The Individual and the Collective

Jan Cohen-Cruz: Episode Three: The Individual and the Collective. 

In this podcast we intertwine first-person tales of prison theatre workshops across three continents reflecting on the prison system, theatre, collectivity, and love. The frame is a love story from one of the workshops, between Finn, who was incarcerated, and me, Jan, who cofacilitated.

Jan: Finn–we’ve both been drawn to collectives. Me, I grew up with this extended family, and then I was drawn to community-based theatre, and then here we were in this prison drama workshop. So, what about you? What’s your thing about collectives?

Finn K.: Well, my thing about the collective is that very early on I knew—I mean I was like about seven years old—I knew that everything we had was wrong. And that was the lack of community. There was none. My father was never there, my mother was up in bed crying. That’s why I said “Okay, the individual thing never works out.” Never. I mean you gotta have it but balance…some community. A little bit. So we didn’t have it. And that’s all I wanted.

Jan: Episode Three is about prison theatre workshops developing through the interplay of the particular participants and the particular groups. This is Terry Kinney and Kathryn Erbe stepping in for Finn and me.

Younger Finn [Played by Terry Kinney]: Upon reflection, I understand exactly why I signed up for the drama workshop: to come out of myself, a requirement if I was to ever have a real life. I had mostly lived interiorly, in my many fear centers. I began to obsess on a Rolling Stones phrase that kept stabbing into my mind: “Suicide right on the stage.”I signed up for the workshop to die the most important of the many deaths I would experience in Trenton: to exit my coil position, a tight bundle of nerves leaving me always on the lookout, ready to spring. If I accomplished this, I would for the first time in my life be free of my crippling fears. 

I had known myself to be a coward at heart since the age of seven. This concerned me most when I entered the criminal life at age eleven, joining my older brother’s gang. I was terrified of getting caught. He said to me, “You’re worried about nothin’. You only got to remember one thing: fight at the drop of a pin and you will get respect. If someone kills you, you won’t be aware of it, so it’s not an issue.”

Over the months turning to years, the fears remained, but like an alcoholic in rehab, I could fake being heroic, and faking would make it real. That was my plan, more frightening than any criminal job I pulled off in life. To be successful in theatre life required the assassination of every solid-yet-deceptive persona I developed over the years, and then to be born again into a fearless lifestyle. Theatre life for me could only be real by being real. And that meant a war unto the death with my many selves reflected endlessly in the lives of others. 

I knew from the start that theatre was my only option to enter communal life, which would remain my central focus throughout life. Living in terror in the years before I came to Trenton had the positive effect of opening me to others, a way of hiding by totally listening to and understanding them, ensuring they were no immediate threat. It was the best cover I could come up with: my existence of total-listening becoming an affirmation of every one of them. 

When I arrived in the workshop, I came out of hiding for the first time in my life. Killing off every persona I had invented and incorporated into my being over a lifetime of pure survival was the only therapy I imagined could actually help me break out of my self-created dungeon of loneliness.

During the workshop process, I met Jan. Totally trusting her, a first for me, other than my brother, opened a door where I could, for the first time, step outside the matrix of my cowardly foundation. You see how precious the love I shared with Jan was and remains. For it was in that relationship I first came out of hiding. That was a major event. I chose her as my one compadre in this new and exciting mission. I trusted her alone. 

I had only read one book by age twenty, The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Then, in my two years in prison before the arrival of the drama workshop, I had read only literature and psychology books. I knew very little about Marxism, feminism, and the sexual revolution, and Jan became my only real guide through all of it. 

Younger Jan [Played by Kathryn Erbe]: Finn may have thought of me as a guide back then, but I didn’t. I was reading Marx for the first time, too. Mao was in the air of the culture I inhabited in those days, but I had merely read, not studied, The Little Red Book, and uncritically at that. When I think about the workshop, I am flooded with memories of scenes and exercises, many from the guys’ lives, which in some cases included radical political activity but only minor references to political writers like Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. On the other hand, I was devouring feminist literature and aspiring to free myself from an internalized sense of women’s inferiority to men.The workshop was an excellent place to practice being the kind of woman I aspired to be, because it allowed all our identities to be in flux.

Jan: This is Mama Glo.

Gloria “Mama Glo” Williams: Before I became a member of the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women’sDrama Club, I had many dark, hidden secrets. Through drama I learned to find a place in myself where I felt safe enough to share all the things that held me back from my destiny. I and others learned how not to let the system incarcerate our minds. People were able to tell their stories and release things that they were dealing with that they couldn’t find peace with. Drama is needed in every jail, prison, church, and school. If you allow drama to help others uncover the tools they need to move past the pain in life, they can become free within themselves. I could never find the words to express just how much I appreciate Ausettua, Kathy, and so many others they brought into my life. Thanks a million to a new family. Drama is it. 

Kathy Randels: The stories that spill out when we’re working on a piece surprise us. 

Jan: This is Kathy in Louisiana.

Kathy: When we share them, we see our own lives through someone else’s lens; and that can help us to reframe our story. It can help us move from a stuck place to forgive someone or something. Clearing out mental and spiritual pathways is like riding rapids to healing, to the cool, calm, big body of water at the end of the roiling river. 

Mama Glo: I was able to release some things from my own closet. I shared “the monster in the yellow house,” about the man that molested me from the time I was a child until I got married. I didn’t know how to tell my mom. Nobody would believe that this Black child was telling the truth. And I didn’t want to put my mom at risk from negative reaction from the community. So I held that demon inside until I was able to create a character in drama to release it. I had to take back the power by forgiving him. The world needs to learn more about forgiving. If you don’t, you continue to give power to the person that took from you.

In the club you could be your real self, but before you walk out that door you were able to take out the phony mask for the compound and put it back on. Drama was my sacred place; it became many others’ safe place. If you chose to share it, a lot of our performances came from our pain. That’s when Jacqueline Bloodworth said, “We are the sacrificial lambs.” We sacrifice ourselves. We put our pain out there to try to help someone else and release them from the pain they’re going through. 

Drama became my healing place: where I needed to be to free myself from the monsters that held me back from my true destiny. Whatever bad things come your way in life, we have to move on. If not, it holds you prisoner to that spot, and you don’t grow. You give that person the power to hold you to that spot, dictating your future.

Drama was part of my cleansing. I was able to show love to others through drama and our performances, and nobody called me weak. I still pull on those things that I was taught in drama to heal myself. Drama helped me uncover tools that I needed. People don’t have to know you’re talking about yourself. You can create characters to free yourself. I am so grateful that I am a member of the drama club til this day.

Ausettua Amor Amenkum: We structured the drama club according to African cultural values. 

Jan: This is Ausettua.

Ausettua: The drama club rarely turns anyone away who expresses a desire to join. When violations occur—such as missing rehearsal, usually due to a prison infraction, or attempting to be not supportive of a sister’s personal journey— consequences are implemented in a just and holistic manner. The women, usually the elders, take it upon themselves to discipline each other and keep the group in line. 

The women have felt empowered and have a sense of ownership. The elders were the leaders, but everyone had input on decisions that were made. Everyone is made to feel that no matter what their struggle is, or challenge, they have a safe space to express themselves in which to be vulnerable, to be human, to be loved. Whatever transpires in that space stays in that space. It is important that we listen to the participants and offer support to ensure them that they are worthy of our love and respect. Core values have been established and are communicated to attendees orally.

Our approach to facilitating the workshops was guided by acknowledgement of Māori protocols, which privileges Māori knowledge and ways of being.

Jan: This is Rand and Reggie in New Zealand—

Rand Hazou: Our approach to facilitating the workshops was guided by acknowledgement of Māori protocols, which privileges Māori knowledge and ways of being. The workshops were informed by a pōwhiri, a traditional cultural welcoming ceremony performed by the Māori prisoners for the visiting US artists. This ritual welcome set the affective and intellectual register for the workshops which the facilitators responded to in genuine, emotive, and meaningful ways.

The pōwhiri is a unique customary welcome practiced by Māori. The etymology of the word pōwhiri are the two words “pō” (unknown) and “whiri” (plaiting). A pōwhiri, therefore, is about the weaving of unknowns. The purpose of a pōwhiri is to provide a process of engagement between two parties and involves one group welcoming another into their place of belonging. The ritual is composed of a series of specific sequences of enacted events. Typically, a pōwhiri would be performed on a marae, or the courtyard of a Māori meeting house, but the location and the sequence involved can be adapted to suit the situation. 

At Auckland Prison, the guests were welcomed into the space with a karanga—ritual chant of welcome performed by a transgender prisoner who held knowledge of language and tikanga, cultural protocols. According to Maori scholar Rua McCullum, the karanga is a call that “reaches not only the physical ears of those who stand waiting, but also the ancestors who have passed to the spirit world.” Following the call and a whaikōrero, or formal speech, by the hosts, the visitors and the prison participants sat facing each other for the duration of the ceremony, which involved further speeches and songs before the ritual concluded in a hongi, or the pressing of noses together signifying the sharing of breath. This entire ceremony is considered tapu, sacred, as the guests and hosts engage on both a physical and spiritual level. For participants of the pōwhiri, “there is an efficacious shift in their state of being, which is emotional, ontological, and psychological.” The final aspect of the ritual involves sharing of refreshments, usually a biscuit and a cup of tea.

Jan: This is Reggie, the visiting US cofacilitator.

Reggie Daniels: I asked the participants to get into a circle and shared my experience as an actor in the production Man.Alive. The original production opened with me reciting a poem I wrote referencing the famous speech by reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and expressing hope and a vision for a new reality for people who were impacted by white supremacy, slavery, and incarceration:

I dream

My eyes are closed

But it's not that kind of dream where I am relaxed and sleep

I am awake and focused

Focused on my seeds of hope

Watering them

and I am dreaming and I am nurturing my ideas […]

I concentrate harder because the demons 

come to frame my thoughts and ideas 

because I am practically a middle-aged Black man 

ex-offender 

ex-drug dealer 

dickslanger 

mind entangler

And while I was lying on my back looking up at the sky

surrounded by a bunch of able-bodied men 

trapped in a nightmare of 

ain'ts, can'ts, do's, and don'ts

mindless labor that does not land me on the 

runway of my dreams.

I fell deep into a trance

when the man with the keys to my freedom told me to dream 

and have it ready for him today

So here is my dream.

The world is a safe place for me and my seeds

I nor my seeds are no longer treated like the invisible man

But there is a team of experts waiting for my next dream

So they can start putting my thoughts 

immediately into action

Me and my seed walk in the garden and share our dreams

And we don't have to worry about 

becoming the next Black president 

because we have finally figured out that 

we are all world leaders

Happiness is more than just 

a hit, a toke, a fix, or a snort 

It's my station in life and now 

my goals have a train, a railway

And I am no longer just lying on my back 

Incarcerated, shackled in my mind 

I am free to move forward

To take flight

And never look down.

With the participants still in a circle, I asked them to chant “dream, dream, dream” over and over as I shared my poem. The chanting would occasionally subside as my delivery grew in tempo and volume, only to be taken up again in brief pauses between stanzas.

The participants were then given Banks’s list of questions on liberation. The participants appeared galvanized and inspired to respond to these questions. The next day, participants shared what they had created, staying up late the night before to write stories, draw, and compose stories and songs. One of the participants shared this response:

Let me tell you my meaning

of Liberation in a Rap

It’s a message of a warrior

who won’t hold back

Beneath the pain and all the

Suffering your hope shines through

Embracing Liberation is a way

of knowing your truth

Release the spirit from within

to free the body and mind

Acknowledge life is beneficial

If you’re living it right

Taking the negative and positive

creating a plan

Illuminating what is possible

and making a stand

Overthrowing your insecurities

is always a fight

Never giving up is a way

that I be living my life.

Anticipating for the time when

all I want is a sign

Without the memories of everyone

I’m leaving behind.

Always knowing that it be possible

to change what we think

Knowledge is given in a pen

so all you need is the ink

Eventually you realize that

Liberation’s a key

Now with the message that I’m

giving you, go follow your dreams.

Reggie: Then I shared some of my personal story as a formerly incarcerated Black man. I explained that my ancestors were taken to the US as slaves and that I found through a DNA test that I am 74 percent Nigerian. I explained that I am interested in visiting my ancestral African homeland and reconnecting with my ancestral customs and culture.

[Music: excerpt from “Wade in the Water”]

Younger Jan:The workshop was as much about us getting to know each other across our similarities and differences as it was about the theatre we made. That’s what theatre is meant to do, open people to one another, whether it’s through a play or a workshop. It’s only now I realize how much went right past me in the workshop, like some of the politically active guys initially thinking that Richard and I may have been sent by the FBI to find out what they were up to. But their distrust broke down over time.

Sometimes before a workshop session started, Kuwasi would ask me to take a walk with him. We’d stroll up and down the room, talking about one thing or another. Some years later when Kuwasi was out of prison, we were walking and talking late into a winter’s night and came upon the icy, untouched beauty of a snow-blanketed Central Park. “It’s not a good idea to walk there this late,” I said. He grinned and said, “That’s because of people like me. Nothing for you to worry about now.” Simply enjoying the beauty of a snowy, moonlit park together reminded me of the scene in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when Paul Newman and Robert Redford, playing criminals, get a bike, and ride around on it with Katherine Ross, with so much pleasure. Like Finn often said, we each contain many selves; we are none of us monolithic.

Kuwasi once cast me as a member of his gang in a bank robbery scene that was exhilarating. I could imagine being part of his life outside, which, as a Black Panther, seemed righteous and brave. I now think Kuwasi, seeing my weakness for collectives, be they theatre companies or gangs, was softening me up for when he would start asking favors, beginning simple but escalating.

Revisiting some of my responses to the workshop now is somewhat mortifying. Like how quick I was to identify with outlaws in the scene Kuwasi cast me in, I who had benefitted so much by staying in the law. Was he stroking my ego, hoping that enacting such a role would lead to my willingness to go down that road?

“Hey,” Kuwasi said with his inimitable grin. “It would be cool if Nine and me had matching earrings—could we have that set you’re wearing?” Yes, of course.

One day, when he got to the workshop early, Kuwasi asked me to open my blouse. I didn’t, but wondered how much that was due to old-fashioned ideas. The conditions of imprisonment are insane. Why are certain body parts meant only to be shared in private anyway? Kuwasi eventually asked me to help him escape, which I didn’t do either. He did nonetheless escape a few years later.

[Music: “Hush”]

Jan: This is Kathy in Louisiana.

Kathy: Throughout the years, I've kept getting the same question: Why are you here? From security and the women; from folks on the outside, too. Here are some of my answers over the years:

Why are you here?

Cuz I was curious.

Why are you here?

Cuz all the doors opened to let me in. 

Why are you here?

Cuz I have healing to offer.

Cuz I need healing.

Why are you here?

Cuz y’all being locked up here ain’t right, it doesn’t sit well with my spirit.

Why are you here?

Cuz you asked me to come back.

Why are you here?

Cuz you pray for me and my wellbeing every time I come.

Why are you here?

Cuz the performances here are the best on the planet.

Why are you here?

Cuz I hate violence, and what it does to us, and I know that the majority of y’all are in here for committing a violence that ended a life, and I know that behind your violence was a violence that you received. A hurt. That nobody ever apologized, much less atoned, for.

Jan: This is John and Saul from Geese Theatre:

John Bergman: We always asked two fundamental questions: Were/are we pissing in the wind? We asked that of everything we did and as often as we could. What right did we have to do any work inside, or any teaching? 

Saul Hewish: Yeah, and who is the audience, who is this work for? All theatremakers should ask that question.

John: The answers turned out to be complicated and got more so as we went on. Our work was designed to get the audience—incarcerated men, women, and young people—to really review what was going on in their heads. And we were working with people who were investigating the psychology of offense. Like Stan Samenow, who was working at Saint Elizabeth Hospital in New Jersey, which had a whole section for the criminally violent. Instead of trying to interpret the men using Freud, he said, “Listen to these guys, listen to what they're saying, and accept that when they're saying, 'I wanna kill you,' it means 'I wanna kill you!' No Freudian subtext. Or when they say, 'I do whatever I want in the world,' this is what they're really saying.” This was sort of revolutionary. 

We in Geese USA had the most terrible battles about what we were really doing. Were we fascists? Was it that we were somehow not really listening? Were we misunderstanding who these men really were? Were we ignoring what they had come from? And some of that was true.

Saul: We asked why they were in prison, what they did to get themselves there, and what they did to try and stay out of prison that fails. That led us to looking more at the internal landscape in their heads. When I joined Geese UK when it started in 1987, that shift had already happened. We just came straight into work you had been developing for a number of years, using the language you developed of the mask: Here's the Mask. What's behind the mask? Masks were part of the strategies we were discovering that alerted us to the tactics the prisoners used to protect themselves or deny others.

John: I became very conscious that I was allowed to come in with a belt. And that a belt was a very significant thing for many of these men. Because, and this we learnt in drama therapy sessions with them and in making new shows with them, the belt was sometimes a tool of punishment that they had experienced as children. The men often tried denial in a session, saying, “I feel nothing” and “Leave me alone.” Just like they had tried to do when they were children being beaten. All you have to do is point to a belt on the floor and say, “What’s the belt saying?” And they tell you. And so awfully, painfully fast. 

So here is my dream. / The world is a safe place for me and my seeds / I nor my seeds are no longer treated like the invisible man

Kathy: What happens when we make theatre out of our rage and our pain; what gets transformed? What can move or be learned? So much pain leads to folks’ incarceration in these United States. Many are innocent. Many are quote/unquote “guilty.” I bring it back to my tiny, personal connection to this mammoth story of anger, aggression, and violence in women, and ask, where do we put the hurt that has been done to us because we were born in a woman’s body? Where do we put the pain of sexual violence, or our innocence in incest? Where do we put the harms we commit because our own harm has not been held? 

My father called the drama club my mission work. He was a Baptist preacher, so he used his words, and recognized his own impulse, in me. I still love Yahweh and Jesus, but I also worship divine beings from other cultures—especially the Hindu Goddess Kali, who saved my life, by giving my locked-up anger a playground in my psyche. She was the primary deity I called on and channeled in Rage Within/Without, a solo performance that I toured for the next twelve years. And then thankfully Ausettua introduced me and the whole drama club to the amazing female deities from the West African Yoruba tradition: Oya, Yemaya, and Oshun. 

There is a well deep inside LCIW [Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women]. We call it the LCIW Drama Club. It sits in the center of every story we tell, every time we gather. It gives us pause. Space. Respite. It heals us. Sometimes, just to say it, whatever it is for each of us:

“I watched my father murder my mother when I was nine years old.”

“I was forced by my husband to have sex with my son.”

“My grandfather, who was a preacher, made me suck his penis, outside in the woods, when I was a child.”

“The white man at the store fondled me every time I went from age nine to twelve; and he did it with all the little Black girls in my small town at that exact age and moved on to the next one once we looked like women.” 

“I took my own child’s life. My neglect. My anxiety. My drug-induced haze. My inability to manage my own emotions. My inability to extract myself from an abusive relationship with my husband, or lover, or baby daddy, or dealer, or love bomber, or narcissist, or manipulator, or mind controller, or the person who once made me feel like a divine queen and throughout the course of our relationship somehow that shifted to making me feel like his slave, worse than that, his dog—that he can beat however and whenever he pleases.”

Breathe. Pray. Listen.

“I dreamt of fish last night, Kathy, that means a baby is on the way!”

“You have the key to the gate to your freedom!”

“Meow!”

“Get the Holy Water!”

“Surrender Dorothy!”

[Singing] “Spread your wings and fly right now. Just fly right now.”

Kathy and Ausettua: [Singing] “Love, love, love, love, is my medicine, my medicine.”

“Love, love, love, love, is my medicine, my medicine.”

Kathy: Those are the phrases, encapsulations of some of the tears, some of the stories, that live in the well of healing that we all found deep inside our own hearts, when we gave ourselves permission to meet in a little group called the LCIW Drama Club. Amen. Ashé. 

Younger Jan: As Richard and I would drive home after a workshop, I’d marvel at something that had happened. “Wasn’t Finn amazing in that scene with the psychiatrist? He really nailed it—the absurdity of separating personal responses from the politics around you, be they the family or something more macro. And Kuwasi—that poem he read was so funny and belligerent at once. Nine told me that Kuwasi ghost wrote some of Gil Scott Heron’s songs.”

“Yes and yes. But why are you so surprised?” asked Richard.

Why was I so surprised? What misconception was I carrying around, without even knowing it, about people in prison? A misconception that books and articles I’d read hadn’t punctured but this experience did. Finn said that most people in prison put themselves there. It is a relief, a respite from a world that expects some kind of behavior from them. 

I thought of the expectations that the world I came from laid on people of my class. My intense involvement in the prison workshop was breaking a taboo, seen as downward rather than upward mobility. My involvement in the prison workshop greatly distraught my parents. 

“You’re on a road directly to hell,” said my usually gentle and non-judgmental father, a World War II veteran and the son of immigrants. He never criticized me but now was frustrated to the brink of his patience at what he saw as me squandering my talents. He had worked so hard to give his children the opportunity to become anything they wanted to be—what was I doing among what he perceived as common criminals? 

“But dad,” I had tried to explain. “These guys grew up in a war zone of poverty and violence, right here in the US. You know from being in a literal war zone that there are different rules.” 

A glimmer of understanding broke through the hardness that had been his face during the conversation. But then my mother put an end to it, stonily silencing my father and wordlessly making him choose his alliance with her or with me, an impossible position. I never got through to him on the subject again. 

Jan: And so those of us on the inside and those on the outside took each other places we’d never been before, making theatre and spending time together. Tune in to Episode four, where the trust and affection continues to grow, not least between Finn and me. 

The theme music you are hearing was composed by Sasha Paris-Carter. The musicians are Daniel Knapp on cello, Dionisio Cruz on percussion, Joanna Lu on viola, Mary Knapp on accordion, and Rene Ferrer on bass guitar. The percussion ensemble is Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective. Wade in the Water featured Kenny Butler on piano and vocalist Haja Worley. Dionisio Cruz joined them on percussion for Hush. 

This is Jan Cohen-Cruz signing off