It Started with a Calling

Jan Cohen-Cruz: Episode One: It Started with a Calling

In this podcast, we intertwine first-person tales of prison theatre workshops across three continents, reflecting on the prison system, theatre, collectivity, and love. It’s framed by an ongoing exchange between me and Finn, who you are about to meet. We met in one of those prison theatre workshops and fell in love—he joining from the inside and me from the outside.

Hi Finn.

Finn K.: Oh, hello, Jan.

Jan: Hello. So, what’s the first thing for listeners to know about theatre workshops in prison?

Finn: Well yeah, the thing is, is that, so if you got a really bad place like Trenton, when the drama workshop comes in, it’s totally different from everything that’s going on. You got two different worlds. 

Jan: Yeah.

Finn:  The drama workshop was so much the outside that I couldn’t think about anything all week in the cell. It wipes out the prison.

Jan: The workshop also took over my life on the outside. Nowhere else could I be so vulnerable and try out so many different selves. The workshop was buzzing with life unlike the routines we fall into both in and outside of prison. Here are some of the people from five other workshops that you’ll be hearing from throughout the podcast.

Mama Glo: The system that I spent fifty-one years in was built to dehumanize people, make you have a whole lot of anger.

Jan: This is Mama Glo.

Mama Glo: But some of the volunteers that were allowed to come into the system, they wouldn’t let us go into that place. They brought you things to think about, building characters to express yourself, and no one ever knew that you were talking about yourself.

Jan: And here are some of the others,who I’ll introduce a little later.

George: It was really quite moving for me because my son was the same age. I kept thinking if he was ever in a similar position that he was incarcerated—how would he be treated? I would want him to be valued.

Kevin: I know from the guys in my workshops that classes they are able to take are great. Groups are important. But what I see are spaces where people, piece by piece, are invited to express their humanity, and do find true love with one another.

Jess: Where is the place for love and care in the work? It is about being human. Feelings are involved. And that’s okay, right?

Saul: I remember at the end, a participant came up to me and said, “That’s the best week I’ve had in prison, ever.” Well, this is one of the best weeks that I’ve ever had as well.

Reggie: For me, liberation is connected to an appreciation for humanity, love, and spirit that can free us from thoughts that bind us. I sometimes yearn for the feeling of connection with my brothers on the inside—an understanding that I couldn’t find on the outside.

Jan: Longtime prison abolitionist Angela Davis writes that prisons disappear human beings but not the social circumstances that lead to incarceration. Through the Trenton Prison Workshop, I discovered that people in circumstances far from my own were not what I thought. Why was I so surprised? 

I’m Jan Cohen-Cruz, your host.

You’ll now hear how Finn and my lives brought us to the Trenton State Prison drama workshop, and then what brought Kathy Randels and Ausettua Amor Amenkum to the drama club at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. Here’s Terry Kinney and Kathryn Erbe, stepping in to play Finn and me.

Younger Jan [played by Kathryn Erbe]: In 1965, I began on the path that brought me to Trenton State Prison in 1971. I was fifteen and leaving my small Pennsylvania hometown for a state-supported arts school in North Carolina. I had felt out of place at the local school, which valued sports and cheerleaders above all, and where I felt I had to hide my love of theatre. My parents thought that I was just going away to finish high school, but I never lived in their home again. I went from being lovingly molded according to middle-class Jewish American values to coming into my own by how I responded to what I encountered along the way.

Younger Finn [played by Terry Kinney]: During World War II, my dad, from Ireland, married my mom, a gorgeous child war bride from Scotland, with raven-black hair and blazing blue eyes. After the war they emigrated to America. Dad became brutal and unrelenting because of a severe gambling addiction, maintained not only by denying his children basic food, clothing, and medical care inside the incurable fever of placing a bet, but also becoming indebted to Irish gangsters as his debts escalated, at one point receiving a $100,000 bail-out. He bought and lost three homes during my childhood, one of them a palatial brick stone with vineyard and wine cellar but no food in the kitchen cabinets.

Younger Jan: I went to Paris in 1969 and taught English in a language school to support myself. My eyes were opened just living in Paris in the aftermath of the so-called “events of May 1968,” a period characterized by worker and student unrest, and an unlikely alliance between them. There were skirmishes with the police, in response to protests about wages and working conditions, and everywhere the graffitied slogan, “The more I make love, the more I want to make the revolution; the more I make the revolution, the more I want to make love.” Allying these two ideas stunned and inspired me, epitomizing a private and public life in sync with each other for which I yearned. I joined a group led by a guy who’d worked with the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, whose “poor theatre” was centered in what passed between the actor and the spectator, with no frills, emphasizing the holiness of the actor and theatre as a spiritual path to uncovering one’s deepest self. The work also emphasized following one’s impulses, something I resolved to do more when I returned to the US in 1970 and moved to New York. I also intended to look into street theatre companies, like I’d encountered in Paris, much inspired by US companies like Bread and Puppet Theater that performed throughout Europe and the Americas.

It is a core African value to treat all living things with dignity and to acknowledge their humanity. Neither death nor incarceration stops Kujichagulia: collective work and responsibility.

Younger Finn: When I was five, I was bedridden with a severe chest deformity that looked likely to end in an early death, possibly within days. The doctors pressed my parents to leave me at the hospital to die, but my hysterical mom insisted on taking me home. She kept me alive by constructing a decongestant-tent to constantly clear what little lung capacity I had. After putting up with my mom’s absurd efforts to keep me alive for years, my dad took me to the basement to snuff out this horrid condition and tried to drown me in the utility sink. But my mom stepped in. Not long after, I was one of four children in America chosen to participate in a new experimental surgical technique involving massive bone-grafting, building me a chest.

Younger Jan: Back in the US, I worked for free with Bread and Puppet. They had a storefront theatre that Nathan’s Famous, the Hot Dog King, had paid to renovate, in Coney Island, an amusement park on the Brooklyn ocean front. I was drawn to Bread and Puppet’s commitment to a broad public as well as to their aesthetics, a combo of popular entertainment and mysticism. Their funhouse featured a two-story high Uncle Sam figure with a paper mâché head, animated by three puppeteers. Other animated figures were as small as a thumb. A violinist and an accordionist accompanied a narrator who told a simple, subtly political tale as the audience was led from one scene to another in the semi-dark. It was a bit like moving through a nightmarish living painting of the evening news.

Younger Finn: My dad’s ongoing war against my existence continued after I was cured. His daily gambling losses painted him as a total loser as a husband and a dad. His escalating losses locked him into a frustration he could not shake from his burdened soul other than by beating my brother and me for instant relief, which became the norm.

Younger Jan: One day, after I’d been with Bread and Puppet for about a month,I arrived early and the funhouse was locked. Just then a blue van with a cityscape painted on it and the words New York City Street Theater pulled up next door in front of its own theatre storefront also supported by Nathan’s. People got out and started washing it. 

“Hi,” I said. “Can you use another set of hands?”

“Sure,” replied a man about ten years older than me, with curly brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a disarming smile, handing me a soapy sponge. “What brings you out here to off-off-off Broadway?”

“I was doing Grotowski’s work in Paris and met Bread and Puppet and came back to the US to join them.”

“And how is it?”

“I actually prefer acting than, like, moving a limb of a great big puppet.”

“Ah, yes. You don’t want to be a puppet,” he smiled, as if he’d told a cosmic joke. “Tell us about the Grotowski work.”

So I did, and they invited me inside to demonstrate some of Grotowski’s exercises. Then they got busy packing things up because they were leaving on a cross-country tour the next day. Curly-head invited me to stay in touch.

Younger Finn: The final death-dive my dad initiated was when I was fifteen. I’d been homeless for some time, mostly on the streets of New York City. My family lived in New Jersey. But a snowstorm hit while I was in New Jersey dealing drugs five miles from my parents’ house. I sat down against a large oak tree in a park, and woke up at about 5 a.m., covered in snow. But within two hours I entered a delirium state and found myself standing in the kitchen of my parents’ home hallucinating my brains out, not knowing how I got there.

Younger Jan: When they returned from the tour, the female co-director of the City Street Theatre, clearly the stronger of the two, had decided to break with Richard (of the curly hair), giving company members the choice of which director to go with. Everyone opted for her. Richard asked me to help him build a new company, raise money, organize a tour, and do a little of everything else. That’s how the New York City Street Theatre/Jonah Project began. We hired actors and made two shows: a short one based on a folktale and a full-length one based on the Biblical story of Jonah. We performed them across-country the next summer, traveling in a van, a car, and a flatbed truck that also served as our stage. 

Younger Finn: My entire family was sitting in the living room watching television. And then I began to pontificate loudly to each family member on why our family was lost in hell, ending with my dad: “And you’re the one who destroyed us all, all of us conquered and forced to participate in your living nightmare.” Then I saw dad’s bulky self, walking fast towards me. With no intention, I looked at my right fisted hand that was on its own, without consulting me, driving itself full force into my dad’s face. I would have pounded his skull into the arms of Lady Death if my brother hadn’t come to his rescue, putting me in a hammerlock while my dad recovered from his daze and began throwing devastating punches at my body and head until finally saying to my brother, “Let him go.” Then he grabbed my body and threw me down the cellar stairs where I remained for three days unconscious. When I awoke my mom was staring into my face, and said, “You’re going to have to leave, and you can never return. Do you understand?” I slightly nodded yes.

Younger Jan: God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn the people that they were about to be wiped out for their evil ways. Jonah boarded a ship going the other way. There was a storm at sea because Jonah’s god was angry at him, so the sailors threw him into the water. He was swallowed by a whale and spat out on the shore of Nineveh. Then Jonah did as God had commanded. The Ninevans heeded Jonah’s words and God forgave them. Jonah got angry, believing that he’d come for nothing. God was never really going to destroy them. One hot sunny afternoon, God created a shade tree for Jonah. The next day, God cut it down. Jonah got even angrier. God asked how Jonah could care more about that one tree than he expected God to care about all of Nineveh, with its many people and animals.

Younger Finn: So, life began on my own, no reprieves. I found myself celebrating this arrival. I bought a new comic book that caught my attention immediately, The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. The story is about an acute empath physician who suffers terribly at the suffering of others. He develops a drug he can inject to see more deeply into the origin and endless varieties of human suffering. Having no respite from this dreadful consciousness drives him like Oedipus into tearing his eyes out. 

Younger Jan: It was not lost on me that my path, like Jonah’s, pulled me in unexpected ways towards what I think of as my destiny. Enacting the Jonah story for different audiences, my twenty-year-old self was alert to a calling apart from individual ambition. 

Emblematic was a show we did in one of the Dakotas, in a town with a Native American and a white population. The white people never got out of their cars. They just opened the windows so they could hear the performance and honked at the end instead of clapping. The Native Americans sat on blankets and picnicked during the show. They all seemed to take that arrangement for granted. It horrified me how easily they co-existed so close yet so separately.

It was clear that simply bringing a show like ours with its humanistic content did nothing to change or even challenge that divide.

But it did something to change me. I saw people’s lives closer up and got to talk with them, which had not been possible when I stayed on one side of the proscenium and the audience stayed on the other.

Younger Finn: I knew that story was my life, but in my immaturity was not able to see that my destiny involved seeking out and entering theatre life where the mysterious questions related to human suffering and death would be answered.

Younger Jan: Performing the Jonah show again and again, across the US in Indigenous territories, inner cities, at migrant camps, and wherever we were invited, made me want a life in the theatre that would keep putting me in exchange with a range of people. I was hearing people’s own versions of their lives, and it rang truer than the little I’d heard about unsung and struggling communities secondhand. When we got back to New York and Richard invited me to co-facilitate a workshop in a men’s maximum-security prison, there was never a doubt I’d say yes.

Jan: Here’s Ausettua in Louisiana.

Being dumped by my first lover after two weeks […] led me to connect to the deep, raw heart of every woman who has been wronged by a man. And […] to talk to women who actually killed the men who wronged them, wondering if murder appeased the rage inside.

Ausettua Amor Amenkum: My journey to work with incarcerated community members began in the 1980s with my company, Kumbuka, the Swahili word for “remember.” It is committed to the preservation, documentation, and presentation of African and African American culture and folklore, and to ensuring that the entire community had access to learning about the significance of African culture for Black Americans. Our community includes the elderly, the young, the working, the retired, and, yes, those who are incarcerated.

Years before, I had completed an undergrad degree in psychology and had attended graduate school to work on a master’s in criminal justice. But I felt little gratification at an internship at the local parish prison teaching male inmates basic subjects, nor did I feel comfortable working in a prison environment. The presence of the guards with loaded guns constantly hovering over my every move was very annoying and counterproductive. I always wanted to be a criminal psychologist, but I was sensing that maybe that wasn’t in my destiny.

Majeeda Snead, a founding member of Kumbuka, and Mary Howell were the primary attorneys for convicted murderer Gary Tyler. It was 17 October 1974. Tyler was sixteen years old, was headed home on the school bus. As the bus was leaving Destrehan High School, it was attacked by an angry mob of one hundred to two hundred whites, mostly students who were angry about integration at the school.

The racially charged atmosphere had been heightened by the arrival of David Duketo Destrehan, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi politics in Louisiana and the United States. Timothy Weber, a thirteen-year-old boy standing outside the bus with other classmates, was shot and fatally wounded. Police searched the bus more than once, but no gun was found. The bus driver said he believed the shot had come from outside.

Tyler was arrested for disturbing the peace when he talked back to a police officer. He was soon charged with Weber’s murder by an all-white jury. He was the youngest person to be on death row and served forty-one years for a crime he did not commit. While incarcerated, Gary Tyler was an active participant in the Angola Drama Club. He eventually directed it, for thirty years. He used drama to promote civic responsibility and hope.

The Angola Drama Club hosted several presentations, including Kumbuka. We were the first traditional African dance company to perform at the prison and left quite an impression on all who had witnessed us. The power of the drum and the dance left an indelible mark on the land. Music awakens the ancestors. The land where the prison now sits was once a plantation. Our performance opened a portal for the ancestors, reclaiming the land, even though we did not realize it at the time.

Kumbuka was overjoyed to perform at the prison. By giving our time to the inmates at Angola, we were manifesting the concept of ubuntu: “I am because you are.” We understood that our destiny was tied to their destiny. The African concept of life extends beyond the present. It includes those of us who are living now, those of us who have lived and transitioned—the ancestors—and those souls waiting to be born. In African culture the community is where all three of these existences are actualized and observed.

It is a core African value to treat all living things with dignity and to acknowledge their humanity. Being a part of the spiritual and cultural journey for many of the brothers in Angola was so fulfilling. We observed their self-esteem and self-worth magnified. Neither death nor incarceration stops Kujichagulia: collective work and responsibility.

Kathy Randels: Being dumped by my first lover after two weeks—

Jan: Here’s Kathy.

Kathy: —at eighteen, finally throwing virginity away and some part of the Baptist faith of my fathers with it, led me to connect to the deep, raw heart of every woman who has been wronged by a man. And more than that, to talk to women who actually killed the men who wronged them, wondering if murder appeased the rage inside.

Younger Finn: Trenton State Prison is where my involvement in theatre life began in 1971 at age twenty-three. My closest friend Tommy and I returned from the mess hall, and on the tier bulletin board was an invitation: “A Drama Workshop will begin this fall. Any inmate interested, sign up in the Department of Education.”

We stood there silent for a moment, and then Tommy says, “You think you could do that?”

“Definitely not,” and looked in his eyes. “But isn’t that the best reason to do it?”

Younger Jan: Richard and I drove the hour and a half from Brooklyn to Trenton, New Jersey. Although it was a maximum-security facility, the complex was, weirdly, in the midst of a working-class residential neighborhood. It had opened in 1836 and looked it: thick, bulky stone walls darkened with over a century of pollution and neglect. Razor-sharp wire along the top. Flood lights sweeping across the neighborhood all through the night. Tall dominating watch towers.

“Why would they build such a foreboding structure in a family neighborhood?” I pondered out loud. “Do they care that little about the people who live here?”

Richard sighed. “Or maybe it’s a warning.” We entered the edifice and went through a metal detector.

Kathy: My first contact with women who killed was in 1994 through the Illinois Clemency Project for Battered Women. One of those women asked me why I was so intrigued. Another, who I told I was going back home to New Orleans, said, “Well, keep working with women in prison down there.” I didn’t have to listen. But I did. A door to the unknown.

Jan: I, too, was about to go through a door to the unknown. Hear about the early days of the Trenton, Louisiana, and other workshops in episode two.

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. This is Jan Cohen-Cruz signing off.