Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration

Obscured behind concrete and razor wire, the lives of the incarcerated remain hidden from public view. Inside the walls, imprisoned people all over the world stage theatrical productions that enable them to assert their humanity and capabilities. Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration offers a uniquely international account and exploration of prison theatre. By discussing a range of performance practices tied to incarceration, this book examines the ways in which arts practitioners and imprisoned people use theatre as a means to build communities, attain professional skills, create social change, and maintain hope. Ashley Lucas’s writing offers a distinctive blend of storytelling, performance analysis, travelogue, and personal experience as the child of an incarcerated father. Distinct examples of theatre performed in prisons are explored throughout the main text and also in a section of Critical Perspectives by international scholars and practitioners.

This powerful account of theater, both in prison and in the free-world, eloquently reveals that those two worlds—and the people who inhabit them—are not distinct. This is an ethical, moving act of scholarship that matters., Well thought out, masterfully researched and heart wrenchingly honest, Ashley delivers a book for the ages. With heart and soul she reveals to us the power of theater to not only transform stages, she shows us how it transforms lives., This is an essential book on prisons in the global age of mass incarceration, the fine-grain deep damage that a crude system inflicts on human beings and their families. This is also one of the great books on theater, the shared and inexplicable phenomenon that shifts perceptions, changes lives in real time, and instigates collective reimaginings of moral action, hierarchy, and purpose in the face of unexpected vulnerabilities and difficult truth-telling. Prison theater is perhaps the one place where theater works as it did in early societies, with lives at stake, piercing questions of justice, and the soul of a nation or a community or a family hanging in the balance. Professor Ashley Lucas, herself the daughter of a father who spent more than 20 years in Texas prisons, writes with stunning insight, attentive to the nuance and detail of process within large institutions and informal groups, alert to the circumstances in which emotional life is transfigured and revealed, and the conditions under which it is buried alive. A deeply inspiring book that demonstrates hundreds of positive, healing, and creative ways forward from a misbegotten culture of failure and shame.

Ashley Lucas is Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, and Former Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project. She and Jodie Lawston co-edited the book Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Scholars, Artists, and Activists (2011), and they cofounded a blog by the same name. Lucas also write the play Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass, which she has performed as a one-woman show since 2004.