Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration

Ashley E. Lucas, Patrick Lonergan, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Patrick Lonergan, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781408185896
• eBook ISBN: 9781472511706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Obscured behind concrete and razor wire, the lives of the incarcerated remain hidden from public view. Inside the walls, imprisoned people all over the world stage theatrical productions that enable them to assert their humanity and capabilities. Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration offers a uniquely international account and exploration of prison theatre. By discussing a range of performance practices tied to incarceration, this book examines the ways in which arts practitioners and imprisoned people use theatre as a means to build communities, attain professional skills, create social change, and maintain hope. Ashley Lucas's writing offers a distinctive blend of storytelling, performance analysis, travelogue, and personal experience as the child of an incarcerated father. Distinct examples of theatre performed in prisons are explored throughout the main text and also in a section of Critical Perspectives by international scholars and practitioners.

PART I

Prison Theatre
STRATEGIES FOR A BETTER LIFE

Introduction
Journeys in Prison Theatre

The first performance I saw inside a prison caught me off guard. I had traveled to the Louisiana State Penitentiary—popularly known as Angola—to attend an event called Longtermers’ Day in 2004. This celebration honored the lives of men who had served twenty-five years or more in prison, and families and visitors were invited to spend the day in the visiting area with over 200 men. I was twenty-five years old; every man around me, it occurred to me as I looked around the room, had been in prison at least as long as I had been alive. Angola has a wide variety of organizations run by incarcerated men, and this event had been put together by the Human Relations Club—a group whose mission is to care for the indigent and elderly and to bury in the prison cemetery those whose families cannot or will not claim their bodies. Though all of the longtermers had been told they could invite their loved ones to the event, I was among fewer than a dozen visitors that year and not related to anyone in the room. Many families could not make the journey to Angola, which sits in a Louisiana swamp over an hour’s drive from Baton Rouge. Other longtermers had lost touch with their loved ones or outlived everyone they had known in the free world.

I spent the whole day inside the prison, chatting with the men and listening to several prison bands play. At one point, as we ate heaping plates of jambalaya, two men stood up and started yelling greetings to one another from across the tables. The rest of us soon fell quiet as these men claimed the front of the room as a stage and started a performance. Most folks around me knew what I did not—that the players before us were members of the Angola Drama Club. The scene that ensued involved two men standing on a street corner talking about the women they saw walking past them. They had plenty to say, and though the women they described were never seen by the audience, the actors’ reactions told the story.

The scene was charming; the audience laughed so much and so loudly that I could hardly hear the dialogue, despite being seated close to the performers. The climax of the play arrived when a third actor—by far the largest man in the room—emerged from the back of the audience dressed in drag in a messy wig and a giant flowered dress. He lumbered through the audience swaying his hips, and when he reached the main characters in this skit, they lost all their fast talk and could not speak to the one “woman” who actually talked back to them.¹

A group of men in the audience laughed so hard they actually fell out of their seats. Years later, when I started doing programming in other US prisons, I was cautioned at volunteer training never to lead a theatre exercise that involved participants lying on the floor, particularly in a group—it could be seen as a security threat, or suggest that someone had been attacked. I have no memory of prison staff being at Longtermers’ Day, but they must have been present given the fact that outside visitors were mixed into the crowd. No one objected to the men laughing on the floor. Thus, though I did not know it at the time, I had watched an act of theatre shift the boundaries of what was acceptable or alarming in a prison context.

But then everything about my experience at Longtermers’ Day seemed to alter, erode, or entirely undo, a boundary of some kind. All that I witnessed that day stood in stark contrast to what I had read and been told about Angola—the grim accounts of the Angola Three, who had each served more than a quarter century in solitary confinement; the stories about men in the general population who slept with phone books on their chests in case someone tried to stab them in the night. The men I met at Angola treated me with great dignity and respect. They took care of each other. The Human Relations Club had spent a whole year organizing this event to honor the fortitude and endurance of those who could survive decades of incarceration, and they celebrated with performances that required considerable talent and skill. Every piece of Longtermers’ Day had been rehearsed and curated to ensure that those men and their guests could experience a few hours of distraction—a kind of reprieve from the extraordinary stress, boredom, and indignity of daily life in prison.

For years afterward, I found that I did not have the ability to make my friends and colleagues understand what Longtermers’ Day meant to me. How could I explain to anyone in the free world that I had seen some of the best comedy of my life inside one of the most notorious prisons in the United States? How could I convey to others the fullness of such happiness and fun inside the same facility that holds Louisiana’s death row? What are the ethics of attempting to tell such a story to people in the free world? How could I convince people to have discussions about these kinds of events instead of the crime stories that others in my life often demanded to the exclusion of any other narrative about people in prison? The play by the Angola Drama Club gave us all permission to share a kind of communal joy that is antithetical to the environment of the prison itself. Something was going on there that I had never seen before; the practice of theatre made the prison into a different kind of space, one that relaxed and united the gathered people, rather than—as is the fundamental purpose of a carceral institution—enclosing and isolating them.

Free-world theatre makers have a great deal to learn from those in prison about what theatre is and can be—the ways it connects people, makes us more capable human beings, changes structural realities, and gives us reasons to endure, even in the face of great hardship. We also have much to learn from incarcerated audiences and the free-world people who are willing to sacrifice some small measure of their own freedom to work with and bear witness to performers in confinement. Rather than reproducing the current literature, which explains why professional theatre makers go into prisons, I attempt—and attempting is the best a person not living in a prison can do—to convey why incarcerated people think theatrical collaboration enriches their lives.

Part I of this book sets out to describe several meaningful strategies that imprisoned theatre makers are using to transform their lives and alter the conditions in which they live. These strategies include building communities, developing professional skills, creating social change, and maintaining hope as a means of survival. Most every theatre group I encountered was enacting all of these strategies on some level, but the troupes who serve as the major narrative vehicles for each chapter most vividly realized a particular modality for getting what they needed. Each of the next four chapters in this volume uses one or several theatre programs as central exemplars of a strategy for accomplishing something inside the prison. In Chapter 1, a group of men performing Shakespeare in a US prison use their love of theatre and one another t o build communities that cross the lines drawn between free and incarcerated people, prison staff, families, and audiences. Chapter 2 describes how another group of imprisoned men in Canada develop a host of professional skills by running their own board of directors, hiring free-world theatre makers, and putting on a puppet play. The South African women addressed in Chapter 3 created a meaningful structural shift when they performed an original play about the deplorable hospice care inside the prison where they live and convinced the administration to make changes. Women in a Brazilian prison, introduced in Chapter 4, rewrote the ending of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies as a way to maintain the hope they needed to endure everyday life inside the walls. The conclusion to Part I explains how these groups used theatre to reframe the boundaries of the prison—those that draw lines between the free and the captive—and made the rigid environment inside the walls temporarily more porous and elastic.

The second part of this book offers four critical case studies written by other scholars and prison theatre makers. The inclusion of other perspectives serves as a political commitment for me—to bring together multiple viewpoints in an attempt to illuminate the difficult question of what is happening with theatre inside the walls. Because prisons pose so many barriers to both research and human interaction, even people living and working inside them need much information from others in order to get an accurate sense of what occurs. The voices of the scholars and practitioners featured in Part II of this book serve as additional observers of the phenomena described in Part I and help to enliven the philosophical debates surrounding why and how people produce theatre inside the walls.

As a whole, this book calls upon us to consider how incarcerated people use theatre to make their struggles visible to one another, prison staff, and other audiences. This theatre also reveals how prisons shape all of our lives, whether we know it or not. Prison theatre makes plain the ways in which incarcerated people have greater complexity and depth than the stereotypes about those in prisons suggest, and in complicating the identities of those in prison, the theatre can make us question notions of whether any person is deserving of the things that the incarcerated endure and whether any of this makes us safer. (The most obvious answer to this last question is that most people do not feel safe when the state has total control of their lives, therefore no one feels safe in prison. Likewise, people in the free world are not safe if the state cannot be trusted to treat all of its subjects as full human beings.) We should never forget that all of our notions of freedom are built upon the backs of those who are not free. In the theatre we can join together—from both sides of the walls—to imagine a different way to live.

How Do We Know That People Make Theatre in Prisons?

By the time I arrived at Angola, I had studied theatre and performance extensively—for the duration of a bachelor’s degree and three years of graduate school. No one had ever told me that people did theatre in prisons. In point of fact, historical documentation from all over the world reveals that people in prisons have been engaged with theatre for thousands of years. In the fifth century BCE, government officials in Athens would temporarily release those in their prisons so that they could attend plays and ceremonies as part of the City Dionysia Festival.² The ancient Romans devised a brutal variety of dramatic reenactments in which prisoners of war and those condemned for execution were forced to wear costumes and be executed in the manner of the mythological character they had been dressed to represent.³ For a much later empire, theatre culture traveled as a colonial force alongside the idea of incarceration as the British set out to establish the only nation ever founded as a place to imprison people. In January 1788, a group of men convicted and sentenced in England arrived in the penal colony of Sydney Cove in what would become Australia; by November of that same year, they had begun staging plays.⁴ Contemporary prison theatre programs have sprung up in facilities around the world in myriad ways. Much of the rest of this book tells those stories.

Undoubtedly, more prison theatre has existed than we can trace, given the array of nations and historical time periods that have incarcerated people. Such work must often have been, from ancient times, as spontaneous as a jam session, as secret as a cellmate’s furtive impersonations of a testy guard. Everywhere and in every age, we find ways to perform for one another, but even when we look only at plays staged in prisons for a public of some kind, these events and people prove exceedingly difficult to track, historically or at present. Today, most prison theatre programs and those who run them keep few records and are hidden (and often censored) by the facilities in which they occur. More simply put, most of us who go into prisons to do this work put so much energy into making theatre in these difficult spaces that we have few resources left over to document or publicize what we are doing. Only the programs that endure for many years tend to have the impulse and ability to create websites, archives, program evaluations, videos, news stories, and blogs to record and share what they have done. Incarcerated people usually have even fewer written records of these programs because many prisons severely limit the amount of paperwork and photographs that a person can keep with them. At times their family members become the repositories of scripts, programs, photographs, and letters describing the theatre work, as incarcerated participants send home information for safe keeping. (One such case of a mother who adopted her son’s whole theatre troupe will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1.) Therefore, nothing in this book should be read as an exhaustive catalog or complete history of prison theatre programs. Such an account could never be accurate because of the number of programs that emerge and quickly disappear without leaving much, if any, record of their existence. Rather, I focus on case studies drawn from the ten countries where I was able to travel during the six years that I spent conducting focused research from 2013 to 2019, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the complex function of theatre programs in the lives of incarcerated people.

Much of the highly incomplete record we do have of theatre in prisons, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was written by people, like me, who run programs inside prisons—theatre professional s, teachers, and activists volunteering in correctional facilities and, on rare but notable occasion, prison staff. Throughout the course of my research and my own work inside the walls, I learned a great deal about what theatre practitioners think is happening when we stage plays in prisons. Buzz Alexander, founder of the Prison Creative Arts Project in Michigan, USA, asserts that our work begins “whenever youth, adults, and students step forward together in institutions where there is much pain and little trust, to risk collaboration and creativity, to begin to laugh, imagine, and play, and to take ownership of their voices.”⁵ Jean Trounstine went inside a Massachusetts (USA) prison to teach Shakespeare because she wanted to give the women there hope.⁶ Rob Pensalfini, artistic director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble in Brisbane, Australia, expresses a desire to debunk “an underlying assumption that anything of value that happens in a prison must be concerned with bringing about c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Prison Theatre: Strategies for a Better Life
• Part II Critical Perspectives
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography on Prison Theatre
• Selected List of Prison Theatre Companies and Programs
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright