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The forged of ‘Shared Sentences.’ (Photo by Russ Rowland).
Roll up your sleeves, unbutton, unzip, present some pores and skin, open up, unfold your legs, naked your soul. Nothing is non-public and nothing is sacred once you’re standing in line at a jail like Rikers Island. Shared Sentences, a debut play by Houses on the Moon co-founder and inventive director Emily Joy Weiner (now at 122 Community Center’s 2nd Floor Theater in New York City by means of Nov. 12), examines what it means to point out up for the folks you’re keen on.
Centered across the members of the fictional United Prison Families (UPF) help group, the play is impressed by the experiences of real-life members of Prison Families Anonymous, a bunch co-founded by creator and activist Barbara Allan and advocate Julia Lazareck. Shared Sentences asks the query: How do the family members of incarcerated of us take advantage of out of lives which contain frequent journeys to the publish workplace, cash transfers on the Western Union, day by day scheduled cellphone calls, authorized help paperwork, and common treks on the Q100 or lengthy automobile rides upstate?
There’s Olivia (Emily Joy Weiner), a newcomer struggling to regulate to life on jail’s schedule following her boyfriend’s current arrest; Tee (Nikomeh Anderson), a transitioning teen whose mom’s battle with habit retains her on a gentle rotation between midway homes and jail cells; Sebastian (David Anzuelo), a bartender who lords over the group aux twine, decided to have his disabled brother’s sentence overturned; Celeste (Yadira De La Riva), a no-nonsense paralegal finding out to take the LSAT a 3rd time, whereas visiting her ageing father at Rikers and making an attempt to maintain her sons from being pulled into an intergenerational incarceration cycle; Harold (Raphael Nash Thompson), a household man dedicated to reconnecting together with his spouse after her launch from a 10-year sentence; and Barbara (Glynis Bell), the fearless chief of the help group who struggles to maintain all of it collectively.
The play explores the sophisticated dynamics of race, class, expertise, training, and privilege amongst these six people, who’re introduced collectively by shared trauma and who change into stronger by leaning on one another. The private melds with the political, such that it not issues what anybody is “in for,” the place they arrive from, or in the event that they’ve been “raised well.” At the tip of the day, none of those characters is ready for the byzantine guidelines, emotional labor, and crimson tape that include having an incarcerated beloved one. As Celeste says, “You hope, but don’t expect.”
This expertise is unfortunately all too widespread. According to the Mayor’s Management Report from Sept. 2022, New York City has a median day by day inmate inhabitants of 5,559 people, with a median particular person keep of 120 days. Detainees are allowed three one-hour visits per week with family members; sentenced people are allowed simply two one-hour visits every week, Wed. by means of Sun., based on the town’s revised go to schedule. And incarceration is not only a neighborhood challenge however a nationwide downside: The Federal Bureau of Prisons stories that there are 122 prisons working all through the U.S., housing an estimated 2 million folks, and the variety of affected relations may be extrapolated from there.
Playwright and performer Weiner had firsthand expertise with this dilemma, and knew it was a topic she needed to develop right into a present with Houses on the Moon, which for greater than 20 years has staged the tales of under-served communities.
“I reached out to some orgs and people that I already knew through other work we’ve done, but also new places to connect with on this project,” Weiner mentioned. This led her to Allan’s Prison Families Anonymous, which in flip related her with sources for interviews and workshops. She quickly discovered that people in these teams had numerous widespread experiences and a shared vocabulary. “I could say ‘Western Union’ and these other people would go, ‘Oh my goodness!’ We all knew that. I have a list of words that we developed together, like an alphabet of things that have very specific meanings to us. That’s how it started.”
This form of meaning-making is par for the course with the corporate’s growth course of. Houses on the Moon usually companions with organizations that actively serve the communities whose tales they inform onstage. In this case, it was social justice organizations just like the Fortune Society, the Osborne Association, and Prison Families Alliance. For such earlier works as 2007’s De Novo, the story of a teenage boy fleeing gang violence, or 2004’s Tara’s Crossing, the story of a transgender girl from Guyana, the corporate studied asylum instances, interviewed immigration attorneys, and labored with human rights organizations just like the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First.
The firm’s work goes all the best way again to the late Nineteen Nineties, when Weiner and Houses co-founder Jeffrey Solomon had been working collectively on the Queens School for Career Development, a faculty for younger adults with developmental disabilities. To counter the rampant homophobia of the time, Weiner and Solomon got down to make a theatre venture that spoke to LGBTQ+ college students and educators. That venture, which got here from analysis on worldwide homosexual youth websites and interviews with younger folks and educators, lots of whom had been closeted, grew right into a venture known as Building Houses on the Moon.
The evocative title got here from an interview with a lesbian teenager from New Haven, Conn., who, when requested about her function fashions, mentioned she had none. Weiner recalled, “She said, ‘It’s like asking to imagine your future taking place on the moon. How can I picture what my house would look like on the moon? I’ve never been to the moon. Nobody’s ever tried to build a house at such low gravity. How do I know whether to picture trees and grass or just rocks?’”
This metaphor grew to become central to the theatre firm’s mission, they usually took it as their identify. Houses on the Moon was based in 2001 with a mission to dispel ignorance and isolation by means of the theatrical amplification of unheard voices. Through artistic workshops, authentic performances, post-show conversations, and accessible ticketing, Houses on the Moon seeks to unite communities by means of the general public sharing of untold tales.
The firm has a backed ticket program, with 30 p.c of all tickets given to group organizations or people with a direct connection to the theme of the play. For Shared Sentences, Houses on the Moon is offering tickets to of us who’ve an incarcerated member of the family or have been incarcerated themselves, along with giving tickets to organizations that work with these populations. The firm additionally hosts two to 3 pupil matinees for every manufacturing, the place they fill the entire theatre with college students from varied colleges all through the town. This is a crucial a part of Houses’ mission to achieve audiences past those that usually make and see theatre.
The seeds for Shared Sentences return to 2017, when Houses on the Moon was creating Camilo Almonacid’s The Assignment, a play about gun violence impressed by a novel relationship that blossomed through the theatre firm’s workshop course of: A mom who based a youth violence prevention program after her teenage son was murdered in a road battle made buddies with a person whose 17 years in jail for manslaughter led him to training and rehabilitation.
The ensuing play was “not about them, but it was exploring that relationship,” mentioned Weiner. “It was a gorgeous play. And through that process, I met a lot of people who worked in the criminal justice system, such as David Rothenberg from the Fortune Society and many others. And it took me back to a place in my own life.”
More than a decade in the past, Weiner’s associate on the time was incarcerated. “I’m going back many years to when this was my own personal experience,” she mentioned. “I was sort of thrown into trying to stay connected with him and support him. I didn’t know anything about how to do that. And during that time, what I did was, I journaled all the time. I just wrote, because every visit—every trip to the post office, every day trying to be there to get the calls, and also manage my own life, trying to have the finances to support him for what he needed, as well as to take care of myself—just everything was overwhelming. And I journaled, journaled, journaled, and then I put all that aside; my life moved forward. Although it doesn’t go away. Once you experience something like that, it stays with you, and you change; you become different in how you see the world. That’s what happened to me.”
Weiner spent most of 2018 and 2019 gathering and curating materials from interviews and workshops with relations of incarcerated people. It was Fortune Society’s David Rothenberg who related her with Prison Families Anonymous. “When I told him what I wanted to do, he said, ‘Oh well, you can’t do a play about family members of the incarcerated without Barbara Allan.’ He was right.” Weiner met Allan at a e book signing for her memoir, Doing Our Time on the Outside and located her “so impressive and lovable. We really clicked, and she told me right up front that she was completely in on helping me develop this project, whatever it would be. She’s been part of it from the beginning.”
Weiner attended a few of Allan’s digital help group conferences through the pandemic, along with spending time together with her and speaking to group members one on one.
“The tie-in between what she’s done for over 50 years with her support circle, and what happened in our little group of these creative workshops—it was kind of a reflection of the same thing,” Weiner recalled. “It became clear that this was the inspiration for the play, what that group does and how that group works.”
It was no straightforward process to slim down the numerous tales and experiences shared by the members in these teams right into a 95-minute play. And whereas Weiner acknowledges that Shared Sentences can not presumably encapsulate each household’s expertise with incarceration, there are positive to be some acquainted faces and moments that resonate onstage.
“There were particularly four people from the beginning of this project that were part of it, through the interviews and the creative workshops, that stayed consistent with me,” Weiner mentioned. “I needed their essence to be in this play, for three reasons: 1. Because of their commitment to the project and their passion for having their stories told, 2. Because their stories are so interesting, and 3. Just because of deep love.” Those 4 are represented within the characters of Harold, Barbara, Tee, and Celeste, all 4 of whom are credited for his or her contributions and are receiving a share of the present’s ticket income.
With a lot encouragement and writing recommendation from veteran playwright Craig Lucas, Weiner accomplished an earlier draft of Shared Sentences, which in 2021 had a week-long workshop adopted by a public studying at Theater Row in Manhattan, after which a public presentation on the Quick Center in Fairfield, Conn. When new-play savant Lisa Rothe got here on to direct, the items all got here collectively.
Though the manufacturing closes on Nov. 12, that is removed from the tip of the highway for Shared Sentences.
“The plan is, we want to take this to as many places as we can,” Weiner mentioned. “Including non-traditional theatre settings, which we do a lot with our work. It’s an equal part of our work, just as important as putting up a production here that people can come to, that we also take it to communities that maybe can’t as easily access or come to the theatre to see it. That entails hospitals, sometimes libraries, community centers, universities, high schools, and regional theaters. We want to tour with this and reach as many people as we can.”
The subsequent venture for Houses on the Moon within the fall of 2023 shall be Hotel Happy by Camilo Almonacid, which can use puppetry to discover the intercourse tourism business and U.S. army involvement in Bogotá, Colombia.
Whether the topic is trauma, habit, poverty, stress, or injustice, the overarching message of Houses on the Moon’s work is that life’s burdens are simpler to shoulder after they’re shared. Theatre is usually a residence for anybody who’s looking, from right here to the moon and again.
Alexandra Pierson (she/her) is affiliate editor of American Theatre. apierson@tcg.org
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