Ten years ago, I was looking for a way to understand what life inside prison was like. My brother was locked up in Texas and he refused to let me visit. We were writing letters regularly, but that wasn’t enough. I needed to know what he dealt with on a daily basis. What he had to endure. So I volunteered to teach a class for women inmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown. I knew that I could never fully understand what he went through, but I wanted to have some idea.

I had another reason: I wanted to put theatre to the test. I had long questioned the validity of an art form that is only regularly attended by 2% of population. Could theatre speak to those in prison as well as the cultural elite? Could it be relevant to those who have lost everything? In my naïveté, I determined that if theatre could speak to even those in prison-the powerless-it would be art worth doing.

There is no poorer theatre than that of a prison. Bereft of any production elements, actors who create theatre in penal institutions have an ascetic theatre as their only option. I had long been interested in “poor theatre,” the aesthetic developed by Polish avant-garde director Jerzy Grotowski. In his 1968 manifesto Towards a Poor Theatre, Grotowski condemned the theatre rich in production elements for its tricks and dishonesty. He argued theatre would never be able to compete with film and television in terms of technological resources. One way to sustain the vitality of the form was to focus on what theatre could achieve that film cannot: poor theatre and performance as an act of transgression.

MY BROTHER WAS LOCKED UP IN TEXAS
AND HE REFUSED TO LET ME VISIT.

I had previously applied the idea of poor theatre to my work in the theatre as a director. I taught in Tanzania, East Africa and toured a three-person South African play around the country with next to nothing in terms of production elements. The props and costumes we had were what we could carry in our packs.

But the population in the prison presented a different challenge: the women that participated in the program as writers and actors had very little education, and many had never even seen a play. Could this population create an original piece worth presenting to the prison community? Would they find meaning in the creative process of theatre?

From the start I knew that I didn’t want to descend on the prison with Shakespeare in hand, bringing “culture” as a goodwill ambassador from “civilization.” I asked myself how did I contribute something worthwhile in my community without being elitist, arrogant, or – worse – ineffective?

The answer, for me, was to allow the women to speak for themselves. I approached the women (with the good counsel of my co-instructor Cheryl Graeff) as a facilitator. We asked them what they wanted to create, we discussed possible themes, and they began to write. The piece would be theirs. We would simply provide the space and the context in which they were able to tell their own stories.

Technically, the prison provided us with the space and the opportunity to do the workshop. But the “space” to which I refer was not simply the classroom or gymnasium in which we rehearsed. The creative space of the workshop was the personal, safe space that the prison systematically destroyed. The women had very few personal items and virtually no control over their daily life. A few pictures or books, perhaps, were all they had of their former life. They had to share the room they slept in, their clothes were issued to them, the food they ate, the time they woke up-all were decided for them. There is no such thing as private space in a prison; the women are subject to regular searches of their persons or cells, to make sure they are not stealing or carrying contraband. They have surrendered the control over their very bodies: they are transported to other facilities without notice and are periodically strip-searched, their naked bodies subject to inspection.

Even the most sympathetic guards refer to the women as “females,” as in a specimen, a subject, an animal. The less sympathetic prison workers use terms ranging from inmates to criminals. They have lost the ability to be seen as women,
as individuals, as mothers, sisters, and wives. As one way to combat the dehumanization they experienced, we re-connected with them at the start of each class and the first few moments of each meeting were devoted to a “check-in.” We would go around the circle and each participant would introduce herself by name, sharing how she felt or what had been happening.

This symbolic gesture, by which the women were recognized as individuals, transformed the space from oppressive and impersonal—to safe and deeply personal. In this context, they were able to share private moments from their lives. Despite the cruelty of the institution around them, they knew we would not mock them, belittle them, or bully them. From their perspective, I believe they may have just wanted to escape the boredom, stave off the dread of their sentences, and occupy their minds with something else, and play. But from our perspective, we realized that they were engaging in acts of transgression; they were claiming the personal, they were maintaining their identity, and they began considering their possibilities. In short, they began seeing themselves as individuals, and as women capable of creating something.

This past fall and ten years later, I returned to the prison and taught a workshop with my former co-instructor. We followed the same structure of creative writing and improvisation workshops to create an original piece. It is a model adopted in the other prison projects sponsored by the theatre company that sponsored our class, Stillpoint Theatre Collective. They have now extended their work to incorporate several prison facilities and, most recently, are performing the writing of incarcerated women outside of the prison here in Chicago.

The theme of our performance this fall was Truth and Lies in four parts, entitled: lies you have told me, lies I have told you,
lies I told myself, and the truth. Each section began with a chorus of single lines spoken by various ensemble members, ranging from humorous to heartbreaking. The emotional arc of the piece began with the judgments others made about them, “I will never be a good mother. I am dumb. I have a very long neck. I am ugly. You told me I couldn’t ride a bike. I’m not pretty. You told me I wouldn’t finish high school. I’m not smart. I would have a bunch of kids. Nobody would want me.” While the piece concluded with, “I want to make things better. I want a new start. The truth is I love myself. The truth is I’m in jail. The truth is I am smart. I am beautiful. I am sexy. I’m ambitious. I will make it. I have changed.”

Under other circumstances, I would have balked at such affirmations of self-worth, and labeled them trite and sentimental. In our context, however—and in the performance in which they were spoken with honesty and conviction—these words were transformational. These words were the powerful expression of the powerless, the courage of the convicted. In seeing the final performance, with segments in Spanish to connect fully with its inmate audience, with its lesbian/bisexual issues, with a transgendered woman in the cast, I realized how transgressive a poor theatre in a prison could be. The women were claiming the performance as their own. They were claiming their lives and possibilities as within their reach. In the end, the women didn’t need us. They had themselves, they had each other, and they had hope.

Teaching in the prison also provided me with an excellent education in the justice system. The US Bureau of Justice reports that were nearly 2.3 million people behind bars at the end of 2007. Our prisons are dangerously overcrowded, operating at or over capacity in nearly all facilities, with federal prisons housing 150% of the inmates they are able. Furthermore, the way that the “justice” system is being run in the US suggests that these institutions are primarily designed for punishment rather
than rehabilitation.

“Whenever an actor moves across an empty space, a moment of the theatre happens.” With these lines, theatre guru Peter Brook captured the spirit of the movement in the late 1960s away from the commercial theatre and its artificial trappings. My experience in the prison taught me that an empty space, while perhaps poor in terms of its material resources, can be rich in terms of its honesty, dignity, and possibility. The experience affirmed for me that theatre can have a redemptive effect upon an ensemble and its audience. It cuts to the heart of why many of us are involved in the arts: we believe in the creative process as an affirmation of individuality, we know the collaborative process as one that can create community, and we are committed to the possibilities and the power of the imagination.

I want to make things better. I want a new start. The truth is I love myself.
The truth is I’m in jail. The truth is I am smart. I am beautiful. I am sexy.
I’m ambitious. I will make it. I have changed.

by Emmy Kreilkamp