page_title: Corner Theatre ETC
section_title: The first year: 1968
hierarchical_section_title: Corner Theatre ETC / The first year: 1968
caption_attribution_description: English: Stanley Keyes and unknown actress in Corner Theatre production, Baltimore, 1971.
context_page_description: Corner Theatre E.T.C. was an experimental theater located in Baltimore, Maryland, existing from 1968 to 1987 as a nonprofit cultural organization.
  The theater provided resources for new playwrights, designers, directors, actors, dancers, and other artists seeking experimental avenues for self-expression and social and political commentary. Throughout its nineteen-year existence, Corner Theatre was dedicated to presenting new and original plays, while encouraging a confrontational approach to production.
context_section_description: The Corner Theatre Experimental Theatre Club (Corner Theatre E.T.C.) was created following a Monday night lecture given by New York City's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club founder and artistic director Ellen Stewart at Center Stage, an Equity theatre in Baltimore. 
  Stewart's lecture challenged those in attendance to create a Baltimore version of her East Village-based experimental theatre. Local producer and director Leslie Irons subsequently met with Stewart and was granted La MaMa's repertoire of original plays. Irons then assembled a group of artists who shared his interest in the creation of a new, radical performing arts center, including: Cliff Pottberg, Mac Lang, Marie Stewart, Daniel Inglett, and Joe Harris. Funds were quickly raised, and Corner Theatre ETC opened at 853 North Howard Street with their inaugural production, an evening of two one-act plays: Birdbath by New York playwright Leonard Melfi and Baltimore playwright C. Richard Gillespie's The Burial. For the duration of the theatre's existence, Corner Theatre had a threefold mission:
  Producing original, otherwise unseen plays;
  Providing local theatre artists with a laboratory environment in which to experiment with unconventional theatrical techniques;
  Occasionally abandoning the idea of presentational theatre altogether in exchange for happenings; at one such event, Changes, audiences were led one at a time through a twenty-minute sojourn into the blacklight world of super-sensory awareness, a late 1960s hall of mirrors and confrontation.
   
  To avoid legal problems which might arise due to the nudity and profanity in many productions, Corner Theatre's charter listed the organization as a club rather than a theatre company.
  Encouraged by the high level of interest, both public and press, in the theatre, Corner Theatre presented two new works by an energetic, imaginative local actor, playwright, and teacher, Gordon Porterfield. Porterfield's Authors and The Earth Is Dead were presented as an evening of one-acts under the title Ratsfeet. This initiated a relationship between the playwright and theatre that yielded, over the subsequent seven years, a series of increasingly rich and occasionally profane evenings of locally produced and written theatre.
caption: Judith Thornton (left) with Stanley Keyes in a production at the Corner Theatre ETC, 1971.
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