INTERVIEW: New play explores struggles of returning home after prison
Home Is a Verb, the new play from writer Melissa Cooper, will receive a special reading in New York City thanks to the organization Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA). The benefit, taking place Monday, Feb. 5 at the Mainstage Theater on 42nd Street, focuses on the obstacles faced by people returning home after time in prison.
Cooper’s play is fictional, but inspired by the RTA program, which offers artistic avenues for those on the inside and outside.
“The play evolved out of, well, probably two-and-a-half years of working with a group of formerly incarcerated men who were all what RTA, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, calls alumni, meaning they were all members of RTA inside prison,” Cooper said in a recent phone interview. “Richard Hamburger, the director, and I met with them sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly over a long period of time to really kind of try to get inside the world of what their reentry into society was like, and from that one of the things that really had struck me was I didn’t want to write an issue play, a play that was didactic about the struggles and troubles. These guys have so much rapport and humor and life. They’re amazing to spend time with.”
The play ended up taking the shape and structure of RTA itself. The drama imagines a group of formerly incarcerated men who have performed theatrical productions on the inside. In the play, they have come together to create an event that will allow the wider world to understand their identities, their challenges and their goals.
“You get people’s struggles emerging,” she said. “You get internal struggles in the group. You get someone who can’t overcome always being late, and that becomes an issue. You get someone whose parole restrictions are making both their life but also their ability to participate in the ensemble difficult, and so on and so on. But it moves toward them putting together an actual performance and performing.”
Cooper has seen the play performed as a reading a couple of times before. The experience of seeing the words come to life before an audience has helped her develop and craft the narrative, but she was quick to point out that this is not a docudrama in which the characters and actors are the same.
“This is a fictional, completely artistic creation, but it draws on these deep, deep wells of experience that these men we’ve worked with have so generously shared because they want this to go out there,” she said. “So initially we did a couple of readings using the ensemble we were working with of formerly incarcerated men. Then we did do a reading at Ensemble Studio Theatre in November with professional actors. That was the first time we brought in professional actors. We had a superb cast, and we have the same cast again with one exception just because of actors’ schedules, another wonderful actor coming in. So we have seen the play. It’s very useful for me to hear it and to be able to hear the structures of it with these wonderful actors, but the goal for Monday is really it’s a benefit for Rehabilitation Through the Arts.”
The benefit reading features Victor Almanzar, Will Badgett, RJ Brown, Bjorn Dupaty, Jaime Lincoln Smith, Maurice McRae and Albert Fermon. Michael K. Williams, from HBO’s The Wire, will make a special appearance as well.
RTA, where the funds will go after the evening, has been in existence for more than two decades. They started at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and now they work in five New York state prisons, serving more than 200 incarcerated men and women and 34 professional teaching artists.
“They’ve just started to branch out to really deal with the really positive fact that a lot of the guys that they’ve worked with over two decades in prison, some of them are getting out,” Cooper said. “They have this body of their alumni out in the world wanting to work and live and still be connected to the arts and to transformation, but also dealing with the issues of reentry. So the play wants to open up this often invisible world. I mean, we walk down the street, you’re passing people all the time. You’re interacting with people in the course of the day in a place like New York with people who have been prison. It’s such a stigmatized thing. It’s a hidden thing. The play I hope, among other things, really shows you that these are six characters, all very different, all dealing with different things.”
One character in the play has been out of prison only a month, while another character has been out almost 10 years.
“There are different stages of life just like the rest of us, but the goal is we really want to raise money for RTA to continue their amazing work,” Cooper said. “But my goal as a writer hearing it, hearing people’s responses, hearing what works, I’m still developing certain aspects, tweaking things. That’s always useful to me, but the goal really is to come and see.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A special reading of Home Is a Verb by Melissa Cooper will take place Monday, Feb. 5 at 7 p.m. at the Mainstage Theater on 42nd Street in New York City. The event will benefit Rehabilitation Through the Arts. Click here for more information and tickets.
