Geno Navarez and his classmates in “Creative Dramatization” recently presented a short skit on the Garden of Eden. Navarez was Adam. Herman Simmons was Eve and Kyle Edwards played the serpent. A few days earlier, Navarez and a handful of students portrayed young toughs drinking in a parked car before being rousted by the cops.
It is difficult to tell when exercises as diverse as those resonate with the students and help them sort out their real lives, even though that’s supposed to be happening. The students themselves have a hard time saying exactly how that process works. What they do say is that at certain unpredictable moments, they sense their minds clearing and opening, becoming free.
And, freedom is important to students in “Creative Dramatization.” In addition to being classmates, they are inmates.
“People aren’t learning anything about their rehabilitation being stuck in a cell,” said Navarez, 25, in DuPage County Jail awaiting trial on charges of cocaine trafficking. He also served 4 years in prison for aggravated battery. “If they didn’t have this drama class and other programs, I’d be strapped up in a room where they’d be watching me because I’d be going crazy.”
The new class is intended to help inmates learn how to deal with difficulty. Through improvisational exercises, they are thrust into unfamiliar circumstances, forced to make fast decisions, then review their outcomes.
The concept of art as therapy has been around for years. Private and public entities from New York to Chicago to San Francisco have seen the value of providing artistic endeavors for people behind bars. But “Creative Dramatization” is the only ongoing drama class offered to prisoners in Illinois, and perhaps in the U.S.
Their props are burgundy chairs. Their costumes are blaze-orange jumpsuits, sometimes accessorized with long underwear. They began coming to the stark, yellow room across the hall from a prisoner’s pod in mid-July in what is something of an experiment in drama. Organizers are waiting to see whether it works. But, Ronald Mullins has his theory.
Mullins, 29, awaiting trial on charges he burglarized a car, studied theater arts at Southern Illinois University for two years in the late 1980s. Since 1992, he has been in and out of prisons in Illinois, on burglary, drug and theft convictions, according to Illinois Department of Corrections records.
“It’ll make a difference,” Mullins said of the drama class. “It points me toward the right direction. It opens my mind to a lot of things I wanted to achieve before I got in trouble. I forgot about all that. Now, I can go back to what I was supposed to be doing.”
“Creative Dramatization” perhaps would be more aptly named creative improvisation. Instructor Richard Oberbruner, 39, a graduate of the Second City Training Center in Chicago, uses improvisation based on the classic handbook, “Improvisation for the Theater,” by Violet Spolin. Her son, Paul Sills, is founding director of Chicago’s Second City.
For two hours, three afternoons a week, Oberbruner directs about 12 students in short, improvisational exercises. The class is open to any inmate, although jail rules limit the number in each class to 20.
One of the favorite exercises is “Freeze,” in which Oberbruner sets a scene with two or three inmates, then allows them to play it out until he shouts “freeze.” At that point, another inmate steps in and moves the skit in another direction.
Many of the exercises include several crises erupting at once, and the main character must make quick decisions remembering Oberbruner’s five rules: Always agree. No cursing. If someone pulls a weapon, it automatically is transformed into a flower. If someone takes drugs, they immediately become an animal. Finally, the students must strive to make “better choices” in their roles.
“It’s giving them a half-baked situation,” Oberbruner said, “and they’ve got to make the best of it.” The underlying lesson is to act out choices, deal with the consequences firsthand and review the experience. And, learn the right choices.
“Imagine that in real life, when they get out, these guys reach that level of thinking, with patience and intellect,” Oberbruner said. “It’s kind of spooky because many of my students will go back into their neighborhood and if they practice what we preach, I think they’ll make better communities.”
The class is the latest offering by Justice Understanding Serving Teaching, or JUST, of DuPage, a nonprofit, ecumenical ministry that serves inmates at DuPage County Jail. Established in 1986, JUST is funded by the United Way, private donations and profits from the jail commissary. In addition to the drama course, JUST offers classes in anger management, computer skills, parenting and violence prevention, among others. It also runs the Brandywine Neighborhood Resource Center in Villa Park, where kids go after school to do homework and socialize under Oberbruner’s supervision.
Artistic therapy for inmates has been around locally since at least 1992, when the Art Therapy Program at Cermak Health Services of the Cook County Jail was started. Instructors conduct dozens of sessions a week in poetry and creative writing, sculpture, quilting and similar artistic endeavors at Cook County Jail. There are plenty of others across the country. In New York City, a group called Hospital Audiences Inc. presents drama workshops at Rikers Island. In San Francisco, Rhodessa Jones’ Medea Project develops dramatic productions with female inmates.
“When I look at inmates as a group, learning to express emotions in a legal, healthy way is extremely important,” said Charles A. Fasano, director of the monitoring program at John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group. “That’s a life skill. Drama could very well be one area to begin to open that up for them.
“If you talk to people in the criminal justice system, most of them will say these inmates are acting all the time,” he added with a laugh. “But you don’t have to use that talent to con somebody. There are other ways to use those skills.”
John Culbert, acting dean of DePaul University’s theater school, said one of the values of drama is that it detaches and analyzes the actor and the actions. Those features could serve inmates well, he said.
“It removes their behavior from the context of their own lives,” Culbert said. “They get to put themselves into a dilemma and study that from all different perspectives, with all different attitudes. It allows you to study the behavior in a way that you can’t with your own life. In a theatrical standpoint, the issue is pinpointed and so it makes it different than your own life because you bring so much baggage to your own life.”
In a conservative county like DuPage, one might think offering inmates an outlet to practice their theatrical skills would raise a clamor. It hasn’t happened, though, perhaps because the class is new and relatively unknown.
“I’ve gotten some very positive feedback,” Sheriff John Zaruba said. And because inmates volunteer for the class, it suggests they “have the mindset that they want to improve themselves,” he said. “That’s about 90 percent of the solution.
“It’s not the touchy-feely social worker stuff,” the sheriff said. “It’s the educational, I-want-to-help-myself-stuff.Once the larger community finds out about this, I think they’ll see that it might work for them,” the sheriff said.
Current students praise the “Creative Dramatization” class.
“This is the best two hours you can spend in here,” said inmate Larry Evans, 43, awaiting a new trial on retail theft charges. He has been in and out of prison since 1983, when he was convicted of armed robbery. “You get a chance to actually ventilate your feelings and you get to see people be someone other than themselves. When you work it out like this, you can see what’s a good idea and what’s not.”
The concept merits at least a trial run, said Judith Grote, director of JUST, who approved the class when Oberbruner suggested it after observing it at an alternative school he visited. She said she is planning to track drama students who have been released.
“We are incarcerating so many people in our society these days, and almost all of them are going to get out some day,” Grote said. “How are we going to utilize their time in jail? Are we going to make them better criminals, or are we going to make them better citizens?”
