Jan Cohen-Cruz: Episode Nine: Aftermath.
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: This was so intense, it was almost fifty-four years ago, and then it ended so abruptly.
Finn K.: Yeah, but this whole thing about a triadic relationship, right?
Jan: Yeah.
Finn: Now from where you are, there’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody says that’s fine, Richard, hey what’s the matter, man? Blah blah blah. I just–I’m still the same. One woman, that’s it. I don’t want to hear it.
Jan: It’s just we never talked about it.
Finn: We couldn’t talk about it.
Jan: It was pretty hard to talk about some things. And everything was always limited timewise. But then, you told me when you were getting out, you came and visited, and ever since then, maybe ten years would pass sometimes, and other times we would be like emailing each other daily—we found something again—
Finn: No no, we always—
Jan: We reconnected to it.
Finn: Yeah, but it never dies. We coulda forgotten about it. But it was still there.
What I had with Jan I never had again.
Jan: In this episode we follow up on relationships forged in the workshops, beginning with Finn and me, played by Terry Kinney and Kathryn Erbe.
Younger Jan [Played by Kathryn Erbe]: After the demise of the workshop and back in New York City, I did alternative theatre and finished the BA I had abandoned while at Trenton. Four years after I was removed from the workshop, I received a letter from Finn:
Younger Finn [Played by Terry Kinney]: June 23, 1977. Dear Jan, Here I am surprising myself. I am not only typing out a letter to you, I am doing it with certain knowledge that I will be mailing it. I have a parole date, and although I know that we will be living separate lives we have connections, a bond that will never be undone. And I know you loved me as I loved you—in the best way we were capable.
Younger Jan: He later told me that he’d gotten a scholarship to study acting with Lee Strasberg in New York City, with whom we, in the street theatre, had studied. But on the day of his release from Trenton, his parole officer, without whose permission he was restricted to New Jersey, would not allow him to go to New York, assuming it was just to make drug deals. So, Finn jumped parole but nonetheless lost the scholarship. Though I didn’t know it, Finn did go to New York and was part of Alec Rubin’s Primal Theatre. He later told me that he sold drugs to support himself but never himself used anything heavy again.
Another year passed. I met a man at a big event celebrating the recipients of a grant for artists to do community-based projects. Neither I nor he had even applied for this grant; we were both there to celebrate good friends who had. We talked, or tried to; the noise level was piercing, but later he said how much he liked my voice. We danced, or tried to, but the room was packed; he later said he loved the way I moved my arms.
He came for dinner one January evening. That year the snow was something mythic; his van got stuck outside the house. He couldn’t leave for eight days. The relationship deepened, cocooned together. A few months later, he and I got a loft together.
That spring, it must have been 1979, over a year after his release, Finn came to see me. It was a great joy, beholding him in natural light for the first time, sitting on the rug as the sun poured in through the high industrial windows of my boyfriend and my loft. I was still pretty knotted up by the whole relationship with Finn, the haunting feeling of something unfinished. But what? He did not want to get in the way of my relationship. But I felt the need to know who we were to each other by then.
At my behest, we went to a friend’s apartment and made love, the one and only time, but it was strained. At the time I thought that at last connecting sexually would be a completion of sorts, pulling together the other ways we had been so close. But I could feel, once we were in the act, that he was not experiencing it that way at all and so of course I didn’t either. Then he was gone again. Only years later did he tell me, when I asked, that it had been futile; it couldn’t restore the grounding we’d shared years before in prison and our paths did not lead us back to that ground.
I next saw Finn maybe a decade later. He had moved to the west coast and tried to break into the movies, but the effort was undercut by his girlfriend at the time. He then settled in Seattle, got married, and had a daughter. I had also married, after a tumultuous five year on-again, off-again relationship with the guy whose van had been stuck in the snow. We had twins. I had gotten my PhD, was teaching community-based theatre and related subjects at NYU, and was writing books about socially-engaged performance, which had first come alive for me through the prison workshop.
Finn was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer and came east to say goodbye to three people he loved, including me. We met in a restaurant near a bus that would get him easily to LaGuardia Airport, where he was heading after our visit. He talked a blue streak, the sort of thing one could say to anyone, which I found really unsatisfying. I said very little until finally I asked if we could just sit quietly for a moment and we did. I felt that the silence frightened him but there it was. It was a great relief to just look at him. Then we spoke slowly, haltingly, but to each other. I felt a little of the old communion, that the love persisted for us both despite the distance and respective circumstances. And then he was gone again.
An undated journal entry reminded me that I saw him once when I was visiting a friend in Seattle. I think his wife had left by then, the reasons being, Finn said, that he wasn’t into sex and wasn’t ambitious. He was doing some spontaneous street theatre in coffee shops and once as guerrilla theatre at a TV talk show when political prankster and egomaniac Abbie Hoffman was the guest.
The next exchange I remember was years later. He was cured of the worst of the cancer but still had a condition that was very expensive to treat in the US and practically free in China. Years earlier he had befriended a Chinese woman when they were each the primary caregivers of their kids in Seattle. Now she was retiring, returning to China, and asked him to go with her. He was planning on doing it. I wished him well and hoped it would be great for him but was secretly sorry to see him go quite so far away.
Then a few hours later I got another email that began “Dearest darling.” My heart stopped—how could he be writing this now? Then I realized it was intended for her and he accidentally sent it to me. He ended up not going to China, perhaps because his daughter and grandkids lived in Seattle, although they were estranged.… And time passed. Time passed.
Jan: And once more to Ausettua, Kathy, and Mama Glo in Louisiana.
Ausettua Amor Amenkum: A strong indicator of the LCIW Drama Club’s success was the desire of participants to continue the work after they were released. This led to the formation of the Graduates, a performance group of club alumni. All powerful performing artists, they allow themselves to be used as sacrificial lambs as they share their personal stories with audiences throughout the United States. They powerfully demonstrate how performance can be a tool to educate and advocate for the thousands of individuals still existing in the prison industrial complex. The Graduates were recipients of a Rauschenberg Fellowship. We participated in an advocacy initiative that contributed to the release of Mama Glo, in 2022, after serving fifty-one years, the longest time a woman in Louisiana has spent incarcerated. Kathy–
Kathy Randels: On some level, calling it the LCIW Drama Club limited our thinking to just making theatre. But for some time, Ausett, you and I had talked about doing something with the women when they got out. The Graduates became the mouthpiece for the Drama Club. When we got the Robert Rauschenberg Racial Justice Fellowship and finally had some money, we went to a Formerly Incarcerated People and Their Families Movement conference. Here was this huge room filled with formerly incarcerated people, and they were all working for changes in the legal system, getting their brothers and sisters released, healing people as they got out, all sorts of things. Mama Glo–what’s it been like for you?
Gloria “Mama Glo” Williams: The biggest fight for formerly incarcerated offenders is once you get out. They’re selling you lies on the inside, telling you, “You can get help here, you can get help there.” It’s so not true. That’s one of the biggest concerns; once you are out of the system and back in the world without training or job skills, you go back to what you know. So I say rehabilitation comes from within. You gotta really want it, and make the sacrifices to get it, in order to change yourself,
to put your focus on something other than what brought you to prison. And by sucking up everything the system has to offer you that would help you better yourself. You gonna use it in your life once you’re free to stay free.
The most important thing is creating opportunities when people come out.
Ausetta: And we began to use the Drama Club for advocacy, too.
Mama Glo: And that leads me to Fox and Rob and the Participatory Defense Movement in New Orleans, Louisiana that fought to get me out of prison after fifty-one years! I never saw their faces. I heard Fox a few times on the phone. I didn’t know anybody else really give a damn beside Kathy, Ausettua, David, and Zohar. But to find out there was a village out there fighting. That didn’t stop until I was free!
Fox told us the governor said it was going to take a Damascus Experience for him to sign my papers. And Fox said, “Well here comes one!” She was willing to buck the system for me. They did everything humanly possible to set me free. Had it not been for the village knocking on the door? The justice system sentenced me to life in prison, but God had another plan ‘cause I am free today.
But I am barred from Louisiana. I hate that because it hurts my heart that my daughter’s ashes are… are still sitting in the house where I live in Texas. I would like to grant her request: She wanted to be buried beside my mother. I can’t go do that and the state of Louisiana is giving my son and them a bunch of baloney in order to put her body to rest. That is insane. I can’t heal because it’s right here with me, it lives with me. I was just strong enough to recently hang her picture over my bed and put the blanket on the bed that match the picture on the wall. I can’t really rest until it’s done, so my question is, how long are you gonna make me suffer? You can escort me in and escort me out. I would be in total peace if you did that. But because of the stipulations, it’s not gonna happen.
Kathy: Forgive me Mama, but I remember a wise woman, namely you, telling me during the Free Mama Glo campaign, “Never say never!”
Mama Glo: That’s right, Kathy. They said they were going to bury me in prison, but I said that would never happen. When you turned the key and I came out, a string of people came out behind me because of what you guys were doing.
Ausetta: Mama Glo, do you remember the time the Free Mama Glo campaign went to the road out back from the prison carrying the signs and wearing the shirts?
Mama Glo: Yes, and one of the security people told me.
Ausetta: What was that moment for you, knowing we had got on the grounds and was demanding you be let out? What did the security person tell you?
Mama Glo: She said, “Come, step outside with me. There are people out there fighting for your freedom.” It was so powerful—people who didn’t even know me fighting for my freedom. I didn’t know there was so much love in the world.
Kathy: Mama Glo’s freedom was a shift for all of us—of course, biggest for Mama Glo.
Ausetta: That’s right. We were no longer just sponsors in the prison. We were advocates. We had to go beyond the boundaries of the prison.
Kathy: Ausettua, you have often said the work we do with the Drama Club and the Graduates is life theatre—
Ausetta: Yes. Because it allows participants to evaluate their experiences by way of the stage. The self-actualization occurs in the process to get to the stage, although the performance is pretty powerful. In life theatre, everyone learns valuable life lessons–the audience, prison staff, and the actors. Jess–
Jess Thorpe: It’s exactly what you’re saying—the most important thing is creating opportunities when people come out. I stay in touch with a lot of people I meet in the prison, like I’m doing a podcast with one person who’s now out, and I go to a lot of meetings. I recently went with a woman who’d just been released from prison to meet with a church that she felt wasn’t listening to her. I have nothing to do with the church. I just went to listen and try to be an advocate for her because we have a relationship. It started in the prison, but it can extend to the outside.
We have a youth theatre that we run in a Scottish prison. Recently we invited lots of other youth theatres from the areas that the young people in prison actually live to offer them places in their youth theatres when they get out. We are constantly trying to map the prison’s geography with Scotland’s, to find opportunities back in the community. I also work in a theatre in Dundee, and so I can invite people to come and work with us there when they leave prison.
I want to create in-roads into Scottish society and get away from the “othering” we do to people in prison. Only doing theatre programs in prison isn’t going to change anything; it can just seem like prisoners have more opportunities than the rest of the community and it doesn’t respond to the bigger picture. There’s got to be, “What next?” when people leave. I give them my email address, and I say, “Come and have a coffee, and let’s see what we can get you involved with.” It’s not for everyone. I’ve met people on the outside that I knew from prison who have avoided me in the street; they just don’t want to reconnect to that part of their lives. But other people are like, “Oh my goodness, amazing!” The relationship doesn’t have to end here. I want to help them with their futures.
Saul Hewish: How does security deal with that?
Jan: Asked Saul.
Jess: In the beginning it was like, “We don’t do that,” and now we do do that. I don’t know quite how that happened apart from the fact that we got a special work email address that people can contact, and then I follow up. Right now, I am connected with about eight or ten people I met first in prison—one who is now teaching in a project with us. That is the potential of a small country like Scotland. So what’s the potential here? How can we change Scotland? It sounds quite ambitious but why not?
Jan: Here’s John.
John Bergman: We did an interactive show called Lifting the Weight about pulling the curtain off the whole issue of getting out. We set it up against a mythical character called Death Bird, who is your death in some way: psychologically, physically, drugs, whatever. We had a cage; a critter was in it. Every time the guys on stage got it right you built a wall against it. And every time they didn’t, then the critter got loose and could get you.
It was important to us, and I think to many of the guys, to see what their lives might look like outside. When someone gives them these “getting out” classes, they’re half asleep. Because they’re boring, because people don’t really know, because they talk about them, like, doing an interview. My guys used to role play job interviews. After about five minutes half of them just wanted to run.
While artists or facilitators on the outside might have time and financial security to set up connections or opportunities for incarcerated communities to engage in arts practice and collaboration, it is difficult to expect someone who is incarcerated or recently released to lead these initiatives.
Kathy: I hear you… The performance we made about a year ago with The Drama Club is called The Key to the Gate, and Mama Glo came up with the title, from a woman who is still incarcerated at LCIW. She once said to Mama Glo, “When are you going to realize that you hold the key to the gate?” Because we’ve been able to have deeper conversations now that Mama Glo is out and also because I’ve been more involved in system change efforts on the outside, I am bringing that back into the women who are inside now.
I want them to spend their time working on their way out and planning for what they want to do with their lives once they are out. On the practical artistic level, I want them to have monologues and performances ready to share on the outside, so they can work with the Graduates when they come out. Oh, it is so much harder to rehearse them “in the free world” because we are all scattered all over the state and across state lines. Also, reentry is so filled with playing catch-up on every level—family, relationships, finances, home stability, medical issues, driver’s licenses, et cetera—that carving out space to come together to rehearse is much more challenging.
Jan: Back to Rand.
Rand Hazou: For me, the workshops were part of a larger project attempting to create agency and empowerment for two communities directly impacted by incarceration by facilitating sustained creative dialogue. Unfortunately, the creative engagement did not result in the sustained and ongoing creative dialogue between these two incarcerated communities that was envisioned.
In reflecting on why, we acknowledge that Banks got released from San Quentin and as such had more pressing and immediate concerns beyond incarceration such as the need to care for his family and secure employment. While artists or facilitators on the outside might have time and financial security to set up connections or opportunities for incarcerated communities to engage in arts practice and collaboration, it is difficult to expect someone who is incarcerated or recently released to lead these initiatives. While connection is one of the main tools that we can use to break through the confinement and isolation imposed by carcerality, when we as outside artists create these opportunities, we need to be aware that those impacted most directly by incarceration might not have the will or the way to connect.
Saul: There’s a lot in the literature about theatre and transformation which on the one hand can be very real but at the same time, if there aren’t things in place for people as they come out of prison, it doesn’t matter how good our theatre program was. Some people are released homeless. They’ll be back in prison very quickly. For some of them, prison provides a place that’s safer than living on the streets. We should be mindful of that. I think what we do is important; we enable possibilities and imagination: Could I live my life differently? We can’t do that all on our own.
[Haja Worley singing]
Jan: This is Haja Worley on vocals, who was part of that same workshop in Trenton State Prison in 1971, accompanied by Kenny Butler on piano and Dionisio Cruz on percussion. Haja got out of Trenton, got married, and went on to be an amazing community activist and gardener. Dionisio is the man I met at that party celebrating artists who got community grants in the late seventies that I described earlier in this episode… and is my husband.
Younger Jan: Around 2015, Finn took his abusive son-in-law to court and got custody of his twelve-year-old grandson. Finn raised the boy until he reached eighteen, when he and his girlfriend got an apartment together.
Younger Finn: Over the years I put a lot of my energy into the church, which throughout her history has had many models of true communion, almost always founded by women and men like St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Francis, out of love. Theirs were powerful acts dedicated to restoring true communion to the church, and they were successful, and will be successful again, unlike anything we’ve seen since the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve collected enough information to write out a methodology to restore true communion to the church, but I’m no saint, and a saint must arrive who can take the methodology and apply it.
I take a five-mile walk most days. Though I never leave my apartment with the notion of talking to anyone, I’ve somehow been gifted with it just happening. From my street, reformatory, and prison lives, I fit right in. This morning a young Black man came up to me all happy, telling me about his new job and apartment, and how he appreciated my advice. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was looking great, a former street kid who’d been in really bad shape.
People I meet in the streets from all walks of life know me. Like a woman who had been psychologically and emotionally destroyed by her parents, a lawyer and a doctor. She has been clawing her way out of that abyss slowly but persistently. Presently she can only afford a room in a drug house with a horrid, shared bathroom, but she’s into celebrating life for the long haul, and she is going to make it. She turned her little room into a paradise—one feels the joy when entering that space. Truly an inspiration.
It’s a natural and a good way to spend my time waiting on that last train out.
Younger Jan: As Finn once wrote, “You and I reside in two different galaxies that briefly touched as they passed going different directions.” Yet I had never gotten over the abrupt end of the intense phase of what we had. Rain is the medium of longing; when someone is gone from your life prematurely, you think you see them in the rain. That is why you walk in the rain when you are melancholy, an emotion with no apparent cause because it comes from another time.
Writing this exchange together brought that other time into this one. I have been able to hold it, see it from the perspective of time, and accept that Finn has always been with me, since I made that little space inside myself with two chairs during the height of our romance, though I’ve barely been in the flesh with him at all.
Through our love, I discovered that what the physicists said was true—there are no boundaries between your atoms and molecules and those of a chair, a lake, another person. But it took love for me to know this. And as Finn has written—and Finn really likes having the last word—
Younger Finn: “Our love abides.”
Jan: Tune in to the final episode, number ten, Reflections, to hear participants share some final thoughts about their experiences. The song Intersession was composed by Sasha Paris-Carter with Kenny Butler on piano, Dionisio Cruz on percussion, and vocalist Haja Worley. Hush featured Kenny Butler on piano, Dionisio Cruz on percussion, and vocalist Haja Worley. The theme music was composed by Sasha Paris-Carter. The musicians are Daniel Knapp on cello, Dionisio Cruz on percussion, Joanna Lu on viola, Mary Knapp on accordion, and Rene Ferrer on bass guitar. This is Jan, signing out.
