Jan Cohen-Cruz: Episode 8: Collapse.
This podcast features stories and reflections about the prison system, theatre, collectivity, and love, from six sets of people who met through prison theatre workshops. Finn and I fell in love in one of them, he joining from the inside and me from the outside. Our story runs through it all.
Jan: I think a few things happened…with…and they all happened at once. I mean things had been slowly, slowly building and it all meant so much to us and then it all fell apart so fast. I had no idea that my lovingness had gotten really over the top and it didn’t work with what you needed in our relationship, but you never told me, because I think you thought it was, like, you didn’t want to oppress me, but you never did, oppress me.
Finn K.: The thing is—for you to think that we could have this open relationship, right, that told me everything that I could ever want to know. I said “Oh, well this will never work out.”
Jan: We didn’t know yet. We were really young. We didn’t know where to go from there—and even good things, like, I don’t think we knew as a workshop, is a play going to be satisfying very long? We didn’t know how to go the next step.
Finn: So at a certain point, maybe a year whatever, after The Trial, actually, oh that was exciting, oh, we’re in a lull, what are we gonna do?
Jan: This episode is about how difficult it is to sustain nurturing experiences in the carceral system. We begin with Kathryn Erbe, playing me.
Younger Jan [Played by Kathryn Erbe]: Trying to pierce through the haze of all the years that have passed since, I see the almost predictable letdown that follows the high of a great achievement, like postpartum depression. We had made The Trial, a piece that really spoke for us, and our audience got it. And all within the confines of a maximum-security prison. Who would have known that all the limitations could provide a laser-like focus on our goals? However, with the workshop reconvening after that production, what now?
An unfamiliar impatience pervaded the group. New people joined, which us old-timers acknowledged as good, but they also threw off the intimacy of our group dynamic. We never discussed how to integrate them into our work other than just welcoming them. At the same time, some longtime workshop members got antsy. We’d done the show, the audience dug it, but so what? Nothing changed. We didn’t have tools other than making plays; none of us had a vision of how we might build on that production. I’ve since learned things we could have tried. Pairs of guys could have facilitated workshops for other inmates. We could have made a play portraying an ideal environment for people who’d transgressed, what real rehabilitation could mean. We could have focused on the street theatre house as a post-incarceration reality. But we lacked leadership and never figured out how to move forward as a collective. As Dylan sang, “Those not busy being born are busy dying.”
Jan: Kevin and Alex–
Kevin Bott: Back in 2020, when I felt like the project had fallen apart, I didn’t think I would have acted any differently in that space had they been white students. Because I was just being a theatre director in the way I learned how, w`hich is essentially, I’m in charge. I’m the final decision maker. That’s how I was coming into it. Just the way I knew. So I was often in tension, in this project and other community-based projects I initiated, because the collaborative part of it was in tension with my own artistic vision. You saw that in our project together. The way that I had ideas for what I wanted to happen and it didn’t really matter what other people thought. I was going to have my way because I felt artistically that was the way to go, which was also problematic.
Alexander Anderson [played by Boris Franklin]: On the one hand, like you say, you’re in charge. That’s what a director does. On the other hand, people are stepping into that space wanting to be in charge, too. I don’t want to be coming into that space with Kevin in charge and I’m just there to help because that feeds into what’s already going on in people’s minds.
Kevin: Yeah.
Alex They already mostly see the white person is in charge. That has to change. We need to bring people into the space and tell them that this is collaborative. You know, I don’t lead with an outline anymore. We do some tableau exercises just to get people into the space. Then I tell them they’re in charge of putting their piece together. And give them some ownership. That’s one of the things we’ll have to deal with, and I didn’t see myself owning Ritual4Return. When I did try to feel some ownership, I think I got some pushback from you.
Kevin: Yes.
Alex: You know? “You don’t own this. I own this.” I don’t know if you remember but after the women’s group, I came to you and I said “Okay, can I be a teaching artist now?”
Kevin: Alex–
Alex: And I…
Kevin: Alex, unfortunately, I remember it all.
[Both laugh.]
Alex: And you said no. It wasn’t so much it hurt as it was, okay, I’m going to show you what I can do. Those kinds of things we just have to point out in what we’re doing to show whites this dynamic that happens in that space. Even though we all talk about being all about the art and all about theatre, I think there’s something else deeper, that when it shows itself, creates conflict and hostility. If we don’t catch those things in time, eventually you’ll hear it all. That’s what you heard in the argument we had—all those things that I was suppressing in order not to damage our relationship. But in the end I had to say what I was going through. Because if you remember, I went through that situation at Lincoln Hospital that really impacted my mental health.
Kevin: Yeah. If I remember correctly, you’d won awards for your empathetic treatment of patients as a licensed clinical social worker and got consistently glowing performance reviews, yet you were bypassed for promotion in favor of a much younger, less experienced white female.
Alen: Kevin, I was bypassed for promotion twenty-seven times!
Kevin: Wow.
Alex: And each time by people who were less experienced than me. So, with Ritual4Return, I felt I was coming into a space where I could be myself and be in control and have all the things everyone wants to have: freedom to express myself, freedom to learn, freedom to help.
Maybe the place to start is in people’s responses to your whiteness in that space. And your response, trying to lead with your own humanity—empathy and all—wanting to be a part of it, is another issue. Because whites do that—they want to come in and they say, “Hey, I want to do time, too!”
Kevin: Kind of romanticizing oppression and wanting to find a way to identify as one of the oppressed.
Alex: Right. Right. So for me that’s the start: thinking about the way everyone is trying to come into that space as their whole self and how that can get misunderstood.
Kevin: I also think that my work for these past three years… Listen, I always joke with my wife that I canceled myself. But it’s actually no joke. I needed to be canceled. The amazing thing to me about our blow up in 2020 is that it was the exact same day that my wife also had some pointed things to say to me. I think back on that day as one where I almost lost my marriage and actually, for a time, did lose my friend and creative partner. But clearly the universe was telling me there were things I needed to hear. I realized I was creating harm and I had been truly unconscious of it. My reflection on it, and I think the work I need to do as I reenter these spaces, is to be aware of the way that whiteness, white maleness, even white middle-class maleness operates so that I can mitigate it on my end and acknowledge it. To even point out, “This is what’s happening,” if only to myself: “These are my privileged identities at work in this space.”
Because it haunts me—that moment when you were asking to be an artist in the space. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think you could do it—although I think there was that arrogance of, “Well, I know how to put a show together, that’s my training and my expertise.” It was more this fixed idea I had of what everyone’s role is. My mind… look, you said it, the whiteness—and maybe this is also typical of men—operates in knowing. “I know. I have the idea of how things are supposed to go and how things are supposed to be.” So unconsciously, this is the way it is. You’re the social worker. I’m the artist. That’s how this is going to make sense, to funders and the participants. Or maybe just to me! And so yeah. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did that.
Alex: No, I think it’s good. I think it’s great what we’re doing. Because these dynamics do happen, and we need to explode them together.
Absent a way to go further than making and presenting shows, jealousies festered, the perception that someone was getting more—attention, love, praise—than someone else.
Younger Jan: Hegel points out that something new is born in the collision of opposites —that’s dialectics: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Charlie Chaplin said that Hegel was the funniest philosopher because he couldn’t conceive of a thing without its opposite. Nor could Chaplin, describing comedy as an idea going one way meeting an idea going another. He loved collisions of very pompous people brought down by their opposites, like the dowager who gets a scoop of ice cream right in the cleavage when a child eating it on a balcony above her accidentally drops it. Or when people read the same image two totally different ways; like Chaplin’s Little Tramp picking up the red flag that falls off an extra-long truckload of lumber passing a factory just as the workers have stormed out in protest. They think that Chaplin’s character, running to give the flag back to the truck driver, is the revolutionary leader, and follow him.
Ideas going one way meeting ideas going another in our case led to collapse. For example, one day Richard told the group that a prison administrator wanted a video made about the workshop as an example of rehabilitation. Some of the guys were firmly against what could look like “fun and games in Trenton State Prison” and would have none of it. That made perfect sense to me. The workshop at its best was a space where we could try to be the selves we aspired to, in the context of a collective ideal, not as pawns in someone’s game or each of us only out for ourselves. These two ideas of the workshop went opposite directions and led to the terrible conclusion that we had to either preserve this space and be used or give it up– which may have been the only way to preserve it. At the same time, some of the prison old guard resented the diversity of our group since “divide and conquer” was one of the ways they kept control.
Finn identified the workshop’s undoing as focusing on individual desires over upholding the collective ideal. For me this is an active struggle, not either/or. We were so young, the majority of workshop participants in our twentiess, and didn’t know how to balance individual and collective needs and desires, which even trying to do in our self-centered culture means swimming upstream.
To me the workshop’s undoing was the lack of vision to take it to the next level. Making theatre together for ourselves and the inmate population continued to be meaningful. But absent a way to go further than making and presenting shows, jealousies festered, the perception that someone was getting more—attention, love, praise—than someone else. And finally, prison conditions are inhuman. After the high of the show, all the inmate participants returned to their cages. A couple of hours a week in the workshop couldn’t balance out the wasted hours that prison conditions impose.
My multiple romantic relationships caused the undoing of my relationship with Finn. In the beginning, the conditions that the prison imposed had been weirdly conducive to his and my relationship, and to the workshop itself, making each moment together matter. Through our letter writing, I learned that the power and intimacy of words between two lovers can be far greater than I’d ever imagined, an invaluable lesson about the many forms that love takes. But finally, it was not enough, given everything about our lives that brought us to that time and place and that followed.
One factor was that Finn was in prison for killing a man who he later found out was innocent. He said he saw that man’s face every day since he did the deed. A therapist once told me that there are some things you cannot fully heal from and killing someone is one. I wondered if she included the killing done in war. The man I eventually married had killed in Vietnam. I was troubled by the immorality of killing in a war being treated so differently from what Finn did. But my point is what it did to Finn to have taken that man’s life. Though he never actually agreed with me that the act of killing a human being had caused him to terminate his right to certain pleasure in life, he never denied it either.
Another was that Finn felt Lee’s suffering as his own and therefore could not try to get her to back off from me. Plus, the pull of family is formidable, even if relationships have been torturous. He could not both fully support Lee and allow himself to express his need for a monogamous relationship with me.
Then the administration canceled visits between inmates and people who worked in the prison even if the prison didn’t pay them, like Richard and me. The loss of contact visits with Finn twice a month put me through intense withdrawal. Contact visits took place in cells of what had been death row before capital punishment was abolished. Though in the summer we sweated, I remember the feel of those cells as icy-fingered. But it was worth it.
Finn and I talked about the choice we faced: I could either continue in the workshop or continue to make visits. It took us no time to opt for the workshop. That was what we needed more. But in fact we lost both and suffered doubly. Because ironically, someone else’s contact visit led me to be banned from the prison entirely.
The girlfriends of two of the guys in the workshop, one a woman who had never attended the workshop and the other who occasionally did, disguised their appearance in order to make a contact visit. It appeared to have worked without a hitch until a few days later, when I went to the prison for the workshop and was surrounded by eight guards and taken into a little room. Guards had often leered at me coming and going from the prison and now in that little room I thought, This is it. But they did not touch me; they made an accusation.
“You disguised yourself as a Puerto Rican and made a contact visit this past Sunday!”
“That’s absolutely ridiculous. And what does that even mean—disguised myself as a Puerto Rican? And if you thought I was there, why didn’t you stop me on the spot? And who was I supposedly visiting? You’ve named someone I never even wrote a letter to or visited. And anyway, I was in Pennsylvania visiting my parents, who you can contact for proof.”
“As if your family wouldn’t cover for you. You’re done here!”
And I was never allowed to be part of the workshop again. Richard continued for a time, but things were pretty rocky with him by then. There was no sense of how to move the work forward and the gap between the heights we’d reached and the repetitiveness of the same old theatre exercises was untenable. Some of the guys wrote me that a drama workshop continued after Richard left but it lacked the vision and energy we had all brought to it. None of the core members stayed with it.
Then, the collective house collapsed. Richard’s boyfriend, Doc, did not like that I had any say in what Richard gave him and where the money came from—too often, I was sure, from the grants we got for the workshops or the street theatre. One day at breakfast Doc and I got into an argument about it, and he came up behind me and hit me over the head with a cast iron frying pan. That was the end of our collective living. Lee and I packed up our belongings.
My relationship with Richard also ended. Why was I, who Doc had aggressed against, the one to leave rather than Doc? Richard was totally exposed at that moment, sticking with Doc, who fulfilled his individual desires, rather than telling Doc such behavior was unacceptable. Why was there no collective process to decide how to move on from such a very low point? Richard and I never spoke again.
Finn and I continued to write to each other for a time, but the relationship suffered without an actual way to manifest the collective ideal that brought us together. I didn’t take in that he had already left, and because I couldn’t let go, I couldn’t believe we wouldn’t find a way to continue our relationship. He looked for more and more direct ways to tell me. Finally he sent me these words, which struck hard:
“If you want to torture me, just send me a letter containing a blank piece of paper.” Just seeing my handwriting on the envelope and imagining what I wrote was enough to send him into a maelstrom.
So I stopped.
That was before I realized that he had been withdrawing ever since I took up with Kareem and Lee and that he’d had a nervous breakdown as a result of his mother’s death-probably-suicide. That was before I knew that he saw the workshop as devolving into individual desires and neglecting the collective. That was before another woman had slipped into the picture, someone who could easily fit into the life he’d led before Trenton.
Lee and I needed a car to move our things back to New York City and borrowed Kate’s, who also kept Lee’s cat Zelda during the housing upheaval. Lee felt we needed a car beyond the move and refused to return Kate’s, as if our need somehow justified keeping it. I was convinced Lee was correct, that going back and forth to Trenton was a reason to take something that was not ours. Kate rightly wouldn’t return Zelda until we gave her back her car. So we did. It’s astonishing now to think how I could ever have thought we were justified in keeping—no, stealing—Kate’s car. That incident ruined my friendship with Kate for good, a loss I continue to feel. I made several attempts over the years to resuscitate it but without success.
I see in my journal that by late September, 1972, I was pulling back from Lee, given her drinking, demands, and the derailing of the life I had been so fervently building. Finn was no longer in the picture, and she had been part of that whole, not someone I chose to be with one-to-one. Without the work on the court cases, I no longer felt we were traveling on the same path and cut the relationship off for good.
