Theatre of Witness– A Model of Performance

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A new book by Teya Sepinuk Theatre of Witness: Finding the Medicine in Stories of Suffering, Transformation and Peace debuts this week.  It tells the story of those whose stories are often not told.  Taking the beauty and suffering of those we call "the great unwashed," Sepinuk mines the truths of refugees, immigrants, survivors and perpetrators of domestic abuse, ex-combatants, members of the security forces, teenage runaways, prisoners and their families, people living in poverty or without homes, families of murder victims, women in transition, people in recovery and survivors of war."  She also tells her tale and reveals how she developed her techniques and philosophy.

Theatre of Witness is a model of performance, first developed in 1986 that gives voice to those whose worlds are not on the front pages. According to their website  "the true, life stories, of people from diverse backgrounds are performed by people themselves, so that audiences can collectively bear witness to issues of suffering, redemption and social justice."  Techniques include spoken word, music, movement and cinematic imagery, but all "put a face and heart to societal issues of suffering, and celebrate the power of the human spirit to grow and transform."


Two productions/productions to-be fascinate me the most of the over 40 that Sepinuk has created in her many years as a theatre artist.  One is Release which deals with men who are coming to terms with the legacy of their past in Northern Ireland. The show includes a former prison governor, a former detective, a former British soldier, two ex-prisoners and a man who had been blown up in a car bomb as a child.  The production toured Ireland through November, 2012, and will tour internationally during 2013. A documentary will be released of the show as well, premiering in April, 2013.  See the website for details.

The other show I'd love to see, Women and War ,will bring survivors of war from countries such as Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, Gaza, Israel, Sudan, East Timor and Northern Ireland.beyond Northern Ireland together to share their struggles of building peace in the aftermath of conflict .  What an amazing idea, to forge such a community and have these woman create theatre together.

A book launch in the U.S. will occur in Philadelphia on April 25th and early reviews are great:  "“If you have any doubts about the power of socially-engaged theatre to challenge and heal, the stories and reflections in Theatre of Witness should put them to rest,” said Howard Zehr, professor of Restorative Justice, Center for Justice & Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University.

SNITCH: A Movie To Knock Your Socks Off

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A new movie hits theatres around the country on February 22nd and it looks guaranteed to be another knockout in the collection of eye opening stories about the results of the so-called "drug war" and incarceration.  But there's a twist to this one.

Here's the sexy action-flick poster which shows Dwayne Johnson.  He stars as John Matthews, a man hit hard when his teenage son is wrongfully ensnared in a drug bust and threatened with a terrifying 10-30 years in federal prison (Oh,by the way that's standard under the US government’s crazy minimum drug sentencing laws.)  For Matthews who wants to help his son, the only option is to “snitch.”  In this case that means becoming an informant.  But across the country this "helpfulness" can take the shape of different Catch-22s but the new reality is that informants have become a part of prosecutorial strategy. 

In Snitch, A deal is eventually made;  a politically ambitious federal prosecutor played by the always amazing Susan Sarandon gets the deal.  Things turn ugly when Matthew become an undercover informant and infiltrates a drug cartel, risking his family and his life.

Some of the facts about informants and mandatory minimums might surprise you.  On this website, developed to get people involved with the issues, you'll discover:
►"45% of people on death row are there because of a lying informant."

Molly Gill, from Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) writes a very convincing editorial about the wrongfully convicted, and here she says:
►"In 2010 alone, nearly one out of five federal offenders facing a mandatory sentence escaped it because they informed on others."
►The problem isn't snitching, per se, it's mandatory minimums which encourage desperate deals.  We need to get rid of them once and for all.
►"Mandatory minimum sentences require so much time in prison—five, ten, 15, 20 years…—that they can easily scare defendants into saying anything, true or not, to catch a break. Desperate defendants can finger the innocent or lie under oath, leading to wrongful convictions."
►"Mandatory minimums bar judges from fitting the punishment to the unique facts and circumstances of each case," although they do not keep us safer or reduce crime….They have succeeded in giving the U.S.. the world’s largest prison population, at an annual cost of more than $70 billion."
►Only prosecutors can ask the court to sentence the "snitch" below the mandatory minimum prison sentence required for the crime. This gives prosecutors "enormous—and un-reviewable—power at sentencing."

You can visit the official movie website and watch the trailer and you can tweet about it there with others. But  some of the real life stories about snitching are killers.  Take for example Timothy Tyler.

Gill tells us that Tyler was a lifelong Grateful Dead fan, an LSD user and a diehard Deadhead. He sold small amounts of LSD to friends and eventually was convicted of two state charges for LSD sales, which resulted in sentences of probation. One of his friends, unbeknownst to Tyler, began working with law officers to set up drug buys in exchange for the promise of a reduced sentence.  He asked Tyler to mail his LSD which he did, five times.

Tyler was arrested and pled guilty to drug distribution. At age 24, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole because his two prior drug convictions (for which he did not serve prison time) triggered the federal three-strikes law.

Did he deserve time?  Perhaps.  But he certainly needed treatment.  And he certainly didn't deserve, at age 24, to be given up on so totally by a society that spends billions of dollars to incarcerate drug offenders instead of treat them. 

After Eighteen Years in Solitary

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Last week I went to an event at Brandeis University with my niece to hear Damien Echols talk about his 18+ years in solitary confinement.  Echols is one of the so-called "West Memphis Three," all from West Memphis Arkansas and falsely convicted for the brutal murders of three boys in 1993.  Following a high-profile, celebrity-backed campaign to free the the three prisoners, all of whom received the death penalty, Echols and his two co-defendants were released from prison in August 2011.  They agreed to a rare plea bargain that essentially had them plead to guilt and not sue the state in exchange for immediate freedom.  It's a story made for a movie — and there is one and there will be another.  Plus many celebs helped with the case that includes stories to make your skin crawl–false accusations of Satanism, police corruption, i.e. the works.  Altogether another tragic indictment of our system.

Damien Echols on the left, and with his wife, Lorri Davis, who heard about his case, wrote to him, worked on freeing him, and eventually moved to Arkansas where they were married while he was in solitary in that prison.

But that's not what stirred me to write this blog. 

Yesterday I came across an article about Echols going back to Tennesee for the first time since he was released from prison in 2011.  For whatever reasons, he was invited to talk at… (ready?) — a technology conference.  Now, granted, just having Damien Echols come to your conference could add to the draw, but asking him to talk about his reactions to technology since he got out of prison seems at once fascinating and almost a little cruel.  How overwhelming must it be to get out and find yourself in this world where everything goes so fast you hardly have time to breathe!

And juxtapose this with what Echols said at the talk and writes about in his new book Life After Death — he eventually learned to spend up to 6 hours a day in prison meditating.  He bludgeoned his body to stand or sit in cold and heat and pushed himself through the physical pain.  He escaped the bars mentally, found himself through deep soul searching, got a modicum of peace.  His spiritual practice as well as his wife saved his life, he says.

So imagine after solitary confinement for eighteen years, walking into Best Buy.  The computers.  The cell phones. The tweets and whistles. Twitter, Echols says, he likes, because it feels like he's writing poetry. Texting too, a language unto itself.  But learning it in a heartbeat?  And what about the other bombardments of the techno-savvy 21st century? Apps?  Blogs? Flicker? All the ins and outs of the technological world, not to mention discovering that you can securely (sometimes) use credit cards online and drive straight through those giant stalls with Easy Pass.  What seems commonplace to us, natural, we actually learned step by step, year by year.

I remember how Dolly, one of the women I taught who spent fifteen years at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, said that the scariest thing after release was looking at the prices of shoes in the mall.  She said she started shaking and couldn't stop.  Yes, there's reuniting with your loved ones.  There's the joy of seeing green grass, the ocean, or a blanket of snow across a mountain.  And surely, hot fudge in the free world is as blessed as a bath.  But the shock of having been years behind the eight ball, the feeling that you are always trying to catch up has to take time to deal with, and maybe more years to get over.

So while we (and I speak as much of myself here as you) might envy Echols for having a New York Times bestseller or for having the likes of Johnny Depp and Peter Jackson support him with their fame and opportunities, the truth of Echols's life is not celebrity or fame, but the hard darkness of coming out of the most repressive world in this country where we keep people in intolerable conditions.  Coming into the light from darkness — it is no wonder that Damien Echols must wear dark glasses.