America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s

5. CELL BLOCK THEATER: Entertainment, Liberation, and the Politics of Prison Theater

chApter fIve cell Block theAter entertAInment, lIBerAtIon, And the polItIcs of prIson theAter In the spring of 1979 the Center for the Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CaSTa) at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center held a conference on theater in prison.1 The event featured a spirited and divided debate about the goals of theater programs by the founders of many of the key programs then in existence, including the heads of the Theatre for the Forgotten, Cell Block Theatre, the Family, Geese Theatre Company, and the New York City Street Theatre Caravan . Stanley A. Waren, a professor at City College and the director of CaSTa, summed up the varying and contradictory ways theater professionals and corrections officials thought about the value of theater programs: to entertain; to change the social and criminal justice systems by “politicizing prisoners, those who control the prisons, and the general public”; to “habilitate” inmates to the existing social system; “to develop personal skills, including language skills, voice, body and interpersonal sensitivity”; to “stretch the imagination of the inmate”; and to train inmates for careers in the theater industry.2 This range of goals reflected the political, humanistic, and professional contexts for theater during the 1970s. There was some question if these different values could be reconciled , and in the end, Waren did not succeed in finding common ground. With some saying their primary goal was to entertain and relieve the monotony of life behind bars and others arguing that “any attempt to ameliorate the prisoner’s conditions through the arts only served to prolong the existing system,” there seemed to be little basis for compromise.3 These practitioners would soon have a clear voice in the form of the Brazilian director Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Op- 130 cell Block theAter pressed, published in English that same year.4 Boal argued that the theater can be an opportunity to imagine the world anew in that at its finest, drama demands active participation rather than passive viewing . Boal identified specific workshop and performance techniques to bring this about, and these techniques and views reflected some theater workshops’ attempts to empower inmates with therapeutic roleplaying . The debate at the conference did little to definitively answer the question of whether prison theater programs, or arts and education programs more generally, provided avenues for entertainment, liberation , therapy, or vocational training. The debate itself, however, is instructive . Since 1967 prison theater programs had been at the forefront of the larger national discussion about the function of prisons themselves . In a period that began with Attorney General John Mitchell arguing in 1968 that the goal of the criminal justice system was “law enforcement, not social improvement,” prison theater programs developed a broad range of strategies to survive. Some simply accepted the new view, arguing that prison theater could serve as a pacifying diversion in potentially violent facilities. Others resisted, using triedand -true theater techniques like farce and improvisation to bypass prison censorship. For much of the decade, these programs did more than survive; prison dramatists linked people across the increasingly punitive divide, capturing the imaginations of the mass media and the general public in order to highlight their views and experiences. As is true for so much of the cultural life of American prisons, California ’s San Quentin prison was seminal. In 1911 a professional theater company performed a play there called Alias Jimmy Valentine, detailing , according to the program notes, the fall and rise of an inmate at New York’s Sing Sing.5 Most histories of prison theater begin in 1957, when the San Francisco Actors Workshop staged a production of Waiting for Godot in San Quentin. Samuel Beckett’s masterwork was a global phenomenon in the 1950s that came to mean many things to many people, but its themes of vacuous toil and futile hopes for a constantly postponed redemption surely had particular relevance to the prisoners. In anycase, the production proved popular with the San Quentin inmates, leading one of them, Rick Cluchey, to found the San cell Block theAter 131 Quentin Drama Workshop. Cluchey kept Godot in the repertoire for many years. San Quentin generally received negative press during the early 1950s both because of a San Francisco Chronicle exposé of physical brutality in the prison’s psychiatric department and the wildly popular books of death-row resident Caryl Chessman.6 The arrival of Warden Fred Dickson in...