Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre

Are You an Inmate? Collective Decision Making in the Development of If Yes, Please Explain . . .

37 Are You an Inmate? Collective Decision Making in the Development of If Yes, Please Explain... Megan Hanley “It has to be ‘inmate,’” Sandra announced firmly, and the rest of the group fell silent. About thirty of us were gathered to read through a draft of If Yes, Please Explain..., a play to promote hiring equality for formerly incarcerated people. Many of the group’s members, myself included, were anxious to begin rehearsals; we had only a few weeks to cast, design, and rehearse the play, which would be performed at a launch party for Turning Point Staffing Services, an employment agency for formerly incarcerated women. Yet as we tried to edit the script together, we couldn’t get past the word “inmate.” We had spent forty-five minutes of our workshop (forty-five precious minutes, I remember thinking in an over-caffeinated haze) discussing the issue. On one side, several collaborators objected to the word on an ideological level, finding it dehumanizing and offensive. On the other hand, many other collaborators—especially some of the women who had been incarcerated—saw the word as essential, the most accurate representation of how guards and outsiders refer to people in prison. Even after a lengthy discussion, we could not come to consensus. If Yes, Please Explain... was developed through the Claremont Theatre for Social Justice Institute, a collaboration between Crossroads, a transitional home for formerly incarcerated women; the Intercollegiate Women’s Studies Department of the Claremont Colleges; Fringe Benefits ; and the Pomona College Department of Theatre and Dance. As a member of a class at Pomona on theatre and social change, I joined our professor, Norma Bowles, and eight other students in the behindthe -scenes preparations for the project. In the course of four months of collaborative work in 2007, more than fifty people helped create Megan Hanley 38 If Yes, Please Explain . . . . It was a diverse group, made up of people from the community who had heard about the project from friends; students, staff, and professors from the Claremont Colleges who were interested in theatre or activism or both; local Rotarians whom we had recruited; and women who lived or worked at Crossroads. Together, we established three goals for our project: we wanted to break down negative stereotypes about formerly incarcerated people, to convince employers to sign up for Turning Point Staffing Services, and to encourage them to give serious consideration to job applicants who had been incarcerated. The play follows three formerly incarcerated women and three potential employers through the hiring process. As audiences get to know our three job applicants, they see the effects of incarceration on the individual level and learn that when a person who is released from prison cannot find employment, he or she is much more likely to return to prison than a formerly incarcerated person who is employed (Workforce Solutions). While the employers in the play wrestle with assumptions about formerly incarcerated people, viewers learn about federal incentives that promote equitable hiring practices, including the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides a federal tax credit to businesses that hire a formerly incarcerated person within one year of his or her release (US Department of Labor), and the Federal Bonding Program, which provides fidelity bonds to businesses for certain “at-risk” job seekers, including formerly incarcerated individuals (McLaughlin Company). Through the course of the play, a chorus of employers forms and emerges from the audience to ask questions until their fears are eventually assuaged. (In fact, the chorus is so convinced by our brilliant arguments that they enthusiastically break into song, declaring to the tune of “New York, New York,” “Start spreading the news: I’m hiring today! / I want to give a chance to this Work Force! Work Force!”) Our hope was that potential employers in the audience could identify with the characters onstage, recognizing the moral, financial, and practical reasons for giving formerly incarcerated people fair consideration for job opportunities, and would be inspired to follow suit. All of this brings us back to the discussion—let’s be honest and call it an argument—over whether to refer to people in prison as “inmates” in our play. We couldn’t just delete the line: it was central to a scene about a job applicant’s history and was a subtle way to point out the tacit Are You an Inmate? 39 assumptions that potential employers might hold about incarcerated...