The Hartford Courant recently sent a journalist and a photographer to cover the work of Professor Ron Jenkin's students enrolled in his Activism and Outreach Through Theater course. While the coverage of this course has been great overall, I'd like to add a personal perspective as someone who took it last semester. Below is an excerpt from the final paper (yes, I know it's summer and that the word "paper" should never be mentioned in the summertime) that I wrote for the class. Oh, and the cupcakes? Well, at the end of our semester of Shakespeare, theater and acting classes the CJTS administration made sure we were treated to cupcakes.  


Of Offies,* Actors, and Non-Actors: 


Theater Outreach at the Connecticut Juvenile Training School

A few weeks ago my theater group went to the Connecticut Juvenile Training School with copies of a scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to work on with two incarcerated youths we were paired with and instead we left with visions of the tempests of the inner-city. Our students, two tenth graders named Chris and Evan,* had their lines memorized almost perfectly from weeks of practice and they were more than prepared to run through the scene. But that day’s session would be spent with us listening to them speak not of Caliban’s torment or of Trinculo’s fear of the impending storm, but of the violence and injustice they have witnessed in their own neighborhoods. After reflecting on that session, I have come to think that Chris and Evan were able to talk about their experiences not only because they related personally to the general themes in The Tempest, but because our group was engaged in a dialogue that drew upon and validated our personal experiences.

In our early sessions, we had explored the themes of isolation and being lost, referring both to the students’ experiences with incarceration and their uncertain lives outside of CJTS and Trinculo’s monologue in Act II, Scene II of The Tempest. Chris, whose family life was fragmented with his mother in jail for a minor offense and his parents divorced with each taking care of different children, identified easily with Trinculo’s search for shelter. We focused on encouraging the students to look past their pop culture stereotypes about what Shakespeare’s plays were about (e.g. “wearing tights” and “reading love poetry”) and to connect with the larger themes in the scene. We drew parallels wherever we could between the students’ lives and Trinculo’s experiences. When I asked Chris to explain the entire monologue to Evan (who joined our group after the first week), he said to him, “You see this? ‘And another storm brewin’ / I hear it singin’ in the wind’? That’s like when the cops gonna rush your project and you ain’t got nowhere to run. That’s like you ‘bout to go down for somethin’.” Evan nodded in understanding.

By using Augusto Boal’s techniques as described in Games for Actors and Non-Actors, we were later able to expand on several themes we discussed and encourage Chris and Evan to rethink the ways that their lives have been (and continue to be) shaped by poverty, fragmented family life, police brutality, drugs, crime, and delinquency. In The Rainbow of Desire, Boal proposes that “the great general themes are inscribed in the small personal themes and incidents. When we talk about a strictly individual case, we are also talking about the generality of similar cases and we are talking about the society in which this particular case can occur.” That Chris understood something of Boal’s concept, weeks before we ever brought it up, was evident when he related his individual experience of being fearful of arrest by the police to the larger social context of living in a public housing project. He drew on Evan’s shared knowledge of what life was like for the two outside CJTS to make a scene from The Tempest more immediate.

Chris initiated Evan into our theater work by relying on his ability to see parallels and imagine connections between their lives and Shakespeare’s characters. As a comparison, in Shakespeare Behind Bars, Jean Trounstine writes of the inmates she worked with in an adult women’s prison, remarking that “instead of frightening me they seemed lost, with tragic lives—lives like those of Shakespeare’s characters, complete with flaws, comic mishaps, and ironic endings.” Using theater to examine the sense of feeling lost has been as useful, and perhaps as therapeutic, for Chris as it was for the women that Trounstine worked with. In addition, through our easy-going relationships with each other and our engagement with the written word our group developed a way of talking about The Tempest remained as accessible, and hopefully as profound, as Chris’s first explanation to Evan.

While prizing accessibility, we also reminded the CJTS students of the relative complexity of Shakespeare’s characters and their situations, something that Boal discusses at length in Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal argues that “the entire body of Shakespeare’s dramatic works serves as documentary evidence of the coming of the individualized man in the theater.” Boal asks “what happened to the character in theater?” and answers himself, “he simply ceased to be an object and became a subject of the dramatic action.” Boal uses this line of reasoning to relate Shakespeare to his historical context and to the rise of bourgeoisie (and bourgeois individualism) in Europe, but it is also useful in terms of our contemporary understanding and the use of Shakespeare’s plays in new contexts, like prisons and juvenile facilities. The development of the individual in theater, and of individual subjectivity, is a historical stepping-stone towards Boal’s innovative new forms of theater. Yet while the modern cultivation of respect for the individual has been worthwhile, the excesses of subjectivity that Boal notes later in Theatre of the Oppressed have often undermined our ability to use theater as a tool for social reform. Boal inspires us to look for ways to balance individual subjectivity with objective conditions, which are always social and political in nature. Let us hope that Professor Jenkins's Activism and Outreach Through Theater course may have such an effect, on both the CJTS inmates who gave theater a try and the Wesleyan students who gave them a chance. 

* Names changed to protect the identities of the CJTS inmates 

* "Offie" is a slang word that can be used to describe a nerd, geek, or someone who doesn't fit in or tries too hard to fit in. I'm not an expert on the word, but I noticed that the CJTS kids used it as an insult. At one point, Chris said that he didn't care if anyone called him an "offie" for being into the work with theater and Shakespeare that we were doing. Strike one against peer-pressure!