|
|
Consequently, he believed that rectifying the social inequality of America’s class system would repair the inmates’ drive toward deviance and that the theatre was ideally suited to facilitating these changes.
Agnes Wilcox, the guiding force behind Prison Performing Arts, approaches her shows as educational. While she believes the theatre can contribute to inmate rehabilitation—a conviction she expresses in the company’s mission statement—she does not load the working process with any specifically rehabilitative designs. She attempts instead to structure the process to broaden the participants’ intellectual and creative faculties, beginning with a college-level curriculum of academic seminars, which then dovetail into play rehearsals. As opposed to Couloumbis, who treated warily any effort to construe the work as reform, Wilcox will acknowledge the rehabilitative potential of theatre. However, unlike Gordon, she does not try to fashion the rehearsals or the exercises of her acting workshops to make them self-consciously fit any penological agenda. Rather than insist on producing quantitative results, she allows the work to accomplish what it will for the various participants and “leave[s] it at that.”18
I chose these three companies in particular in order to conduct this study across the spectrum of theatre production behind bars. Theatre for the Forgotten, being the pioneer in the field, obviously merits attention; the way in which the first practitioners of prison-theatre in this country went about creating their art in this environment reveals much about the state of the practice. I chose to look at Cell Block Theatre, partly because of Ray Gordon’s pronounced political stance, and partly because of the program’s relationship to TFTF. Being an off shoot, to a certain degree, of Theatre for the Forgotten, but nonetheless stressing an almost polar-opposite operating philosophy, will simultaneously compliment the study of TFTF and explore the further extreme of the penological spectrum. Furthermore, during its operation, Cell Block Theatre was offered as a model for other prison-theatre programs across the country. The National Endowment for the Arts heralded the organization as a prototype for other performing-arts programs; and the federal government created Project C.U.L.T.U.R.E. (Creative Use of Leisure Time in Restrictive Environments), operating on a $1 million budget to replicate CBT in prisons throughout the country.19