Drama Behind Bars:
San Quentin inmates taste freedom performing a play about slavery and liberation
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic

The inmates raised their rifles at San Quentin prison and vowed to be free. No one moved a muscle to stop them. Emotions ran riot in that still moment, shared by prisoners and the public in a remarkable piece of theater recently staged inside San Quentin's walls. True, the guns were only wooden sticks and canes. And no, a prison break was not about to happen under tight security. The silence inside the packed Protestant Chapel felt charged all the same.

In performing "John Brown's Body," a demanding and rarely seen verse drama by  Stephen Vincent Benet about slavery and liberation in the Civil War era, a nine-man ensemble of murderers and career felons brought art and life, aspiration and reality, into stark and telling relief. Some black actors took the parts of privileged white slave-owners in the panoramic, multicharacter piece. White and Latino inmates took their turns as slaves.  The cross-racial casting underscored the vivid strangeness of this prison drama. A woman, forbidden to rehearse with the inmates, performed the play's female roles on videotape. The Pacific Mozart Ensemble sang the haunting music live, in a first booking behind bars. The audience had to clear heavy security to attend, then mingled freely with the inmates inside. 

Capping a 2 1/2-year workshop that overcame lockdowns and solitary confinements, resistance by some prison officials and a jailhouse beating, the two-night run of this historical drama opened a powerful lens on contemporary prison life and the nature of freedom and responsibility. Violence, race, class, hope and despair are eternal facts of life at California's oldest prison, played out in thousands of private dramas every day. Refracted through the medium of live theater, in performances attended by 75 prisoners and 200 outside guests each night, those themes took on a laser clarity. The performances were videotaped, and the producers hope to present the San Quentin "Body" to a television or movie-house audience.

The show's prime mover was Joseph De Francesco, a San Francisco film editor for who had wanted to do "John Brown's Body" for 40 years and finally found a way to make it happen. As a teenager enamored of Benet's ravishing language, he stole a copy of the original cast recording and badgered friends to catch his fever for the 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning epic poem about the abolitionist firebrand Brown. Phrases like "graciousness founded on hopeless wrong" lodged themselves immovably in De Francesco's head. "I just wanted someone to hear this language with me. It turned out to be these guys."

De Francesco, 58, began meeting with inmate volunteers once a week in 2000, through the state's Arts in Corrections program. He raised $35,000 from various donors for the production, leaving him $15,000 in the hole. He needs $100,000 more to complete a marketable videotape.

De Francesco never asked about the men's crimes. "Maybe it was protective. Or
maybe I thought it would prejudice me in some way," he said. But he also felt a kinship with men he recognized from his Army days in Vietnam. "These guys were in my unit," De Francesco said. "Men off the streets, rough guys, the uneducated people who hadn't gotten a break." A poetic drama about slavery and the Civil War may have seemed a distant stretch. "But Jesus, these guys know something about the cost of freedom."

The director holds no illusions about his cast. "These men did terrible things to get here," he said. "I don't think lightly about what they do. In no way do I want to make these men heroic." Their instincts as con artists, De Francesco reasoned, may have constituted the strongest inherent qualifications of his actors. One of them, Larry Miller, was asked in a television interview if he had any acting experience. "Other than acting like a damn fool? No," he said.

A feature on the production ran on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Seen live, "John Brown's Body" dragged at times but broke through in dynamic ways. "Ain't you never thought about being free?" a slave character (played by Miller) mused in one intimate cabin scene. The answer came from his woman (professional actress Blancett Reynolds), looming above him on a video screen. "It ain't safe to talk like that," she chided. "I want to be free," Miller exclaimed, "like an eagle in the air." Like everyone in the cast, he was dressed in prison garb of blue denim jeans and light blue work shirt. With his arms raised in silhouette against the backdrop of that phantom woman, his longing seemed doubly anguished.

The scene drove home the deep, tough-minded pulse of this production. In process and result, "John Brown's Body" was a dramatic expression of prison reality, rather than quixotic or sentimental ideals. "You have given us a gift no man could ever have given us and no man will ever take away," cast member Nelson "Noble" Butler told De Francesco from the stage on closing night. The actors embraced one another and chatted with visitors from the outside for several minutes. "We put our differences aside," Marcus Lopes said of the mixed-race company. "We all became brothers." 

"This was a blossoming," said Jeff Golden.

"That's it," a prison lieutenant said, cutting short the post-play celebration. "These men have to get back to their cells. Now."

San Quentin Warden Jeanne S. Woodford was initially wary of the play's racial themes and language. After lengthy negotiations, she insisted that the n-word be excised from the script. A prison chaplain wanted no part of the project. The arts offer the inmates "a positive approach and appropriate way of conducting themselves in life," Woodford believes. "We have a responsibility to teach them a lawful way to handle the minutes of their day."

 San Quentin has an intermittent but celebrated history with drama. The Actor's Workshop mounted a production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" at the  prison in 1957. That play was reprised there 30 years later. Woodford accounted herself "very proud" of "John Brown's Body" and said she would "absolutely do (live theater) again." On closing night, she delivered her own ringing curtain line to an audience still on their feet after a standing ovation: "I'm very glad we did it."

Black cast member Carl Sampson said the play helped "break the ice" of the prison's racial tensions. One white workshop member was beaten by skinheads for participating in a program with blacks. He was sent to administrative segregation and never returned. Another of the actors tried to hang himself. "It blew me away," said inmate audience member Bert Christopher of the show. "The last play I saw was, what, 15 years ago, and this was better than anything I can remember." A captive audience of sorts

There was orange juice and lots of pleasant chatter at the intermission of "John Brown's Body." Flower-form fountains hissed discreetly in the courtyard as the audience milled about. It may have felt, for a passing moment, like any other night at the theater. But since this performance was taking place inside San Quentin State Prison, everything from set construction to crowd control was minutely scrutinized and controlled. Every bolt, screw, wrench and foot of video cable in Arthur Meiselman's steel-frame set and lighting grid had to be accounted for before and after load-in. Audience members who attended a partial preview of "John Brown's Body" in summer were advised that if they were taken hostage, "the state of California would not negotiate your release."

Members of the public invited to the full-scale performances had to clear multiple checkpoints and enter and exit the prison in escorted groups of 10. The process took over an hour each way. Metal gates clanged shut on either side of a sally port, flanked by barred
Gothic windows. Gazing up at the cellblock walls and barbed-wire loops, people joked softly about "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Cool Hand Luke." Inside, the atmosphere was remarkably relaxed. More guards are in evidence at the Golden Gate Theatre for a Best of Broadway opening than were apparent in and around the prison's Protestant Chapel. The prisoners who attended the two shows were an elite, handpicked bunch.

During rehearsals, security concerns supplied a moment of comic relief. When Los Angeles conductor Arthur Rubinstein showed up for a cast and chorus rehearsal in black Calvin Klein jeans, he had to don a white jumpsuit to get inside. (The black jeans were deemed too close to the identifying blue denim only prisoners wear.) "Now we know," inmate actor Nelson Butler kidded Rubinstein, "what conductors wear at San Quentin."

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, November 19, 2002.
Reprinted with permission.©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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