Prose and Cons

Hope is the Thing With Feathers, a comic play by Richard Harrity about a group of men scheming to catch and cook a duck, had a one-night-only performance in the Kansas City area on December 20. After six weeks of rehearsal, the nine-man cast and six-man crew staged a play that was so exclusive, one had to request a seat months in advance — and that didn’t guarantee admittance. But a select few did have first dibs on a seat — the actors’ fellow prisoners in Lansing Correctional Facility’s medium-security unit.

The show marked the premiere theatrical production of Arts in Prison, a nonprofit organization founded in 1998 by Elveera Voth. The program is best known for its initial project, a choral group called the East Hill Singers, so named for the area of the Kansas prison that houses minimum-security offenders. The group comprises minimum-security inmates and community volunteers, and its next concert is scheduled for January 7 at Trinity United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Kansas.

Voth came to Lansing after spending most of her professional life in Alaska, where she headed up the music department of the University of Alaska-Anchorage. “Five years ago, I decided to swim upstream,” she says of her move to Kansas City — without a job and with only minimal connections. She eventually landed a post as choral master for the Lyric Opera.

“But I wanted to do some volunteer work, and, out of nowhere, a friend said, ‘You ought to start a prison chorus,'” she recalls. Voth says that she had no experience with a prison program, “and there was no precedence (at Lansing) for something like this.”

But now the East Hill Singers’ schedule includes two concerts a year in Kansas City and one in Topeka. While Voth has increased the choir’s visibility, she has not yet been able to rid the choir of the stigma it carries like a ball and chain. She is often asked why a group of criminals deserves her time and expertise.

“I’ve gotten some bad mail,” she says. “One read, ‘This proves they’re living in a country club.’ I also hear, ‘Why should we give to the dregs of society?’ My response is always the same: because they’ll be better members of the community when they leave. And I’d rather have them as a neighbor with hope in their hearts than with hate in their eyes.”

Christopher Kurtz, who is in the middle of a one-year internship with Arts in Prison, says that he also has taken the defensive when faced with naysayers’ comments on the project. “We’re not doing this to throw anything in the face of victims,” he says. “Some of the inmates genuinely want to better themselves.”

After the prison added creative writing, guitar, and visual arts to its palette of classes, theater was a logical next step. That’s when John McCabe-Juhnke, a professor of communication arts at Bethel College in Newton, Kansas, came along. McCabe-Juhnke first saw the chorus at a performance in Newton, and his theater experience led him to wonder whether the concept could be expanded from singing Broadway show tunes to staging them. So after presenting to prison officials a one-man show that featured the ideas he would use in drama workshops, he persuaded those officials to complement the existing Arts in Prison projects with a drama class. Now he’s on sabbatical from Bethel College, leading medium-security inmates in theater workshops that might not look out of place on his Mennonite campus, though he says, “I’ve switched cultures completely.… This is unlike doing theater anywhere else.”

For his drama class’ first assignment, McCabe-Juhnke asked the inmates to share a personal story, which was then dramatically retold by a different person. “Each man took very seriously his obligation to perform the best possible dramatic version of his peer’s story,” McCabe-Juhnke writes in the Fall 2000 issue of Arts in Prison Quarterly. “And all joined in the spontaneous applause after each person’s efforts…. I was humbled by the sincere outpouring of praise these men offered one another.”

The December performance went off without a hitch. The 40-minute play was staged for 80 people — mostly medium-security inmates but also a few visitors. “If you count as a success the level of enthusiasm of the actors and the audience, then it was a resounding success,” McCabe-Juhnke says. “I told (the actors) to expect anything from walkouts to inappropriate noises, but it seemed to be an infectious experience. It wasn’t over for a minute when they asked, ‘When is the next play?'”