After The Winter’s Tale at Two Rivers prison in 2014: Ashley Lucas and Jeffrey Sanders. 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 3, 2020

Interview with Ashley Lucas

Johnny Stallings.  Your book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration comes out today, published by Methuen Drama. Can you tell our readers what it’s about and how you came to write it?

Ashley Lucas.  I traveled to ten different countries to see as much theatre inside prisons as I could. When I started, I thought the book might be more focused on how theatre in prisons gets made, which is certainly something the book discusses, but I realized when I really started talking to incarcerated people about their work that what I most wanted to know was why theatre matters to them. The vast majority of people I met in my research had little to no relationship to theatre prior to their incarceration, yet somehow once they started doing theatre inside the walls, it became deeply important to them. I wanted to find out what that was about. Most of these folks didn’t see themselves as training to become professional theatre makers after their release from prison. They told me stories that revealed that they were using the theatre to accomplish other things besides the staging of plays. They were building communities, developing professional skills, creating social change, and maintaining hope as a way to survive the harsh world of the prison. The book endeavors to make the people that I met feel alive and present to readers who likely will never get to meet the extraordinary folks I encountered in prisons.

The process of how I came to write the book is multifaceted. On a very practical level, back in 2013, Methuen Drama invited me to write a book about theatre in prisons around the world, but in a certain sense I had begun this journey long before that invitation arrived to mark the official start of my research. My father spent twenty years in Texas prisons, and in a sense I grew up in prison visiting rooms. I started acting in community theatre productions when I was in middle school, just a few years before my father’s incarceration began. In that sense, both theatre making and visiting prisons have been major cultural practices that shaped my life from adolescence. Nearly a decade into my father’s incarceration, I was in graduate school working on my Ph.D. in theatre and ethnic studies when I decided to write an interview-based play about people who have family members in prisons. When I started performing my play Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass as a one-woman show, I started getting invited into prisons to share it with incarcerated audiences. People began introducing me to other folks who made theatre in prisons, and that was how I came to realize that theatre was actually happening inside these facilities. My work as a scholar shifted to follow my artistic practice, and I began to research prison theatre companies. That led me to a job at the University of Michigan, which recruited me to teach theatre and also become the Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP). (I’m now the Former Director and continue to teach in the program, while the fabulous Nora Krinitsky serves as the current Director.) My work as a playwright/performer, administrator of a prison arts program, teacher of students who facilitate theatre workshops in prisons, and scholar who studies such programs informs how and why I wrote this book. Fundamentally, my experiences as the daughter of someone who served two decades in prison shapes my approach to writing this book more than anything else.

Johnny.  Before asking my next questions, I want to mention that the Prison Creative Arts Project is the largest prison arts organization on Planet Earth. So, my next questions… After seven years of travel and work on the book, are you excited that it’s coming out today? Who do you hope will read it? What do you hope the book will do to them?

Ashley.  I am so grateful that I was able to finish all of my research travels as planned before the advent of the global pandemic. It would have made me so sad to miss out on meeting any of the extraordinary theatre companies and artists I had the honor to meet in my journeys. I am both excited and a little overwhelmed that the book is finally coming out. At the PCAP we’re just starting new correspondence programming in lieu of the work we have always done in prisons in person. It’s very sad not to be able to be physically present with all of the people we care about inside prisons, but the fact that we are being allowed to start this new correspondence programming gives us the ability to send books into prisons for the first time in PCAP’s thirty-year history. We’re sending all participants in our theatre workshops a copy of my book, and I pray that the men and women who receive it will find it both a consolation and an inspiration in this terribly difficult time. It’s always really tough to be in prison, but the pandemic adds layers of pain, fear, and physical torment that are not always part of an incarcerated person’s daily life. Good books have helped me through the hardest moments of my life (and are helping me now). I pray that my book can be a layer of support for people on both sides of prison walls who really need it right now. I think Prison Theatre has the potential to do this for folks because it’s full of stories of people who have used their artistic talents as mechanisms for survival in very trying circumstances. 

Johnny.  I get the impression from your book that you are also making a case to prison administrators and the general public that theatre in prison is more than just a way for prison residents to while away the time. It has value. You’ve already said that prison theatre helps to build community, develop professional skills, create social change, and maintain hope. Let’s talk about love. In your travels, in 2014, you visited Open Hearts Open Minds’ production of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale  at Two Rivers prison in Umatilla, Oregon, and you write about that experience in your book. What happened in the Visiting Room where the play was performed?

Ashley.  Yes, I hope that the book has many audiences. I hope that prison administrators with open hearts who truly wish for the world to be a safer place rather than a more punitive one will read the book and see how much theatre programming can do to improve the lives of everyone inside the prison—the incarcerated folks and the staff—and the lives of those connected to them in the outside world (ie. their families and the general public coming to see the plays).

I am so happy that you brought up love! I find that people are terrified to talk about the concept of love in connection with prisons. There seems to be an automatic assumption that the only kind of love that can happen in prisons is sexual, romantic, or aggressive, and of course, the truth is that because people in prison are complex human beings, just like the rest of us, all forms of love and affection exist inside prisons. We love our friends, our mentors, the people who become our chosen families. A prison that recognizes the humanity of the people inside it and actually wants them to be empathetic and driven to make positive contributions to the lives of others should actually cultivate a broad range of opportunities for safe and loving relationships among people, in much the same ways that a good school, religious congregation, or community organization would. The theatre is an extraordinary vehicle for emotional openness, vulnerability, and love. If we can’t enable one another to be vulnerable in safe ways, then we are cultivating a culture of isolation and aggression. Since the vast majority of people in prison will live again in freedom some day, we need to invest in their emotional wellbeing and stability. People cannot be well if they do not feel that they are loved, admired, and appreciated for their unique gifts and abilities.

I hope that the chapter I wrote in Prison Theatre about the Open Hearts Open Minds production of Winter’s Tale helps readers to feel in some measure the magic of that production. The acting, costumes, music, and sets were all absolutely beautiful, but the incredible joy and love that that performance brought to everyone in the room really altered the world of the prison. The visiting room where the performance was held was full of families and children. I was blessed to sit by a woman named Sharon Lemm whose son Joseph Opyd was in the cast. She had been at Two Rivers prison for the Open Hearts Open Minds production the year before, and when she realized that a number of men in the cast had no families there to support them—indeed some no longer had contact with their families at all—she promptly adopted the entire theatre troupe and became known as Momma Sharon. Her extraordinary spirit exemplifies something larger that was happening at Two Rivers that day. All kinds of human connections were forming. Families were mixing with one another to celebrate the cast. The prison staff were engaged and even proud of the work they’d seen the incarcerated men do. Audience members like me who were until that day strangers to almost everybody in the room were welcomed with open arms—literally, there were people hugging all over that prison visiting room! It was such a glorious evening, a celebration of life in spite of the prison in which we found one another. That play helped break down all kinds of barriers that divide people and helped us all to see what we shared in our common humanity.   

Johnny.  One thing that keeps people away from theatre is money. Not charging admission means that more family members, and even small children, come to see the plays. By making the play free it is a pure gift from actors to audience. What we discovered is that, in the case of our prison productions, the gift was reciprocal. It means so much to the actors that family and strangers have traveled a long way, and come inside a prison(!), to see them, and to appreciate them with thunderous applause. For the volunteers with Open Hearts Open Minds programs, volunteering in prison is not some kind of noble act of charity. It’s a profound reciprocal giving. Have you noticed something similar in your work supervising college students who go into prisons in Michigan?

Ashley.  Yes, absolutely! Many people I meet want to talk about what a great thing our program is doing for folks in prisons, but in truth the most demonstrable growth I can see, as someone whose worked with the program for years, is in the college students. Most of them have never set foot in a prison prior to joining PCAP and don’t believe they have any connection to the carceral system. Then they spend a semester collaborating with incarcerated people and come to love and respect those folks in a way that reshapes their entire world view. The experience of meaningful and prolonged interaction with people who live in very different circumstances than you do expands your understanding of how things like state power, structural inequality, racism, and social justice work. My students and the currently and formerly incarcerated folks with whom we work also come to see the arts as active forces that can help us to build coalitions, address problems, and create opportunities. Fundamentally, my students are not going into prisons to teach or to provide social services. Our mission is to equalize power dynamics as much as the prisons will allow us to do so and approach one another as collaborators with a shared stake in the community and artistic outcomes of our projects. In this way, we all learn and grow together. My students will often tell me that going to prison is the best part of their week, and none of them like prisons. Being in community with other people who take you and your artistic gifts seriously is an incredible joy, a great blessing—one that can be harder to find in the outside world where our presence in a classroom or other public space is often taken for granted. People in prison treasure their time with people from the free world, and they remind us of what a gift it is to be truly present with others.

Johnny.  Thank you so much, Ashley, for taking the time to share with our readers. Congratulations on completing this vast project! It’s going to make the world a kinder place. How can people order your book?   

Ashley. Thank you, Johnny! I’m so grateful that this book project enabled me to get to know you better and to meet the extraordinary folks at Open Hearts Open Minds. I hope very much to return to visit you and the incarcerated folks with whom you work.

My book is available from all major booksellers, and I encourage you to support local and independent bookstores when ordering. My favorite independent bookstore is Literarity Book Shop in my hometown of El Paso, Texas: https://www.facebook.com/LiterarityBooks/. My friend Bill Clark who owns it has my book in stock and ships anywhere in the United States. You can reach him through the store’s Facebook page or by emailing him directly to order: bclark@literarity.com. Local bookstores sustain our communities, and they need our support!

You can also order directly from the publisher’s website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/prison-theatre-and-the-global-crisis-of-incarceration-9781472508416/.

Note to our readers:  Ashley will be doing a virtual book tour, which includes being the special guest of The Open Road’s Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom gathering on Sunday, September 20th, at 3 pm, Pacific Time. Here’s the link:  

 https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82169567543

I hope you’ll join us!

And to clarify a couple of points… I’m no longer doing theatre inside Oregon prisons. Open Hearts Open Minds is moving forward under the leadership of the amazing Carla Grant as Executive Director. To learn more about what they’re doing, here’s a link to their website: www.openheartsopenminds.net.

I do have a lot of prison pen pals, and The Open Road (openroadpdx.org) has a Prison Education Project and a Meditation & Mindfulness Project for people who live in prison and for those who don’t. This “peace, love, happiness & understanding” journal is mailed every week to 33 friends inside prison walls and emailed to 130 friends on the outside.

peace & love

—Johnny