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Some years ago, when I was a reporter for a newspaper in Southern California, I wrote a series about the state’s burgeoning prison population, which was having unintended consequences in every facet of the culture. Industries, from phone companies such as MCI to giant building contractors such as Fluor Daniel, fed at the trough of the massive prison industrial complex, which swept in youth of color at alarming rates.
For the series, I interviewed convicts, gang members, prison guards, crime victims, human rights advocates, parole officers, families of prisoners, the governor and the attorney general. And it was Orwellian. All the politicians could promise was more incarceration for younger and younger offenders.
“They might as well put a gate up around the whole state,” one convict said. “That’s where we’re headed. This is the new plantation.”
The year I started the series, spending for California’s penal system eclipsed all funds for the state’s acclaimed university system for the first time in history. And California is a bellwether for what’s happening in every state.
I thought about that as I watched Insurgent Theatre’s In the Belly, an overtly political play about the shattering cruelty of prison. The three-person work, performed at Wild Goose Creative in early October, was an attempt to portray the mind-numbing repetitiveness of prison life, with its degrading body cavity checks and stupefying loneliness. Interspersed were radical polemics that argued against the racist reach of the prison system and advocated for the outright abolition of prisons.
I have no quarrel about Insurgent Theatre’s politics. I saw the California prison system up close and remember well its grotesque abuses. But Insurgent’s approach—to not use various prisoners’ testimonies and instead present their own reactions to the prison system—makes for less than compelling theater. Put another way, the company, which moved here from Milwaukee in 2010, doesn’t present the gripping details and stories that inspire identification with the inmate’s plight.
I wanted to hear tales from the prisoners themselves, maybe snippets of dramatic monologues to put me inside a cell—to let me see what life is like behind bars. For the voices of prisoners are the most telling aspect of prisons.
Instead, I heard buzzers go off regularly and saw men and women repeatedly remove and put on their prison garb and rage or bristle with anger for brief intervals.
There were helpful insights: a narrator telling the audience that poor black men, for instance, are a major target of the system. But sometimes a cast member talked over the narration, making it impossible to hear what was said. This was regrettable, as the narration offered the only real coherent story. The fact is, almost nothing about In the Belly comes across with the plain tragedy of prison existence—which is doing time, the prisoner’s lot, after all.
But then that was the company’s plan all along.
“We decided to keep away from narratives,” Ben Turk, the co-founder of Insurgent Theatre, told me a few days later. “We didn’t want to steal other voices for this play, but rather speak of our relationship to prison. We tried to show how you lose your identity in prison.”
It’s not as if Insurgent Theatre—Turk, Kate Pleuss and Weslie Coleman—didn’t do their homework. They’ve interviewed prisoners, been pen pals with convicts and read voluminously on the subject. Their after-show explorations of the prison dilemma across the country—from Florida and Wisconsin to Maryland and New York—has elicited deep reactions, some from former convicts in the audience.
“Prisons are a huge part of what’s wrong with society,” says Coleman, who had no acting experience before this show. “When I talked with prisoners, when I thought about the nature of their experience, I realized prisons are integrally related to capitalism. Societal change has to come. Prison traumatizes prisoners. And it harms the rest of us.”
Though I can’t say I enjoyed In the Belly, it did make me think about the role of stories inside theater and the relation of the actor to the adapted narrative. I’m glad the company felt free to experiment with form. I look forward to its other offerings. But, in the end, the stories rule. They always will.
Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.
