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FREEHOLD FORUM 2007 APRIL ISSUE |
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This month the Freehold Forum is thrilled to feature the following:
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| Engaged Theatre Monroe Residency Program by George Lewis | ||
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Beginning in early January and extending into the middle of March, I traveled to the Monroe Correctional Center with a team that included collaborator Hal Ryder and interns Don Carter Rodriguez, John Leith, and, for the first month, Jose´ Abaog. Our intent was to work with a group of the male inmates in the Twin Rivers Unit - the medium security part of the prison - to create with them an original piece of theatre that they would then perform for audiences of other inmates, officers and prison staff members, and family/friend visitors. The program was coordinated by Marjorie Petersen, Director of MCC's Community Partnership programs. Our first meeting with the men was on a Tuesday evening. They were ten, and we were three. Our rough plan was to begin with the Brutus/Cassius scene from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, to use the scene as an armature from which to hang the men's own stories.
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On the first day of the Meisner Progression, taught by Freehold Artistic Director Robin Lynn Smith, we eighteen students
introduced ourselves to one another through a horrifying ice-breaker called "Video Pen Pal," horrifying to a degree you
can only experience in an acting class. We each had two minutes to tell our imaginary future video pen pals via the
maginary video-camera about ourselves. To add fuel to the fire, Robin then had a fellow student volunteer do a "playback"
of our introductions. I still haven't completely forgiven my classmate for how fumbling, nervous and awkward she made me
appear in her playback. Or maybe that was her acting acumen shining through. In any case, I held out until the bitter
end and was one of the last students fed to the video wolf. And for someone who confessed to the video that this was
particularly hard for me because I'm more of a listener than a talker, I talked longer than anyone else in the class.
Much longer. Well over the two minutes.
I am not a writer. In spite of that - or because of it - I determined that I would take the Playwriting I
class at Freehold last quarter. My training and experience to that point had been as an actor, singer and engineer.
I had somewhere between little and no creative writing experience but was armed with a firm belief that humans can be
trained to do anything.