The Play

Paper, perhaps surprisingly, is a key part of the prison experience. Paper gets you in and sometimes gets you free. Chasing paper on the front is the catalyst to cuffs for many; making papers—that is, parole—is the hope of freedom for others. Inside, letters from family are lifelines, earning the slang moniker "kite" and there is an edge of exhilaration when a kite is slipped into a cell by a guard during mail call or under a cell door by another prisoner. For years after my release, I carried around a slip of paper in my wallet. A receipt for twenty-five dollars and seventy-one cent, the last of the money I’d earned working for 45 cent an hour in a Virginia prison. The experience is marked by paper. Transforming the paper into art complexifies the experience, makes it more than loss, more than the account for crimes and prison time that seem to stalk.

Felon: An America Washi Tale is about re-imagining paper. A solo performance that begins with the pages of a book being slid into a cell, traverses stoves made of toilet paper, kites from a father, handwritten affidavits, legal complaints, handmade paper, certificates of pardon, & a 1,000 squares fashioned from the clothing of men serving life sentences, the variety of papers that reveals what is possible and burdened by prison. Here, I weave traditional theater, poetry, fine art, and Japanese paper making aesthetic principles into a meditation on my own experiences of incarceration and my legal work to free friends that are still in prison. This reflection on the challenges of living in the shadow of mass incarceration is a story of violence, love, and fatherhood. The set is a collaboration created by Kyoko Ibe from "prison paper" that Ruth Lignen constructed from the clothes of men I first met in prison, each of whom were still in prison during the earliest stages of this project. Directed and developed by Elise Thoron, this Washi Tale moves literally and metaphorically beyond my own life, unwrapping the disturbing ways that prison touches us all.

Director & Developer

Elise Thoron

Stage Manager

Tyler Sperrazza