Stories from Jonestown by Leigh Fondakowski

After the play was staged in 2005, Fondakowski used the transcripts to put together a book. She spent three years interviewing subjects from San Diego to Eugene, Ore. While only a handful of people present at the agricultural project survived that day in Jonestown, more than eighty members of Peoples Temple. In 2001, she was commissioned by San Francisco's Z Space Studio to write a play about Jonestown. The saga of Jonestown didn’t end on the day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred Americans died in a mass murder-suicide in the Guyanese jungle. In her new book, Stories From Jonestown (University of Minnesota Press), author Leigh Fondakowski interviews more than 40 survivors, former cult members, relatives of the deceased and various experts, giving voice to some of the Angelenos who were part of the largest mass killing in American history.įondakowski was one of the creators of the play and subsequent HBO movie The Laramie Project, about murdered gay student Matthew Shepard. and attracted thousands of local congregants. While Jones' Peoples Temple is inherently a Bay Area story - that of an Indianapolis preacher who, in 1965, moved his followers to Ukiah and later San Francisco, where they became a political force - the church branched out to L.A.

To that end, the play is a loose In her book Stories From Jonestown. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the infamous Jonestown murder-suicides orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana. Directed by Leigh Fondakowski, this devised documentary theater piece is a form of.

Stories from Jonestown by Leigh Fondakowski