There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a rehearsal room when someone tells their story and realizes no one is judging them. No shame. No stigma. Just the experience of being seen and heard.
That's the space Issue Box Theatre is built with the Belonging Project, reminding us why the arts matter in the first place.
At the center of the project is Infinity, an original play by Rachel Daley, built from the ground up with the community it portrays. Issue Box brings unhoused and housed neighbors into the same rehearsal room — not as observers, but as the cast and co-creators of the work itself. Together they ask: what do we actually do to build a better community? How do we bring people together so we can experience unity and recognize the dignity in one another?
For the company at Issue Box Theatre, this is the heart of the mission: using performance to create space for human dignity. The arts have a way of leveling the playing field, where no one is exempt from the stage and everyone deserves a place to have their voice carried. The hope is that audience members will be surprised by how gifted their neighbors are — and struck by how much we lose when we let a single word like homelessness stand in for an entire human life.
That's the point the project keeps returning to. When you get down to the humanity of someone's experience, how different are any of us? The stories are as varied as the thousands of people living them — thousands of reasons people arrived where they are, and thousands of paths to where they'll go next.
When Issue Box Theatre brought this idea to the Greater Toledo Community Foundation, we were proud to help make it possible through our Arts and Culture Fund. The vision belongs to the artists and the neighbors who are living it out. Our role is simply to help the work find its footing.
And the message at the center of it is one worth carrying well beyond the stage: these really are your neighbors. And you are one of them.
The Belonging Project's final performance of "Infinity" is Saturday, June 27 at 2 p.m. at International Cove.