held for sixteen years: one by a known playwright, one company-created original, both on current social and political themes. The Firebugs, a parable about storing nuclear weapons, and We Shall Overcome?, an original built from scenes of Black and white miscommunication. To work through their doubts — “Shouldn’t we be activists in the streets rather than doing theater?” — Stan invited their friend Howard Zinn, later the renowned historian, to talk with the troupe. They decided theater was itself a viable mode of activism. As Stan put it, the word “act” is in both “activism” and “acting.”

When AFSC’s two summers of funding ended and the troupe left, Bobbi was ready to stop. Only Stan pushed forward — “persistent and filled with the energy of a phoenix,” she writes, lifting them up when Caravan seemed to be only ashes. With fifty dollars and a new group of actors drawn to the company’s creativity and social-justice aims, Stan staged wild experimental performances at Club 47 (later Club Passim), rehearsing by day in the empty coffeehouse.

In 1968, the visionary minister Ed Mark offered them a permanent home at the Harvard Epworth Methodist Church in the heart of Harvard Square. The space was big, open, and U-shaped — no proscenium, the actors essentially in the round, close to and intimate with the audience, bleachers wrapping a three-quarters-round floor beneath a balcony and the church’s stained-glass windows. Each week they struck everything for Sunday services, though Ed Mark let them leave the heavy bleachers in place.

Their first show there, Genet’s The Maids (1968), set the company’s signature style: imaginative and imagistic rather than realistic, props used in unexpected ways, bodies and voices pushed past the naturalistic — what the 1960s came to call “experimental.” The Boston Globe called it “near genius,” and audiences came charging in. Stan’s The Measures Taken followed, then Euripides’ anti-war Iphigenia in Aulis, and in 1969 Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle — which Bobbi considered the best play Stan directed.

In 1967, the company held an important discussion about what to focus on next. Bobbi proposed a play about how a woman’s life differs from a man’s — revolutionary for the era, but the troupe embraced it. Months of improvisation followed, which Bobbi led; Stan sat in on all of them, then wrote the first draft of How to Make a Woman, which Bobbi directed.

The play, and the consciousness-raising discussions held after every performance, catapulted Caravan to new heights and made it an instrumental force in what would soon be called the Second Wave of the women’s movement in Boston. Audiences told them again and again that the play was an “a-ha!” moment, illuminating the restrictive nature of imposed gender roles. The post-show talks grew into separate women’s and men’s groups; the theater began offering weekend Male/Female workshops; and the play toured New England colleges and, eventually, a festival in Poland. Read the full story of How to Make a Woman →

In 1972, caught up in the era’s drive toward more democratic groups, Stan and Bobbi experimented with giving up leadership so everyone could participate as equals — which let several longtime members grow into directors. But the question of who had the right to direct brought a painful schism. In the summer of 1973, some members left to form their own theater; others stayed, and Stan trained a new ensemble.

The later work kept its social focus: Bobbi’s autobiographical Focus on Me (1974), written on a Radcliffe Institute grant; the children’s play The Millie Cartoon (1975); Family (1976), for which Caravan was voted Best Ensemble of the year; and Tell Me a Riddle (1977), adapted from Tillie Olsen, which The Boston Globe named one of the Ten Best Plays of the Year. In 1978, when Stan and Bobbi amicably ended their marriage, Bobbi stepped back. After a serious car accident, Stan wrote and directed his last Caravan play, One Man’s Journey (1978), about that accident and the end of his marriage. A year later, in 1979, the theater closed its doors.

Bobbi names a few regrets. Pete Seeger once brought them a children’s play he’d written, visiting their home while the kids stayed up in their pajamas to meet him — and when she didn’t like the script, they said no. “A rookie’s mistake,” she writes; they should have helped him make it better. During the run of How to Make a Woman, the son of a major New York critic offered to produce it in New York City on the company’s own terms; high on their Boston success, they voted to stay. “Only later did we understand how important it would have been.” And she wishes she had appreciated the actors’ and Stan’s skills more, and interfered less in his writing. “Now I know how to appreciate people’s skills. Luckily, I’ve learned.”

“When Caravan started, it was one of the few theater groups able to successfully blend social politics with theater,” she writes. “Caravan Theater was a vital force for feminism in the era of the Second Wave… So, overall, when I look back now, as an 89-year-old woman who continues to write plays and direct theater, I feel proud of what I helped to start at age 28, and I feel proud of what we all did with Caravan.”

For every production — with full cast lists and descriptions — see the Productions & Media page →