The prison system in the United States is unlike any other criminal justice system. American prisons hold 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, yet the entire population of the US makes up only 5 percent of people on Earth. Longer sentences for nonviolent crimes, the inexorable stomp of privatized prisons, and a justice system that is seeing faults in its streets as well as its courts are all causes and symptoms of broken system. So often in this discussion are the human lives reduced to numbers and statistics, a dehumanizing practice that only fixes the gaze away from the epicenter of this national tragedy: the individual lives affected by the carceral state.
JACK &, a new collaboration from Kaneza Schaal, Cornell Alston, and Christopher Myers, seeks to explore the after-effects of spending time in the system. Through the lens of experimental theater and a kaleidoscope of cultural references, this group of actors, directors, and designers will be unfolding the long-creased flaps of our most intimate and internal consciousness: the world of dreams, and how they are lost or interrupted on the journey back into society.
The creators of JACK & discussed all of these topics and more with Tommy Franklin, cohost of the Weapon of Choice podcast and Restaurant & Creative Director at All Square, a social enterprise and restaurant in Minneapolis that aims to invest in the minds, lives, and dreams of formerly incarcerated people. It’s built around the idea that once one has concluded their sentence in the criminal justice system, they are “all square” and should be given a fair chance and a pipeline to prosperity.
Tommy Franklin (TF)
If you had to lay it out for folks, what is the ultimate theme of JACK &?
Kaneza Schaal (KS)
JACK & is about how we rebuild dreaming after trauma. The piece is speaking specifically to reentry to society after prison, but the project is really thinking about how we build and tend to internal life.
Christopher Myers (CM)
The thing that gets lost in all of the conversation about social good and the arts is that all trauma affects your dreaming, affects your fantasies of who you can be, affects your fantasies of who you want to be and who you will be. That’s what we’re talking about specifically with JACK &—the idea that we believe in tending to is taking care of our dreams, of our fantasies of who we are and who we will be.
TF
And do you see dreams as a way to reinvent ourselves?
CM
Absolutely, that is the prime way that we tell the story of who we are to ourselves. When you say to a kid, “What do you want to be when you grow up,” when you say to a grown person, “Hey what do you see your tomorrow as,” this is all a way of asking the question, “If you were to invent yourself tomorrow, who would you be?”
TF
Do you remember a particular moment when you realized that focusing a performance on the intersection of incarceration and the dream life was a necessity?
KS
The project really grew out of our collaborations with an artist who worked on the first piece Chris and I collaborated on, Go Forth (I had actually first seen the artist perform when he was serving time): Cornell Alston. Nate [Cornell] played the title role in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in full drag, at an all-male correctional facility. His performance was transcendent, and it awakened my own sense of dreaming, and so we started working together on that project. At one point, Nate’s parole schedule became impossible to resolve alongside the production as it was evolving. So there was this real thing we came up against as artists, thinking about making work together in terms of the State’s reach into our dreaming together and in trying to make work together as artists, tackling the kind of imprint of the State in our room.
CM
I feel like whenever people look at underserved communities, poor communities, black communities, they focus on whatever outside force has the boot on our necks. And I’m less interested in that than I am in the ways we end up hurting ourselves the most. What I see consistently, across the board, is people who have a poverty of dreaming. There is a way in which for all of us—for me certainly, I know for Kaneza, I know for so many folks—there is this idea of: when did you first get permission to dream yourself to be bigger than your block, bigger than your neighborhood, bigger than your city? We live in Brooklyn, and I’ve taken kids from Brooklyn into Manhattan to see a museum and realized that they had never crossed the bridge on their own before. It’s strange, the invisible walls that hem us up are so often walls made of dreaming.
TF
Obviously, JACK & does some reclaiming of these dreams. Is there a culture that goes along with dreaming, like a culture of incarcerated dreamers, so to speak?
CM
Absolutely. What I find is that dreaming collectively is really one of the biggest and quickest ways to expand our sense of self, and to expand our sense of dreaming. I didn’t know that I could go to the college I went to until somebody else told me that’s a college that existed. I remember coming home to my family and saying, “I think I want to apply to this school”—I went to Brown in Providence. I said I want to apply to Brown, and my father said, “Well, what is it and where is it? Is it a black school?” In small ways and in big ways, our collectivity of dreaming on the inside and on the outside is what allows us to dream beyond the narrow confines of our own lives, and I think that there is absolutely a community of dreamers in the world, and our dreams are shaped both from the positive and the negative on the community.
KS
In addition to this idea of the individual’s dreaming,
TF
How important are dreams in your own lives and, if you’re a person who remembers their dreams and was fortunate enough to remember their dreams, in what ways do they inform you to create or beg for creative exploration?
CM
Well, I’ll tell you one thing, this piece in and of itself would have been impossible without the dreaming of Kaneza Schaal. What I mean by that is that for both Nate and myself, we looked out onto the landscape of what is possible within theater, or what is possible within the contexts that we have been exposed to, and there was an impossibility that Kaneza saw as absolutely a possibility, that active dreaming then took all types of discipline and work to make happen. Countless letters to countless lawyers trying to prove theater is gainful employment and was worthy of a one-week pass to leave the state, to rehearse outside of New York.
That’s the other big lesson of this piece for me: there’s a lot of dreaming that went on to make this piece happen, but then that dreaming was followed up by a relentless quest for both resources and opportunities to make that dream happen. Nate and I had several fish sandwiches out in Queens; those fish sandwiches did not make this happen. You can talk all we want, there was so much discipline and belief, especially on the part of Kaneza to make that thing happen. That’s one aspect of the dreaming that I feel like was so consistent in this process.
TF
So how did all of JACK &‘s initial visions relax into the page?
KS
I knew off the bat a kind of sense of the structure I wanted for the piece. That three-act structure, with this monologue from Nate at the top, the sitcom baking fiasco in the middle, and the final section being movement based around the idea of cotillion, as ceremonial entrance into society, and what is a re-imagining of that. But in terms of the words that the actors speak and how those ended up on the page, the first monologue is written by Christopher and has come out of those fish sandwiches he mentioned earlier.
CM
And so Nate and I spend a number of hours talking about his experience. I read some of the journals that he kept when he was inside. What we wanted to focus on was the fact that there are so many narratives around incarceration in our society. Every week on NBC they have Law & Order, they have CSI, and all of these things are about the primacy of incarceration as a thing in our world right now. This is every television show, every movie, focuses on this system that is so central to the United States culture, and as many stories as are being told about incarceration, about encounters with the law, there are still so many stories left out.
The central thing that is left out is the interior space of the young men and women who are involved with the system. We get the point of view of the lawyers, of the judges, of the jury members, but who you do not get the point of view of? Who ends up simply being an object, a person with no imagination, a person with no dreaming? The people who are encountering this system. So we wanted to focus on that for the monologue, with the idea of all the kinds of interiority that are happening with any person who is involved with this system.
TF
Wow, in the process of creating this, it sounds like so many layers unfolded and revealed themselves. Did any of those unfolding layers surprise you?
KS
So many. One of the ways we really developed this piece was gathering a groups of artists. One of the very surprising materials came out of a conversation about dreaming and about where our dreaming has landed over time—and specifically about tools of social performance and how we have passed tools of social performance.
A couple of the artists we were working with kept bringing up The Honeymooners, the 1950s sitcom. I was like why are—what? I’m like, I don’t want to watch The Honeymooners. What’s the next idea, and it kept coming in and kept coming in, and finally I was like: OK, we’re going to watch The Honeymooners. I had these kind of vague domestic violence overtones of like “To the moon, Alice,” but I was like, OK, we’re going to watch it.
Of course, it became so clear to me in watching that material this sense of the sitcom as a form of American dreaming, that the sitcom is one of our collective structures around everything from aspirational class stories to imagination itself. This is a dreaming form in the United States, and so that structurally became one of the sections of the piece around this very unexpected material that came out of these conversations. We also found out at some point in that discussion that there was a three-year period where that was the only TV that was accessible in the cell rooms, so there was this encyclopedic knowledge of what was for me the unexpected material of The Honeymooners.
TF
And JACK & is breaking down that imaginary wall that blocks general society’s concern with the issues this work brings up. How is it breaking down that wall, this play?
CM
First, I think that we are concerned with the way in which this cornerstone of American society has colonized all of our dreaming. I mean, whether or not you’ve had direct experience with that system, it’s still in your mirror. It’s in your world, although there are great pains taken to render the carceral state invisible (for example, all of the youth facilities in New York City have been exported outside of New York City now, so you don’t see them). These places are still central in our imaginations, so just by the fact of addressing these things on stages in mainstream venues and in art venues, we are already challenging that invisibility, that desire to render these issues invisible. I think one of our main things is to say not only are these issues not invisible, they affect you and they are in people all around you. I think that that has been one thing that a lot of audiences have come away from the piece understanding that their communities have all been affected in some way by the incarceration madness that has colored our attraction.
TF
So engaging audiences through experimental theater, it’s softening the blow of mass incarceration?
KS
I would say it’s a way to precisely get at the ideas we’re trying to get at. To me, part of this invisibility of the carceral state relates to the idea that all art is political. Whether you are making protest documentary theater or whether you’re putting acorns in a row, there are political implications within these practices.
As an artist, I believe that excellence relates to addressing all of the materials in the room. You can take any text, any performance
CM
I would say that far from softening the blow, I think that by giving people something unexpected around these issues, it intensifies their understanding of what’s going on, because, quite frankly, there are a thousand expected narratives to come out of any art documentary media around prison. Since the days of Jayne Kennedy and the penitentiary movies or probably James Cagney before that, prison lives in the imagination of the average US citizen, and that means that there’s a really easy and cliched narrative ready at the gate for anybody who wants to deal with that, but we have become numb to those narratives.
So I don’t think this is about softening the blow, it’s more about decentering these narratives that are central American narratives, that are central to the American consciousness, but at the same time serve as much to hide and obscure as they do to reveal.
TF
Was there anywhere in the creation of this piece that you were hesitant or afraid to go?
KS
All the time. I think there are so many forces that tell us this piece shouldn’t be made in this way, so the first time you tell someone you’re doing a piece that addresses prisoner reentry, there’s immediately an aesthetic imagination of what the project is going to look like.
CM
Quite frankly, I feel like the places that were hard to go provided the roadmap for us. What were the things that were scary? What’s interesting is that a guy can tell you the hardest things in his life, but what can be very scary to talk about is: what are your dreams? What are your fantasies? What do you want? That is somehow even more frightening than saying all of the trials and tribulations someone has been through to admit to wanting, to admit to longing, to admit to the fantasies of a future that you may or may not be able to get at.
TF
After witnessing JACK & and other works of art for social change, what responsibilities do audiences, community members, and other artists in the field bear? What dialogues do you hope folks will—excuse the pun—go forth and cultivate?
CM
Real talk: I think what I want audiences to come away with is the idea that if you’re not talking about these issues, then you are loudly ignoring what is going on around you. You are being an artist in the blind. I think that the question is not so much why are we doing what we’re doing, but why aren’t more artists dealing with these issues? That I think is what we hope audiences and artists come away with, is the idea that this is one of the issues of our time. We have millions of people who are locked up, how is this not on the tip of everyone’s tongue?
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