Ashley Lucas is Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Former Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project and the current Co-Principal Investigator for the Carceral State Project. Her new book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration was released by Bloomsbury in September 2020.
Andrew Martinez (AM): Ashley, your book Prison Theatre: and the Global Crisis of Incarceration is many years of research in the making and also a lifetime in the making for you personally. Do you mind sharing about that?
Ashley Lucas (AL): That’s a good way of framing this project. Formally, I received an invitation from a book series editor at Methuen Drama in 2012 to submit a proposal to write a book about theatre in prisons worldwide, and I had a contract in hand in January 2013. That invitation and contract enabled me to find funding and support to spend the next six years traveling throughout the United States and to nine other countries to see as much theatre in prisons as I could. That’s the official version of how I set out to conduct research for the book.
The personal story is more complicated. My father went to prison when I was fifteen years old and stayed there for over twenty years. He was released in 2015 and passed away just as I was turning in the completed manuscript in November 2019. In terms of my research, these experiences often gave me a kind of insider knowledge of how prisons work and the far-reaching impacts on families and communities. The people I met in prisons all over the world as part of my research often seemed to feel more comfortable with me after I disclosed the fact that my father was incarcerated. I think it helped them trust me to tell their stories from the perspective of someone who saw them as people with lives that transcended the context of a prison. So much popular culture, academic writing, and news media cast incarcerated people as both cut off from the world and utterly defined by crime. I can understand why folks in prison would not want others to write about them.
AM: Early in the book, you write: “Though my father was released, some piece of me will always live inside a prison.” Would you please say more about that? How has prison shaped you and continue to shape you?
AL: I absolutely adored my father. His incarceration shaped my life and work far more than any force other than my family’s and my husband’s love. This book is deeply informed by the lived experiences of spending my teenage years in a prison visiting room and always feeling like a part of me was serving time with him. In the early years of his prison sentence, I was caught up figuring out what all of this meant for my family. I felt like we were exceptional somehow, that such injustice and pain was not meant for us. I was constantly asking my father to tell me more about what prison was like, how he spent his days, what was going on inside the walls, and he really couldn’t tell me. He didn’t have the words for a lot of it, despite being a college-educated and articulate person. The experience of incarceration is so utterly confounding, stressful, frightening, and disorienting that many people struggle to describe it.
This is compounded by the profoundly misleading representations that we see in the news and popular culture. Gina Dent, a scholar whom I very much admire, has said that there are no realistic television or film representations of prison because the truth of prison is unwatchable. Sex and violence and other dramatic things do happen in prisons, but most of the time, prison is deeply boring. The threat of something really horrible is always present in prison and could happen at any minute, but most of the time, it doesn’t. That leaves people—prison staff and incarcerated people alike—needing to be highly vigilant for days and years on end while at the same time being bored out of their minds and highly uncomfortable. Nobody wants to watch that on TV. What we get instead are sensationalized portrayals that condition us to think we know a lot about prisons when in fact, a great many people have no clue who lives in prisons, how they arrived there, or what their daily lives are like.
I also want to acknowledge that even though we seldom depict prisons accurately in public culture, there are well over 2.3 million people in the US alone with firsthand experience of what life in prison is like, and all of those people have families and communities who also know something meaningful about what incarceration does to people. I hope that my work in teaching, writing, and performing can help open up more conversations about what all of these folks with lived experience know but seldom have a safe space to speak openly.
AM: And you created a one-woman show, yes?
AL: When I was in graduate school, my father was denied parole for the third time, and I was devastated. No matter how many times you go through that, it’s always absolutely crushing for the whole family. We have to live in the hope that our loved one will come home, and every time that chance at freedom gets snatched away, you have to find a new way to pick yourself up and keep living in hope. That’s why I wrote Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass. I needed to find community in this experience of having an incarcerated family member. I studied Anna Deavere Smith, Culture Clash, and other playwrights who did ethnographic theatre—research-based plays that offer a diverse and complex portrayal of living communities. I decided to experiment in the form by finding other people who had loved ones in prison and interviewing them about what had happened to their families.
I had never written a play that had been produced and knew I couldn’t afford to pay other actors, so I wrote it as a one-woman show to perform myself. At the time, I thought of it as a selfish kind of project—something to imagine myself out of isolation. But immediately, when I started interviewing people, I realized that others had felt just as isolated in this experience as I had. I hardly had to ask any questions because people were eager to tell someone who cared what had happened to their families. I wrote monologues based on the things that people told me and often deliberately combined or disguised characters to protect the identities of the folks who had talked to me. I started performing the play in 2004 and have been performing it for sixteen years now, whenever I get invited to do it again. I’ve performed in many places throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, and Brazil (in a trilingual adaptation of the play). I’ve been honored to perform Doin’ Time in theatres and prisons, college campuses, and bookstores. It’s had quite a life, and I never anticipated any of that. I thought I’d do it once or twice, and that would be it. I thought it was a graduate student project, but so many people need to discuss what’s happening to their families that I continue to receive invitations to perform. The play has been a great and unexpected blessing in my life because I have met so many extraordinary people in doing it. It was my entry into prison theatre and meeting other people who stage plays in prisons, and, in many ways, I stumbled into that world without knowing what I was doing.
AM: I’ve had the honor of traveling internationally with you and participating in prison theatre workshops. I have seen firsthand how moving prison theater practice can be. Can you share a moment when you’ve realized that you were witnessing the best theater you’ve ever seen?
AL: Just one? That’s so hard! I don’t think I can talk about just one moment because I’d never be able to choose, but I can tell you what an extraordinary and wonderful thing it is to see a play produced in a prison.
One of the things that is utterly riveting about prison theatre is that the stakes are always so high. The audience and incarcerated people alike know that everybody in the room went through something to get there. You can’t walk into a prison unannounced. You have to get a security clearance, and usually, you have to travel to a remote location that cannot be reached by public transportation. You get questioned and searched on the way in. Strange hands pat you down. You are regarded as suspect and unwelcome—and that’s just what happens to the folks who are visiting the prison to see the performance! The people living in that prison every day and the theatre professionals or volunteers who go into the facility for months or years to work on these plays have been through so much more.
In prison, you know that everything can be stopped at a moment’s notice. Something could happen in an entirely different part of the prison that would cause everyone to stop the play and return to the housing units or the free world. Whenever a performance actually happens, the very occurrence of getting everybody together and staging the play is in itself a miracle. When you start with those kinds of stakes, the theatre itself is primed for something truly wonderful. Theatre is most interesting when the actors have a deep investment in the work, and for many people in a prison theatre program, performing in a play is the highlight of the entire year. It could be the only occasion for their loved ones to see them do something positive or the only time they see children—theirs or anyone else’s—or the only time they get to wear clothes that are not a prison uniform. There are so many things that make such performances momentous for the people involved, and this often inspires truly remarkable performances, even if the folks on stage are not well-trained or sophisticated actors. It’s also really remarkable how often one does encounter truly gifted actors in such productions. I am so often reminded when I am in a prison that the standards of the institutions I know best in the free world—universities and professional theatres—have overlooked or deliberately excluded a wealth of really brilliant and valuable people.
AM: Going back to the book, can you talk about how you’ve organized the book into strategies?
AL: When I began the research process, I thought I might have a chapter on Shakespeare in prisons and another on devised theatre and so on, but I quickly realized that those divisions felt false. What I was really interested in was finding out why so many incarcerated people find that theatre becomes a significant part of their lives. Many incarcerated folks have told me that the theatre keeps them alive quite literally, that it helped them to stave off suicidal impulses. How could that be? The vast majority of the people I met in prison theatre companies had little to no knowledge of the theatre prior to their incarceration, and very few of them had any hope of working in professional theatre or a related career after their release. I wanted to find out what theatre was doing for these folks during their incarceration, and what they told me was, essentially, that the theatre helped them to accomplish other things that were important to them. In the end, I wrote four chapters about the strategies that I saw folks using to get things done through the vehicle of making theatre. They were building communities, developing professional skills, creating social change, and maintaining hope as a means of survival in prison.
AM: What have the pandemic conditions done to embolden the mission of theatre and creative work in prison?
AL: The COVID-19 pandemic is making more visible all of the societal ills that we already knew were present: the failures of our healthcare system, educational inequality, police violence, racism. The list goes on and on. In prisons, everything happening in the outside world is magnified and intensified. As of September 5, 2020, sixty-nine incarcerated people have died of COVID inside Michigan Department of Corrections facilities, as have three staff members. Nationwide, prisons are some of the largest vectors for disease transmission, as staff carries the virus in and out of the facilities. Inside the walls, people cannot socially distance. They have inadequate access to PPE (personal protective equipment), cleaning supplies, and healthcare. People who test positive for the virus are thrown into solitary confinement with little to no access to their few possessions. Many incarcerated people who suspect they are sick do not want to tell anyone because they feel they will be punished with solitary confinement rather than being given treatment.
Some prison theatre companies have been forced to halt their activities completely during the pandemic. No visitors, volunteers, or family members can enter most prisons in the world right now, so the feeling of panic and isolation among people inside has risen considerably. Educational and recreational programming has either turned to remote instruction or ceased altogether. At the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan, where I work, we have been fortunate enough to find a pathway forward through correspondence programming. My students, who ordinarily would be going into prisons once a week to lead arts workshops, are now sending activity packets into prisons via the US Postal Service or by emailing prison staff who distribute our materials to incarcerated participants. I have found that those of us who administrate prison arts programs are in touch with one another more regularly now as we all brainstorm about what can be done during this horribly difficult time to support the incarcerated folks with whom we have worked for many years. This is a challenging time to try to work with folks in prisons because we are so cut off from one another, but those of us who do prison work are used to facing significant challenges. As long as incarcerated people find the arts to be a vital need—and from what I have seen, that will always be true—there will be those of us in the free world doing our best to continue to find pathways to collaborate with them.
AM: With a national conversation shifting to police reform and divesting from the police, where does prison reform need to go?
AL: The ultimate goal is prison abolition. Prisons do vastly more harm than good. They are fundamentally unsustainable for local economies, the environment, public health, and the wellbeing of families and communities.
That said, I understand that abolition is unlikely to happen quickly. In the meantime, we need radical decarceration, especially during the pandemic. Here’s a quick list of people who should categorically and without much fanfare be released immediately: those who are over sixty, those with preexisting health conditions, the disabled, those who have met the conditions for their release but have not yet been sent home (so many people!), those in hospice care (again a ridiculous number of people), those who have served at least twenty years, and children (yes, we lock up kids in adult prisons in the US). All of these categories of people, except for children, are statistically unlikely to commit a new offense or harm anyone. Children are, well, children and should never be in an adult prison.
The major resistance to prison and police abolition is that people can’t imagine what that world looks like. Crime is real. Folks are frightened. Those are things that should not be dismissed. What we need is a system of social safety nets that reasonably intervene in a lot of places where we currently think armed forces and carceral punishment are necessary. We need better educational systems for everybody, accessible mental and physical health care for everybody, meaningful jobs that provide living wages for everybody. The folks at Critical Resistance have been saying for a very long time that abolition is really about presence, not absence. We tend to focus on the absence of the things that cause such harm—prisons, police—rather than focusing on shoring up the presence of all the things that need to be there for everybody to be safe and well. Angela Davis says this (and many other things) far better than I can. If you want to know more, her book Are Prisons Obsolete? is a great place to start.
