On a recent weekday morning, a chattering, expectant audience of some 65 students from the 6th, 7th and 8th grades at McClellan Elementary School in Bridgeport packed a large windowless room that was serving as a makeshift theater.
They were about to see the official opening of a production entitled
”Inside Out,” which would be performed under extraordinary conditions.
For one thing, the students and their teachers had been required to pass through a metal detector and to be frisked, which doesn`t usually happen at playhouses in Chicago.
Such vigilance, however, is standard procedure at the Cook County Jail, where ”Inside Out” was presented.
The show, a 35-minute morality play whose message is that crime is defeating and foolish, hits hard in a series of brief, fast-paced scenes that are separated by ”original rap ballads” composed and delivered by the inmate/actors.
The cast was composed almost equally of students from the city`s Metro High School, on the Near North Side, and inmates who are enrolled in the jail`s high school. The ages of the Metro students ranged from 14 to 18, the inmates from 17 to 20.
This sprawling detention complex at 26th Street and California Avenue was built with criminals, not thespians, in mind, which means that many of the features that theater people take for granted are missing here.
In this instance, there was no real stage, no curtain, no dressing rooms, no backstage area. The audience was perched on bleachers instead of in plush theater seats.
The actors were in plain view as they awaited their entrance cues, most of them sitting in plastic chairs along two brick walls.
They wore no makeup and no costumes, although some were dressed in khaki uniforms with ”DOC” in large black capital letters imprinted on a trouser leg or the back of a shirt.
The initials stand for Department of Corrections, and in case anyone in the audience forgot where he or she was, a sheriff`s deputy, on some sort of errand totally unrelated to the performance or to show business in general, ambled across the stage in the middle of a scene.
The actors, with discipline that would have impressed the most demanding drama coach, ignored the interruption, remaining in character and continuing to speak their lines. Considering their inexperience and perhaps the temperament of a few, this was particularly remarkable.
In yet another variation of the-show-must-go-on tradition, director Steve Ivcich (EYE-vitch) was forced to use an understudy because one of his stars was detained in solitary confinement, something that doesn`t happen all that often on Broadway.
Despite such obstacles, ”Inside Out” seemed a success.
The McClellan students were rapt throughout; their applause at the end was loud and spontaneous; their questions during a discussion period afterward indicated that what they saw had its desired effect; and no cast members tried to escape.
`Nights are the worst`
Some scenes are encounters between the Metro students and the inmates;
some are raw, searching soliloquies. In the latter category, an inmate talks about doing time:
Man, the nights are the worst. Sometimes I just lay awake and think deep, think hard. I think about why I`m like this. How did I end up in this place?
For a moment I can almost understand what`s going on with me. Then it fades and I don`t understand anything. I cry, man. I just lay there and cry.
The script was forged through a process that was, in effect, a kind of group therapy.
Beginning last October, the volunteers from Metro and the student-inmates would gather in two-hour workshops at the jail on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
They were guided by director Ivcich and their teachers-Charles Rankin from the Cook County Jail High School, which is part of the city`s public school system, and Shelby Taylor from Metro.
Rankin has taught for 16 years, all at the jail; Taylor has been a teacher for 18 at Metro, the city`s experimental ”school without walls.”
Ivcich, 39, now affiliated with the Victory Gardens Theatre, has taught acting for 10 years.
The primary goal, Ivcich says, was self-discovery. He and the two teachers first set out to strip away the biases each group had about the other. In the play, two cast members ponder these preconceptions. First a Metro student:
The first day I didn`t know what was going to happen. I was thinking,
”These guys are criminals. They`re mean. And I`m gonna be stuck in a room with them.” That`s scary, man.
Next an inmate:
I was afraid the Metro students wouldn`t see me, see I was somebody. They`d take one look and think criminal. That`d be it. I was embarrassed, too. Wearing this stupid uniform. They`d have real clothes. I`d be real easy for them to look down on.
Forget the `fronts`
Ivcich also wanted each individual to tear down the walls-in street argot, the ”front”-that he has erected as a defense, to hide his
insecurities and bury his fear.
Everyone from corporate executives to ghetto gangbangers tends to build a front of some kind, an image, to appear to be someone he isn`t; it may be Clint or Eddie, or for really old guys, the Duke or Bogie. The danger, psychologists tell us, is that these fronts can become our personality, that we can move through life without knowing who we really are.
For a gangbanger, as many of the inmates are, a front can be especially destructive-for himself and for victims of his crimes-and hard to demolish.
”It`s painful to get behind your mask and be honest about your feelings,”
Ivcich said. The show`s rap-song trio introduced the section dealing with this subject:
Fronting, like an ice-cold wall,
Pretend to something that you`re not at all.
Confusion, your mind`s in a rage,
Don`t know who you are so you play the stage.
Reflection, from yourself you hide,
Trying to be hard but you`re soft inside.
Listen, it`s not too late,
You can be real, don`t seal your fate.
In an early scene, an inmate/actor swaggers across the stage and faces the audience.
See this jacket. See these shoes. It`s a look. Clothes make the man. Lets people know who I am.
He accosts another character, orders him off the sidewalk, then turns again to the audience.
What you just saw me doing isn`t me. It`s this thing I do. It`s the other me. It`s my front.
Another character comments on the enactment of an armed robbery:
This is a front we all know. Gangster Man. Superhuman with his imaginary little gun. Take a close look at his hand. It`s not a gun he`s holding. It`s his fate.
A companion adds:
That`s the problem with a front. At first you can drop it. But later you lose track. You can`t remember what`s front and what`s you.
Hardest and the baddest
The dialogue, Ivcich says, came directly from the workshops, the words actually spoken by the students. ”The show is essentially a by-product of this struggle for self-awareness. It took a lot of guts for these kids.”
At the beginning, Ivcich says, the inmates for the most part ”didn`t have any impression of themselves as human. On the street they`re like high- velocity bullets. There`s this incredible gap in thinking about the consequences of their actions. They have no appreciation for who they are or what they can be except to be the hardest and the baddest.
”They might as well have been to Mars. They have seen things that most people in Chicago have never seen and cannot imagine. And yet if you look inside each one of them, you`ll find this emotionally pristine, naive 9-year- old.”
There are presently 27 cast members with the ”Inside Out” project, 12 from Metro High and 15 inmate-students. There is a continual turnover of inmates; most leave because they are transferred to state prisons.
The inmates are either charged with or have been convicted of serious crimes, including murder, kidnaping, armed robbery and assault. Two who await trials, if found guilty, could receive the death penalty. Several face sentences of from 20 to 40 years.
Bleak futures can make willing students, teacher Rankin says. ”When you work with people who have hit bottom, as these young men have, you`re able to touch them. They`ll listen.”
A priority of the ”Inside Out” project, Rankin says, is to prepare the inmates to survive emotionally in prison.
”When you can help a young man accept the fact that he may get 30 years and then make him understand that he`s really lucky, that he was on a path of death and that coming to jail was a blessing, well, that`s rewarding.
”That`s happening with young men in this project. They want to get to prison and continue their education and turn their lives around.”
A fearful lesson
For the audiences, simply visiting the jail can underscore the lesson that staying as far away from trouble as possible makes pretty good sense.
Trouble, they learn, invariably translates into drugs and gangs.
During the question-and-answer period that followed the performance, the McClellan students asked how many inmates had used or sold drugs. All raised their hands.
They asked how many were in gangs. Again, the response seemed unanimous.
In the play`s section on gangs, a Metro student observes:
Everyone has a different excuse for being in a gang. Really there`s only one reason to join a gang. It`s because you don`t know who you are. . . Gang thing makes you think you`ve got something. It comes down on you like a spell. You think the fear is gone. You think the guilt is gone. You go in as deep as you can. It`s like you`ve gone into this long tunnel. So long as you`re in that tunnel you feel like you can do anything.
Two gangbangers talk.
The first: Man, if I want to do something, I just do it. Anything. . . (Everybody`s) scared of me, man. I like it when people are afraid of me, man. Ain`t nobody can touch me.
The second: When we go out on the street that tunnel we were in seemed pretty roomy, didn`t it?
Teacher Taylor played the role of someone like himself, a teacher who attacks the common notion of the gangbanger-that he`s been victimized by an unjust society.
Taylor: When you want something from someone on the street and they don`t want to give it up, do you take no for an answer?
Gangbanger: No, man. You can`t do that out here. You wouldn`t survive.
Taylor: So then you don`t say to yourself, ”I`m from a broken home in a bad neighborhood in a racist world so I can`t possibly get what I want from that person”?
Gangbanger: Hell, no.
Taylor concludes: Seems to me when you gentlemen want something, you don`t need those excuses. Maybe we ought to leave the excuses behind. Then maybe we`d get somewhere.
The ”Inside Out” project was created by Julie Miller, director of public affairs for the Cook County Circuit Court. Although her plan has yet to be approved, she hopes next year to present ”Inside Out” each week to junior-high students from Chicago-area schools. ”That`s the age group that`s most vulnerable,” she says. Classes from three other schools, two from the South Side and one from Barrington, saw previews. One more performance, for a West Side school, was held this week.
Taylor has seen the inmates change since working with his Metro students. ”The hatred they had for others seemed to dissipate when they began dealing with our students and getting to learn about themselves. Before, other people were their `problem.` Now they`re realizing they have responsibility for their own lives.”
Ivcich offers a practical reason for the project. ”Charles Rankin says if we don`t try something to help, people are going to get hurt. It`s either going to be these young men or the people they meet on the street some day.”
