 Welcome to this lecture which is part of the Burek Distinguished Lecture Series. Yes, a special thanks to the Office of the President who funded this series and to folks like Susan Davidson, where Susan's there who helps coordinate all of this. So a round of applause for those entities. Thank you very much. As part of our production of The Exonerated, which is taking place this week, we've planned some events around it. A couple of talk-backs. The talk-back happened last night. It was a wonderful conversation. We're having another talk-back tonight. Tonight's talk-back will be moderated by Kathy Fox, who is a sociology professor and an associate dean, and also by our guest speaker Ashley Lucas. Before Ashley comes forward and does her talk, I'm just going to tell you a few words about her. I've known Ashley for a number of years now, and I'm continually impressed by the kind of productive work that Ashley does through theater. Ashley is an associate professor of theater and drama and director of the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan. She holds a BA in theater studies in English from Yale University and a joint PhD in ethnic studies and theater and drama from UC San Diego. She's a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the UNC Faculty Engaged Scholars Program and UNC's Institute for Arts and Humanities. I first came to know Ashley because she created a solo performance piece called Doing Time, and today she's going to tell us about her recent research that has to do with the restorative and socially productive ways that we can take arts into prisons, and she may give us a couple of excerpts from her own solo performance work, so please help me welcome Dr. Ashley Lucas. Thank you so much. I'm really delighted to be here. This is my first time in Vermont, and I've received nothing but warmth and beautiful scenery since I arrived here in terms of the reception that everyone has given me, so thank you for inviting me, thanks especially to Gregorio Ramos, who is my old friend and someone who I admire greatly as an academic, a teacher, and a performer and director. I am here today in large part because I believe that theater can actually change the world. I know that sounds like a big idea, and a lot of people may raise an eyebrow or two at how much the arts can actually make an impact on social change, but I've seen it happen, and I think that the ways in which we think about constructing and understanding our culture have everything to do with live interaction. So social media is great, film and television can be extraordinarily powerful, but there's something different that happens when we're in a room with other live people interacting around something that really matters to us. So the topic of the day is documentary theater, but I want to talk specifically about the ways in which documentary theater has an impact on the criminal justice system. Some of you all have seen already or are a part of the production of The Exonerated, which I'm really excited to see tonight, and I'll talk a little bit more about that play and its history in a bit, but I want to start by talking about another play about the criminal justice system called Voices in the Rain. So there is an extraordinary man named Michael Keck. He's an African-American performer and composer and sound designer for the theater. He makes a living as a theater professional. He was raised in rural North Carolina, somewhere outside of Raleigh. And while he was growing up, he sang in church choirs. He became a performer and made a life out of the theater, thinking that it would be sort of a traditional career in professional theater, where he would perform places and people would pay him to do that, and that would be his life. So he went off into the world and began to do this kind of work. And he started thinking about ways that he could give back to the community in which he had been raised. And so someone who knew his extraordinary singing voice from the local church choir said, Would you come back to North Carolina and sing in one of the local prisons? And so he goes into this huge men's prison that's outside of Raleigh, and as he's walking into the facility before he even gets to the spot where he's going to be performing, he starts to hear people calling his name. And there are all these men in the tears who are calling to him, Keck, hey, Michael, remember me? And it turns out that this prison is full of the people that he went to high school with. People who he did not think were going to end up in prison, people who didn't seem like they were on the wrong track, but a lot of black men like him were in this prison. And that's why he hadn't heard from them or seen them in many years. So he goes in, he does the show, and when he comes out of it, he flies back to New York where he's working and living, and he starts writing some notes about a play that he might like to write about the criminal justice system and why it is that he would know so many people in prison without realizing that he had any connection to that prison. And literally, while he's taking notes for this play, he gets a phone call from his sister back in North Carolina, and she says, Michael, you've got to come home. Something's happened to mom and dad. And it turned out that someone had broken into their home and brutally beaten his elderly parents and robbed them, and both of them were in the hospital. So he immediately flies back to North Carolina to see about his parents. They were pretty badly injured, but they were able to come home from the hospital after he gets back to North Carolina. And so he takes them home, they're traumatized, they're frightened, and he goes to the local Home Depot and starts putting up bars on all the windows of their house to prevent something like this from happening again. And when he speaks about it, he said he realized as he was doing it that he was actually incarcerating his parents in their own home, putting bars on all the windows to keep them safe. But it's rural North Carolina, and there's only the one Home Depot, and they ran out of bars before he had enough to do the whole house. So there's still a few windows on the back of the house that are not yet covered. And this is very soon after his parents have been attacked. So he's asleep in their living room on the couch downstairs. His parents are both upstairs asleep, and he starts to hear something. And at first he thinks he's just having a nightmare because he is so upset about what's happened to his parents in the events of recent days. And then he realizes, no, there's actually a noise outside. And he looks out in the backyard, and there's a man stacking up the yard furniture to try to get to one of those windows that doesn't have bars on it. The perpetrator had come back. And so Michael gets on the phone, and he calls 911, and he says there is a medium-skinned black man in the backyard. He's trying to break into the house. He's about five foot seven, five foot eight, really short hair. And he realizes while he's talking that he's describing himself, but also this man who's outside. So the 911 dispatchers send people to his parents' house. He's trying not to wake his parents because he doesn't want to frighten them again after all the trauma that they've been through. But while he's waiting for the police to arrive, he flips on the back porch light, and the person who's trying to break into the house realizes that someone has seen him and flees. So when the police arrive, they come to the front door. Michael runs out of the house to say, please don't wake my parents. The guy ran out the back. And of course they arrest him. So he spends about two hours trying to convince them that he is the person who called them and just get them to look at his ID to prove that his name is Michael Keck and that these are his parents. And by the time they do all of that, of course the person who's trying to break into the house is long gone. So then Michael's parents are still asleep. It's the middle of the night, and the police fan out into this rural black community and they start picking up every black man they can find and bringing them to the lawn of Michael's parents' house for him to identify. And they've got men who are the wrong height, the wrong skin tone, the wrong hair, that completely off the mark. The only thing they have in common is that they are black men who live in this neighborhood. So finally he says, stop it. Just quit bringing people to this house. Let us all get some rest. Which he does. And when he gets there, this is in the early 90s and they didn't have everything digitized yet. So now you would probably be looking at images on a computer, but they hand him a notebook full of mug shots and they say, these are the usual suspects. Find the one who was breaking into your parents' house. And again, he sees all these people he knows, all the folks who grew up just down the street from him, all the folks who went to high school with him. It's just like a yearbook of people that he knows in this book of folks who are constantly under police scrutiny. So he does not identify anyone. Later they find out they did catch the man who attacked his parents and they realized that he was someone who had come home from prison, who his parents had decided to give odd jobs around the house to help him reintegrate into society. So naturally Michael is very troubled by all of this. He's concerned about why black people are attacking other black people and what is the cycle of crime and violence and incarceration that keeps happening in his community? What would drive people to treat their own folks in this way? So he decides to write a play and he makes friends with some folks at the University of Michigan where I now work at a program called the Prison Creative Arts Project. Buzz Alexander and Janie Paul are two professors emeritus from the university who had founded this program. And so Michael goes to Michigan on an artistic residency and starts going into the prison with the folks from the Prison Creative Arts Project and doing theater workshops, improv-based theater workshops with incarcerated men. And from those workshops he developed a series of monologues that became a play called Voices in the Rain about the cycle of violence and incarceration amongst black men. And one of the really extraordinary things about this play, besides the fact that it's great theater, is that he refused to perform for anybody in the outside world until he got the approval of the men inside who had helped him to develop those stories. So he did workshops with them, they performed their own work in the prison, he went out of the prison and wrote things that they had inspired, fictional stories based on the kinds of things that he had learned from them. And he rehearsed, the monologues went back into the prison and asked for critique and approval from the men inside before he ever showed it to anybody in the outside world. And then he toured with the play for about 15 years after that, starting in 1992. So I know this doesn't sound like a grand sweeping cause of social change in the world, but the act of doing that kind of theater changed Michael. It changed the men with whom he worked in the prison who had a new reflexive way to think about the circumstances that had brought them there and about how it might be shared with the outside world. How could a man who had never been incarcerated be an effective vehicle for conveying the stories of people who don't have a choice about living inside a locked facility? So he gave them a means by which to have some kind of live immersive interaction with audiences who had real questions that Michael could help them answer in discussions after the show. And this kind of work led Michael also to insist that every time he performs this play somewhere that he does community engagement workshops in connection with the play. So he might do a run of the show at a professional theater, but alongside that he would also be doing theater workshops that would bring police and youth who had been overpoliced in their communities together to do theater work or bring youth in contact with university students so that they could see that that life could be possible for them when nobody in their school system was telling them that they might have the opportunity to go to college. So Michael Keck was a great inspiration for me as I started thinking about how theater could operate in relationship to the criminal justice system. How do you have these really difficult, very frightening, weighty conversations about what's wrong with us, with the social fabric of how we think about justice without threatening people so much that they either stop listening or want to flee? And I think The Exonerated is a great example of that too. So bear with me if those of you who are in the play have done some research on the play's origins, but for those who haven't, I wanted to tell you a few stories about how this play came into being. So the playwrights, Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen were two New York actors. They had been actually on a fair number of law and order type TV shows where they had played prosecutors and district attorneys and defendants and psychologists and things like that. They were doing bit parts in a lot of small television stuff that was filming in New York and also acting in live theater in New York. And they went to a conference together for whatever reason. And at this conference, which happened to be about the death penalty, they're in an auditorium full of people and the hero voice comes through these loud speakers. And it's a live phone call from Death Row. And this man says, my name is Leonard Kidd, and I was wrongfully convicted and the state is going to kill me for it. And at some point in the middle of this conversation with a man who's currently on Death Row, the people at the prison to the phone call realize that he's not just talking to his lawyer and they cut the phone call off. So the audience, including these two playwrights to be, realizes that they've just had an interaction with a living person who is about to be killed by the state and that he's explaining the circumstances of his innocence and that the prison in which he lives does not want that message to reach the outside world. So they were very moved by this and they started getting involved with each other. They ended up getting married, but this was when they started dating. And as their relationship strengthened, they also started doing a lot of investigating into wrongful convictions, specifically in connection with the death penalty. So they went to these folks at the Innocence Project. There are several Innocence projects around the country, but the really famous one is in New York and then there's also the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. And both of those places were very generous in working with Blank and Jensen to connect them with people who had come home from prison from death row because they were found to be innocent and released. So today DNA evidence shows us and DNA alone is a very specific type of evidence that is often not applicable to everybody's case or the evidence has been lost or couldn't be properly tested, but just in the cases that DNA evidence has revealed to us, it is possible that a third of the people that we execute in this country are not guilty of the crimes of which they were committed, accused of committing. So this is a massive revelation for any of us, right, that we could be killing lots and lots of people who did not do the thing that our courts found them guilty of. We're supposed to have the greatest level of protection for people who are accused of a death penalty offense. They have the most access to be able to appeal their cases, and yet it has been proven that up to a third of those people are actually scientifically proven not to have committed the crimes for which we are ready to see them die. So Blankenjensen, take this in. DNA evidence was very new in the early 90s. The exonerations that we started seeing come out of this work don't really become super public until around 1993, 1994, and the time that Blankenjensen hear Leonard Kidd talking from death row is in February of 2000. So the other big thing that's happening in 2000 is a presidential election. So George W. Bush is about to have his first term of office, and while people were still considering whether or not to elect him, much of what was in the news about him was that when he was the governor of my home state of Texas, he oversaw 156 executions, which at that time was the largest number of executions overseen by any governor in United States history. His successor, Rick Perry, managed to outdo him in short order. But at the time, it was a big point of contention as people were thinking about whether or not to elect or not elect, as the case may be. George W. Bush in his first presidential election. So Blankenjensen decided to do something pretty radical. They wanted to influence the election, specifically surrounding this issue of the death penalty. And they started interviewing a whole lot of people. They were actors living on a shoestring budget, and they spent literally their last dime getting in a car and driving through the South to find all of these people who had been exonerated, who often lived in rural, difficult-to-access places. And they talked to a lot more people than actually appear in the play. And they took the interviews that they did with exonerated people and their family members and the trial transcripts that had convicted all of these folks. And they went back to New York with a team of volunteer researchers who transcribed the interviews, and then they started doing readings with actors. So Bob Balaban, who's a pretty famous actor and producer in New York, decided that he was going to take this project on. He sort of commissioned them to do this for the culture project. And as they were working on the script, they started bringing in some pretty big names. People like Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver and Mia Farrow all had hand in doing early readings of the script. The first live productions of it were actually done in places like the United Nations in front of people who would have the ability to influence policy globally because they felt that this work was so powerful. So the entire play is taken from verbatim texts of the interviews that they did with exonerated people and their loved ones and with the court transcripts that convicted them. So these are two contradictory sources of evidence, right? The court transcripts tell us how do you construct a narrative that says that this person is not only guilty but so guilty that they deserve to die, that they should no longer live and walk among us. And then you hear from these people who the courts later found to be innocent the ways in which this false narrative that put their lives in the balance was successfully constructed. And we do find out how these things were undone also, but it begs the question how many of those other stories of the people who could not be interviewed because they died are left hanging out there in the world. There's not a whole lot of funding or support for investigating the cases of people we've already killed. So we don't really have a way to gauge how many people we might have wrongfully executed. So the play comes together as a kind of dialogue between those two sources and gives you the narratives of six different exonerated people telling you how this shaped their lives before they went to prison during their time on death row and after their release because it's not a simple thing to come home from prison, much less a simple thing to come home from death row, especially when you're pretty famous as most of these people were in the communities where they were originally sent to prison which is where most of them ended up again after their release. So the play as a political strategy plays out in the world of celebrity because again we're trying to influence the 2000 election and keep George W. Bush out of office. So clearly that political strategy ended up failing or the Electoral College failed us in relation to that election but the impact was pretty huge. A lot of people saw this play. It ran in New York from months and from week to week it would be a completely different cast. It was a very simple staging at the 45 Bleaker Street Theater. It was just a row of chairs with actors in it and very tight spotlights that would come on the actors who were reading from music stands. They were not expected to memorize the script because they knew that they'd only be there for a week. So you've got these really, really big name people reading the script from week to week and folks in the audience would come back many weeks at a time to see different actors playing all the roles and the show sold and sold and sold and had lots of productive conversations after each performance. In the meantime, Bush gets elected. Or takes office, as the case may be. And the playwrights were not... They were in despair about that but they didn't stop their work merely because the election had not gone the way that they had hoped. So Governor George Ryan was a Republican in the state of Illinois in the year 2002, I believe, is when this happens. He had launched an investigation into whether the death penalty was being meted out equitably and fairly in the state of Illinois because there was tons of evidence in every place that has the death penalty that we have a really hard time giving it out equally to everyone who might be eligible for a death sentence. Black people get it a whole lot more than anybody else and if your victim is white that's actually the leading indicator of whether or not you're going to receive a death penalty, whether you're a white person, a black person, or anybody else. If your victim was white, you are at the most risk of encountering the death penalty. If you are a black person who killed a white person, then your odds are exponentially worse. So Governor Ryan had put together this commission to investigate all of that and they had just sort of almost gotten to the point where they were finishing that report around the time that he was supposed to leave office and that whoever came after him was probably going to support the death penalty in one way or another. The vigor with which that support might come could have been questioned but either candidate who was likely to take office after him was going to put the death penalty back into effect most likely. So, Blanken-Jensen and a whole bunch of other people staged a big protest with folks who had been exonerated and they did a march called Dead Men Walking and they marched from the capital to the theater where this production was happening in Illinois and they get to the theater and they did a performance of the play and Governor Ryan was in the audience and when the show ended, they drug him up on stage very much against his will and asked him to speak and he was crying. He was trying not to show it but he was weeping and within a month after that performance he had commuted 176 death sentences from the state of Illinois. So all the people who were sitting on death row as he was about to leave office then were not released but their sentences were commuted so that they would no longer have the death penalty. They would have life in prison or some other sentence that was reassessed by the courts. And he also granted six pardons including one to Gary Gowder who was one of the exonerated people featured in the play whose case had been tried in Illinois. It did have an enormous political impact. You can't say that all of that was caused just by the play. There was clearly a lot of other political stuff happening at the same time that contributed to Governor Ryan's decision but the point is that the play changed the culture around this conversation. It got a lot more people involved than had ever been involved in the state of Illinois before. It got the attention of a lot of people who weren't paying attention when Governor Ryan had launched the inquiry into whether or not the death penalty was fair and equitable and it did end up changing the lives of 176 people. So that's one of the reasons why I'm super excited to see the production tonight and why I believe that the play can continue to have an impact on us and how we treat one another in the world. The last play I want to talk to you about is a little bit self-interested because I wrote it. It's a play called Doing Time Through the Visiting Glass and I got involved in this work and in this line of theater because my father spent 20 years in prison in Texas. I was 15 when he went to prison and from that time forward, I have never lived my life entirely outside of a prison. Somewhere in this world my heart still lives in a prison because they took my father. He's now home, thank God and has been out for about three years but that does not change the fact that I now know too much about what happens in prisons and who lives inside them for me to ever entirely live a life outside of prison. I grew up in prison visiting rooms and for 20 years that was the only place where I could put my family back together because it was the only place where we had access to my father. So for the first eight or nine years of my father's incarceration I really thought I didn't know anybody else who had a loved one in prison and it seemed incomprehensible to me because it had an impact on every breath I took outside of that prison. There is no moment in your life when you love someone who is behind bars that you don't think about what the world would be if that person was out here with you instead of where he or she actually lives. And so my father was a huge force in my life before he went to prison and that didn't change and I didn't have a way to tell people what that meant. I didn't have a father to point to or to take to school on parents' days or for my graduation or anything like that to say this is the person who raised me, this is the person I love the way you would if your parent could be present. But he also wasn't dead, right? He wasn't gone. He wasn't forgetting me. He wasn't someone I could mourn. He was alive and in a place where I could not reach him. So I needed desperately to find a way to have that conversation. Not a conversation about what sent him to prison or how people might judge him or me because of that, but a conversation about how my family lived through those 20 years and in the time beyond. So I'm in graduate school at this point working on a PhD in theater and ethnic studies at UC San Diego and my father gets denied parole for the third time. And every time someone comes up for parole no matter how distant the possibility may seem you can't help but living in this place of glorious hope that gets snatched away from you when it doesn't materialize. And so I was devastated. There was nothing that I could do to legally bring my father home but I needed him and I needed a way to respond to what was being done to us in this time. And the only thing I ever knew how to do was theater. So I'd been studying Anna Devere Smith culture clash and all these other people who were doing really interesting interview based work and I was writing a dissertation about that about ethnographic theater and the premise of ethnographic theater that I was working with is that these plays were about living communities that could be described in all of their diversity as having a shared world view because of what their lived experiences were. But I didn't know if this could work about prisoners families because we don't know each other. There are not places where we congregate. It's not like I can identify by your last name or the neighborhood in which you live or what you look like whether or not you have loved one in prison because nobody ever looked at me and thought ah, there goes a prisoner's child. I was always the outlier and yet I yearned for that community. I yearned to know what was happening to other people's families and how they were adapting to the lives that they had to continue to lead despite the fact that someone they loved had been taken from them. So I just started telling everybody that my father was in prison and I wanted to write this play and all of a sudden it turned out that I knew tons of people who had family in prison who had never spoken to me about it. I'm a Chicana I grew up on the U.S. Mexican border and every other person of color I knew in graduate school had a loved one in prison and no one had ever said anything to me about it even when they knew that my father was locked up because there wasn't a reason to talk about it. There wasn't a safe way to talk about it but when I said I'm writing a play then that gave people a reason to open up and it also gave people a reason to connect me to other people they knew who were in similar circumstances. So everywhere I went people were begging to be interviewed and coming out of the woodwork. Somebody had told me that they had a friend named Edwin and all I knew about Edwin was that Edwin's brother was in prison and that he was Puerto Rican which could mean anything in terms of what somebody looks like. So I'm supposed to meet Edwin at a coffee shop and as luck would have it I walk into this coffee shop and there are eight different men by themselves at tables. So I start walking up to people saying excuse me are you Edwin and everybody's like no crazy lady why are you asking me that. And I passed by these guys who were too mad at a table and I knew that they weren't Edwin because there were two of them. So I didn't talk to them but they said to me like hey so what's this really about? Like why are you trying to find Edwin? What are you doing? This is really strange and I have a truth telling problem if you ask me the right question I will tell you the truth about just about anything. But I was trying not to out Edwin because I was going to interview him about something very personal in this coffee shop. So I was like well I'm a playwright and I'm looking for Edwin because I'm supposed to talk to him about something and they just kept asking me questions until I finally broke down and told them that I was a prisoner's child and I was writing a play about people that had family in prison and Edwin's supposed to have family in prison and I don't know where Edwin is. Edwin was 20 minutes late but he did show up. But in the meantime these two men look at each other and they say should we tell her? And it turns out that one of them had just gotten out of prison and the other one was his lawyer and they would like to be in the play please. So they didn't end up in the play but this kind of thing happened everywhere I went. The play involved some projections at one point and I had gone to a photography store to make some slides because this is how old I am. I was using a real slide projector back then and when I went to make the slides this woman was like well why are you cropping these images in this weird way where you're not going to show somebody's face and I said well it's because I'm the child of a prisoner and I'm doing this play. And all the blood drained out of her face while I was talking to her and she said my brother spent 18 years in prison and I have never spoken about it to anybody in my life and it shapes every single thing I do. And it was like that everywhere I went for the rest of my life to this day everywhere I go when I start talking about this work someone says to me I can't believe I found you I can't believe I found somebody who spoke this out loud because this is my life too. And I realized what a palpable need there was for this work in the world so since I told all these people I was going to write a play I kind of had to write a play. And I did. I wrote a series of 13 monologues that I perform as a one woman show it's called Do In Time Through the Visiting Glass and I really thought that I was going to do it once in California where I was going to school and once in Texas so that my mama could see it and then it would wander off quietly into the night and no one would ever know that this play had existed and all of it started in 2004 I've been performing on and off the same play ever since then because there is still such a need for this play so we can talk more together perhaps in the discussion about what I think the play has done in the world for me and for others but I thought you might want to see a little bit of it because that explains the play better than me talking about it. So the full show is an hour and 15 minutes and as I said involves a whole bunch of different people and I thought I'd just introduce you three of them and in the great tradition of Anna DeVere Smith I always perform barefoot because none of the people who I perform would wear the same shoes and for those of you who aren't actors shoes have a big impact on how you stand and carry yourself and how you walk so everybody gets to be barefoot in this play you want a bare sister I was just listening to some Janice and having me alone store you sure you don't want one I got plenty all right you change your mind you just holler at me so you're out collecting stories about people what's got Ken Folk in prison well you come to the right place I got plenty to say about what prison is doing in my life and ain't none of it good mostly it pisses me off now I didn't used to be an angry person all right these days I just feel like I'd be up my butt all the time like this one time I was visiting my cousin Lerlene who lives out in San Diego and I think she just moved out there because she thinks that since Arnold's been the governor the whole damn state is just an action movie or some crap like that let me tell you the movie of her life would be real boring called something like Lerlene works at Walmart wouldn't that beat all the pictures to see some crap called Lerlene works at Walmart a film directed by her Walmart supervisor a Filipino with a GED and no front teeth shoot my vacation to California was much more interesting than Lerlene's life hell I wasn't there but two hours before some guy tried to rob me now this vacation was not supposed to be no vacation at all I had just been to visit Casey the weekend before and I couldn't get in to see him because he was in lockdown so I was real pissed because I had driven ten hours all the way across the cotton picking state to see my husband and this pissant guard won't let me in he says to me look inmate number 752948 is in the hole right now and you can't see him I just called you on Monday to tell you about my kids and you said my visit was approved well now he's in the hole and ain't nobody gonna visit 752948 today Casey my husband's name is Casey yeah after that I decided it was high time I had a vacation so I figured since I come this far west I might as well drop my kids off at my sister's for the weekend and head on out to see Lerlene in San Diego so here I am visiting Lerlene and me and her taking some cash out of the ATM so we can get us in and out burger and this ass hole kid sticks a gun in my face and says to me give me all your money bitch I just looked at him for a minute before I did anything because I absolutely could not believe my luck all I wanted to do this weekend was get drunk with Lerlene and sing some Janis Joplin and a Tijuana karaoke bar cause I ain't never performed her music internationally before and here's this little shit waving a gun in my face and trying to take the only money I was gonna spend on myself since Casey got sent up the river this is what I get for trying to spend money I could have used on another trip to see him give me all your money bitch well I grabbed the gun out of that stupid farts hand and I aimed it right back at him and I said Chewie now the kid wasn't even Spanish or nothing but I figured us being on the border and all it was the right thing to call him I said Chewie you done messed with the wrong bitch today I'm from Texas and my daddy taught me to shoot a gun when I was 5 years old my husband is doing 35 years for murder and if you think for one second that I won't shoot your sorry ass you're crazy now have you robbed anybody else today Chewie and he starts crying and says yep I got some guys wallet don't shoot me crazy lady I don't want to die don't you sass me Chewie you say yes ma'am when I ask you something now you got that wallet on you uh yeah I bet yes ma'am alright then now you're gonna go on Lerlene here she ain't gonna hurt ya she works at Walmart she sees your kind all day long alright that's better now and I tell you Chewie you run on home and tell your mama what you done I hope she beats the living shit out of ya now go and I tell you that piss aunt kid could run when he was gone Lerlene drove me to the police station and we turned in the gun that guy's wallet shoot Lerlene and me were scared to death to have that gun ain't neither one of us ever held a gun before in our lives said all that shit to the kid cause everybody thinks that all us Texans are cowboys and crazy people now just because George W was does not mean it's true about the rest of us my husband's no cowboy he's a mechanic he was you know before we've changed a lot both of us since he went in I can't confide in him the way he used to cause cause he worries about me and there's enough stress there so you know prison such a violent place I mean a look can get you killed literally get you killed so there's a lot of heartbreak on my end worrying about that you kinda gotta close a door on that you know what I'm sayin you gotta put that in a part of your mind where you got a door that you can close I don't tell him half of what goes on in home no more and he gets to the point where it's kinda like play acting in a way like everything I tell him is just a show that I put on and of course the way they treat us there's no privacy you know they censor our mail and I get today I'm mad at him when I think about somebody reading the personal things that I'm writing just for my husband and I don't mean no sexy bullshit neither I'm just talking about your basic everyday problems and hurts and worries and the happy stuff too the stuff you share with the guy you married and nobody else and I know them assholes read every word we write sometimes I write some shit just to screw with them idiot guards in the mail room I write something like hey Casey baby I sure do miss you sugar could you excuse me for just a minute now this message is for the lazy son of a bitch whose job it is to read my husband's letters get yourself a real job and stop reading other people's mail I love you Casey signed nail giving them hail that's what little Jiggly got going on about nail giving them hail are you sure you don't want a bear sister I'm fixing to need me another some days I just got to do something besides working at the hardware store and the Levi's factory she doing my jobs and my kids there's not much left over for me you know and the little stuff the stuff that used to be comfort and or just plain normal don't work for me no more I can't even watch TV now because it said I am stupid I quit watching TV years back when they said that they had captured Saddam Hussein and the war on terror was over bullshit the government never even tried to fight my war on terror the fucking government spends a shitload of money trying to keep my terror going you want to know where the real war on terror is it's in my house it's in my bed at night when I can't sleep knowing that Casey could get beat up or stabbed or raped any day there's not a damn thing I can do to keep him safe it's trying to figure out what to tell my kids when they ask when their daddy's coming home terror is trying to figure out whether to spend my last dime on putting gas in my truck to go see my husband or on the shoes my kids need for school so while our government is out there spending it's millions and billions of dollars blowing up every brown fella they can find me and mine's living out the real shit right here you know some days I just throw my hands up and say to the lord where the hell are ya where the hell did you go mister cause I'm standing right here waiting on you I ain't heard from the man upstairs in a real long time so uh so I took to singing where I used to pray I'm gonna do a little jannous for ya now cause I got sick of talking I'd like to do a song of great social and political import it goes like this oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes bands my friends all drive porches I must make amends worked hard all my lifetime no help from my friends so oh lord won't you buy me a Mercedes my brother's an artist he draws and paints but mostly he does graffiti right now he's doing seven years for graffiti imagine a thing seven years of your life for a crime where nobody got hurt who's it helping for him to be in prison the guy whose wall he wrote on shit would've helped that guy more if they gave him community service and made him clean up the pincha wall yeah I think mostly they locked him up cause he's a smart ass so when we was kids we went to El Paso and we saw this mural that said God is Mexican and Danny my brother loved that shit when we got back to Phoenix he started writing it all over the place God is a Chicana Dios es un mojado God comes from the barrio God hangs out at Titos he didn't just write the words he made them beautiful you see when we was growing up we had this real strange relationship with God because of our mother right so we were Catholic and on Sundays we went to church and we prayed like everybody else but during the rest of the week Amal would talk to God like he was her compadre or something like he was right there washing the dishes and folding the laundry and she'd get mad at him and she'd yell at God and then she'd have to apologize because he's God right so she'd say something like perdóname Diosito pero I was angry with Jew this morning for sending rain on the day of Lolita's first communion but then I realized that you send the rain so that the wind with Blodonia Violeta's ugly dress over her head on the steps of the church to punish her for being una vieja chismosa now that your plan has been revealed to me I want to say how sorry I am for gelling at you this morning and for stealing two extra communion wafers durante la mesa porque tenía hambre pero yo no quiero hablar más de eso so that was my mother right she was doing things like that all the time so then so then Danny this one night he stayed home while the rest of his friends went out and a bunch of them got arrested and if Danny had been out that night he would have got picked up too so he started going to all the places where he used to write God is an undocumented immigrant and God denses cumbias and he started writing his friend's names instead Aldo Gutierrez is in prison Israel Cien Fuegos is in prison Freddy Ramirez is in prison the day the cops caught him he was writing Leo Archuleta is in prison God is with him God is a prisoner he tried to run when he saw the cops but they caught him and they beat him until he had a concussion and they broke his right hand so that he don't write so good no more after that I must stop talking to God for a week and now Danny he writes us letters on this real shaky handwriting and at the bottom under his signature he always writes God is a prisoner she called for a laying out of hands my hands a healing mama always said I had healing hands well I could cure the sick and heal the wounded I could suck the aching from your skull or slow down your heart if it beat too fast that's what I do for mama a lot her heart gets to beating fast and she says to me child come here I need a laying out of hands and I go to her and I put my hands on her chest right under where those two knobbly little bones make two little lumps before your neck starts right there it's just solid bone and I listen to her heart beating pitter patter pitter patter way too fast and I say breathe mama and she does and then that solid bone place starts to move up and down real slow until her heart gets the picture and slows down to more like what her breathing is doing then she puts her hands out to God that's how she thinks God and then she thinks me by giving me a kiss up on top of my head oh healing doesn't just work on mama I can do it on just that anybody so long as I can lay hands on them I got these I got these feelings about who needs healing I get this I get this hurting feeling in my heart and this empty feeling in my guts like I'm a column of air like there's this big space inside me that even an ocean wouldn't fill and I just don't feel better until I got my healing done I guess I guess I've had this particular feeling now going on two years since they took my daddy usually I know just who needs healing and I take off down the road until I find that person lay hands on him and then it's done and well I know where my daddy is over yonder and I go see him about once a month with my mama but I just can't get my healing done because I can't lay hands on him so I go in the visiting room with mama and I sit there looking at him needing the biggest healing I ever done and I put my hands up on the glass and he does too but I just get so cold there's nothing colder than that glass in the visiting room and that plastic phone on your cheek and I start to think there must be something wrong with me because that cold visiting room is the place that I love most in all the world it's the place I'm always trying to get back to I guess it's that hurting part of daddy calling me back so that I don't want to be anywhere else and I guess I'll just have to keep going until they let him come home so I can lay hands on him but well who's going to come when I need to lay a lot of hands it's fine either way he's going to my chest hello hey thank you we have just a couple minutes for some questions of Ashley we're just going to talk for a couple minutes and then we'll talk for just a couple minutes and maybe I think the easiest way to make this work is if you have a question just say it and because of the whole recording thing I'll just try and repeat it as best I can here so there is a question there to start great Janice so the question being for Ashley which are her favorite or most powerful of these stories to tell that's a cruel question to ask the playwright like asking which one of your children do you love the most I can't say that I love anyone more than somebody else but no the good old gal from Texas looks a lot like my mama so I love her in a special way but I really do love all the people who populate the play and there's something personal about all of them because I actually interviewed all of these people not everybody is a direct one-to-one relationship with somebody who I interviewed because a lot of the people I interviewed wanted me to disguise their identities so Nell sounds like my mother but is not based on my mother's life or an interview with her the feelings that Nell feels are things that my mother has felt is the wife of an incarcerated man but the text is mostly my writing mixed with snippets of three different interviews with other prisoners' wives who were not good old gals from Texas and I created the persona of Nell because I knew her heart I knew those women in my family and that I could tell her story in that way and who doesn't want to sing Janice Joplin so so I feel a particular safeness in her also because she's the only person that comes back she frames the play and when she shows up at the end she ends up wearing my father's cowboy boots so that that was a touchstone I built into the play to have a piece of my father with me great other questions, comments there well I literally have a question and my mother's name was Marlene sorry you just made me so happy me being an actor in technical apologies specific and so detailed and I think it's a great testament to these people because you tell their story so clearly and I've come such an interview for each character and because of what you just did there's short time now I want to know more about it and I think what you're doing is a great service keep doing what you're doing so I'm just going to quickly summarize as best I can it was a Jolie who appears as one of our tips in our production of the Exonerated was saying that Ashley's work is very productive and it was a testament to the individuals who were interviewed safe other questions, comments up there yes so the question to Ashley is have you gone have you inspired other artists to go into prisons and do similar work that you're doing well actually my day job because this is the thing I do outside of my day job is to be the director of a program called Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan so I'm a theater professor at Michigan but I also run this program which I did not found which is the one I mentioned that Michael Keck used to get into the prisons originally to start work on his play in the early 90s PCAP Prison Creative Arts Project was founded in 1990 by a university professor named Buzz Alexander and an incarcerated woman named Mary Glover who had filed 13 class action lawsuits for women's equal rights and won them all and because of her women in Michigan were allowed for the first time to receive college programming and they had not been men were allowed college programming in Michigan but women were not until Mary sued Mary is now a member of our staff which I'm really proud of she's full time employed by the University of Michigan and has been home from prison for about 15 years but I've never heard of such a thing because nobody did that in the middle of nowhere, Texas where my father was and when I started performing this play outside of prisons people started inviting me to go into them and also connecting me to people like Michael Keck who performed in prisons and so I started writing as a scholar about people who do theater work in prison and while I started writing about the Prison Creative Arts Project I got recruited to come to the program as Buz Alexander retired so I've been at the University of Michigan and director of the program since 2013 and we I believe are the largest prison arts organization in the world we have a pedagogy that trains students to facilitate arts workshops in prisons so we work in visual arts theater creative writing and for the first time this year in music and we send students in once a week for about an hour and a half to two hours for workshops for about eight to twelve weeks depending on how long it takes us to get security clearance at the start of each semester and in that time my students really build meaningful community with a group of incarcerated adults or youth in detention or people who come home from prison who are doing this arts work together and it's a collaborative process my students aren't teaching it but rather facilitating exercises that they can all do together as a group and if they do theater instead of directing them in a performance so it's all about building community between people who live in prison and people who do not but beyond that my larger academic work is that I'm writing a book about theater in prisons around the world so I've had the great honor to travel throughout the United States and to many parts of eight other countries to see theater in prison and to actually help seed some prison theater projects or to help promote their projects by using the name and the University of Michigan's name to endorse them so I don't know that I've inspired well, maybe I have I give my students grades to go into prison and do theater but I didn't start that methodology but I did have a really incredible opportunity this past summer to go to Uruguay which is just south of Brazil and to help some people there who had heard about my work start a prison theater program and they're translating the script into Spanish and they're going to go into this prison that has men and women in a mixed population to use my script as a starting point for them to write their own stories about their family and I haven't heard how that's going since I was there this summer but I'm honored that they would even think about doing that and if they produce a play I'm going back I'm going to see it Question up there? So the question was one of the characters as a child and did you interview children? I did not explicitly interview children that's the only child in the play who speaks there are other characters there's one character elsewhere in the play who goes to the visiting room to see her husband and brings four children who are invisible as I perform the monologue but they're all running around me and she's yelling at them but I didn't interview children I talked to a lot of mothers who talk to me about their children and that monologue is largely based on my experiences I cast her in a role that was younger than I was when my father went to prison but her monologue is about the way I felt about being his child in Texas at least I'm not sure how it is in other states or certainly not in Vermont because I'm not very familiar with your prison system but in Texas at the time of my father's initial incarceration it may or may not have changed since then you enter something called the diagnostic system and for 30 days you can have absolutely no contact with your family of any kind phone calls, letters, visits and for the first 90 days you can't touch so when you go to the prison for your first visit of somebody's incarceration you're visiting through the glass and then if that person has any kind of behavioral issues or special conditions of his or her sentence then you may have to visit through the glass for a long time so that visiting glass was for me the central image of the play and particularly to watch children navigate not understanding why you can't touch someone you love it's an incredibly painful experience Mumia Abou Jamal who's a well known political prisoner in Pennsylvania has written a short piece in his book Life from Death Row about his daughter who was a toddler at the time pounding on the glass and trying to get through to him and the mother trying to hold her back so that they wouldn't lose their visit and that's sort of the emotional core of the entire play for me maybe one more question before we kind of yes right here in front immigration detention so the question is about detention centers and is there a correlation between detention centers and us not knowing about them do you know if any work is being done to make that those conditions more known to those of us who exist in the general public yeah it's the conditions in immigration detention centers are very difficult to report about because they're very difficult for outsiders to see so the conditions of incarceration for a US citizen usually but not always involve a person who speaks English and immigration defendants often do not and they don't have the legal rights of US citizens so there are there are many different ways in which people are detained as undocumented immigrants many of them whose only crime is not having documents and having come to live in the United States across the border without papers will end up in the regular prison system so states like Texas rent out beds in the regular prison system and immigrants are confined in the same way under the exact same conditions mixed into the same population as people who are convicted of other kinds of crime but there are also these private immigration detention facilities which I think is what you're referring to and those vary vastly so some of them look like private prisons and are in fact private prisons but others of them that the US immigration services have not for a long time had the ability to incarcerate the number of people who they want to detain they don't have that number of beds or even close to it so in addition to renting beds from various state prison systems and county jail systems they also have built these prisons and let corporations run them and when corporations run prisons they don't actually have any vested interest in human or civil rights their investment is like any corporation in the bottom line making things as cheap as possible which means not very many staff to run the place which creates a dangerous environment for people inside really poor conditions not very good food little to no medical treatment and you're often held in Kumunikado which means you have no means of communicating with your family because you don't have the legal rights of a citizen and you don't have legal representation much of the time the worst of these places are known as hotel Kafka's and they're literally motels that somebody is renting out as a kind of immigration detention facility and people are locked in rooms where they have no access to other people and they only see the folks who bring them food and they have no television no system of communication whatsoever and they're often not told why they're being held or for how long so you could stay in a place like that completely cut off from people for years and those places usually only make the news when somebody manages to break a window to attempt to escape or to kill themselves so we need a lot more publicity a lot more conversation about what we're doing to undocumented people including children a lot of the time we talk a lot about deportation but we talk very little about the fact that many of those folks are held for years in completely untenable conditions before we do them the kind of service of deportation I mean some people are actually happy to be deported after living in those conditions even if they're being deported to a place where there will be persecuted or in danger of their lives it's deeply disturbing so so many important topics but I just want to close by just thanking you and just I think for all of us that were here we started out the conversation today to talk about the power of theater and the theater being a space where we come together as a community to address things and I'm a believer that things change when we as individuals actually have a I don't believe it's a mental change I believe it's actually a visceral physical change and the performance in your talk today I think attests to the fact that we all felt something so thank you so much help me thank Ashley