For the past year, Caroline Brown and theater director Elizabeth Araujo Haller have been working with women incarcerated at the state’s Adult Correctional Institutions, in minimum and maximum security. They conduct workshops that use performance to examine what underlies addiction, violence, and other forms of destructive behavior.
The drama of the lives they dealt with was more vivid than most of what we see up on stage, so they got the idea to show us the world they discovered. The result is Look Who’s Comin’, a theater piece created and performed by non-actors, ordinary Rhode Islanders whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system. Presented by Brown and Araujo Haller’s Emergence Collaborative theater company, the performance will run March 29 through April 1 at Providence Black Repertory Company.
The title was chosen because it strikes the tone of uneasiness that is felt on the street. As Araujo Haller says, “There is a frightening feeling about that phrase, which seems to apply to the way many ex-offenders feel in the world.” She notes that former prison inmates tend to be looked at with “a bit of a stigma.”
“Even though they’ve established themselves as ex-offenders,” she says, adding about the title: “Also, when they were on the streets they were constantly having to watch their backs.”
Of the three male and four female performers, four have been incarcerated. One of the women has spent time in six different prisons, and, like several of the others, has battled addiction. She now does outreach work with prostitutes and also campaigns against international human trafficking.
“She has a lot to say about the world and the political justice system,” Araujo Haller notes.
At the beginning of the process of creating Look Who’s Comin’, the participants contributed stories from their experiences. Poetry from current ACI prisoners was added to the mix. Then the presentation was structured into three acts, which they call the Bondage, the Struggle, and the Light. The first two categories are self-evident, and Brown describes the third as “feeling a sense of establishment, whether it be in finding Jesus, or sobriety, or love, marriage — or establishing themselves.”
Araujo Haller says the best thing about the process of creating the performance was the sincerity with which the actors began revealing themselves. “Everybody has a moment of beautiful, precious theatricality. Of course, the wedding dress story is fantastic.”
She is referring to one woman, dressed in white, who tells how she was arrested on her wedding day.
As interesting as all this might be to audiences looking for engaging theater, the actors are more concerned about getting the work across to former offenders.
“They all are feeling really responsible to people who are incarcerated and who are getting out, wanting to help them,” Araujo Haller says. “They see this as a forum to show people that if they can do it —”
“Right,” Brown inserts.
“— anyone can do it.”
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Promoting human rights at home, Stonewalling is normal, Hunger strike at Maine's Supermax Prison, More 
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- Stonewalling is normal
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Inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement Supermax unit in Warren have been on a hunger strike since Saturday night. Death in the Supermax. By Lance Tapley
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- Letters to the Portland editor: May 4, 2007
God bless the First Amendment.
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Maine State Prison warden Jeffrey Merrill has decided to replace the prison’s traditional uniform for correctional officers.
- A night in Guantánamo
I’d volunteered to spend the night in the replica cell (which is modeled on the ones at Gitmo) because we’ve all heard stories about unlivable conditions at Gitmo but can’t come close to imagining what it must be like.
- Arbitrary injustice
Fears doesn't like the particular prison where he now resides. He would prefer to be in one near his family in Arizona, and not in solitary confinement.
- Can RI back away from the war on drugs?
When Rhode island voters narrowly approved a measure last November to allow felons on probation to vote, it marked an important step away from the kind of supposedly “tough on crime” policies that have long typified American criminal justice policy.
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Mainers will get a chance to discuss prison life with Bo Lozoff.
- Press behind bars
As a reporter, I can attest that the rules the state agreed to in the 1970s on news-media access to prisoners have been violated by the Corrections Department in its recent practices.
- Less
Topics:
This Just In
, Criminal Sentencing and Punishment, Prisons, Weddings
