by Alison Minami

For three semesters, I have taught an introductory playwriting class through USC’s chapter of the Prison Education Project (PEP), a volunteer-based organization that offers educational classes to students who are either currently or formerly incarcerated. The first two times I taught over Zoom to a classroom of young males at a juvenile detention center. Having been in numerous Zoom meetings with box after box of up-close faces with carefully curated backgrounds, I was not prepared for teaching to a wide-angle view of a classroom of students. While I’m sure the students likely saw a giant projection of me, I could barely see anyone’s faces let alone learn their names as would be my normal practice. Despite this challenge, I carried on with lessons on character, conflict, and dialogue, having the students freewrite, riff, and generate in each session. I called on students awkwardly, saying “yes?” to a roomful of raised hands without actually knowing who I was calling on. There was always a supervisory person in the room, whose face I never saw but whose voice I occasionally heard demanding students to quiet down or follow instructions. Still, in every class, students volunteered to stand up and read their work—acting out the dialogue with selected partners or classmates—and while I could barely hear their words because of the poor audio quality, what I could hear and see was the audience reaction—the laughter and glee at a relatable situation or a creative twist to a familiar conversation.

This past semester, I finally had the opportunity to teach in-person at Impact LA, a residential drug treatment center that assists clients with re-entry. In this small group setting, I was able to really make connection with the students, and they were able to experience my excitement for teaching and sharing the creative process. In every session, we had time for checking-in and sharing our highs and lows of the week, which set the tone for the class. The students were eager, lively, and trusting. They all had a shared experience, often teaching me the vocabulary of a world that was foreign. They openly supported each other in their recovery journeys and in their resistance or timidity at putting pen to paper. “I know how you feel” or “you could do it” or “just write whatever” were words I often heard when one person “wasn’t feeling it” or was stuck on a blank page. I was moved by the level of intimacy and care that the students had for one another, and it made me think of how important “alternative” forms of education are where students are not confined to raising their hands or keeping every aspect of their inner monologue to themselves—we know–every educator knows–the smaller the class setting, the more intimate the space, the higher the level of investment for all participants. But I digress. You don’t have to teach drama, to a roomful of people who have seen life from the prism of addiction and/or incarceration. Their lived experience has already taken them to the edges of emotional extremity; they know fear, danger, heartbreak, pain, loss. And too, they know joy, camaraderie, wonder, and gratitude. For them, survival is not a metaphor. The question is not what plotline or conflict makes a scene dramatic? But how can we reveal the drama to maximize its effect on the audience?

For each course, comprised of only seven sessions, I culminated by gathering professional actors to read revised student scenes. While this was rewarding for students over Zoom, naturally nothing replaces the magic of live theatre. This past semester, we had a successful last day with scenes that reflected back to the students their own experience. Their words were raw and real, but also clever, funny, and joyful. After the reading, students were given some time to ask questions to the actors, and in one exchange I will never forget, actor Alex Alpharaoh, himself a teaching artist and community activist who founded No Fronts Actors Workshop, shared with students: Some people go to film school and pay thousands of dollars to learn how to tell stories, but you don’t need to; you’ve all lived the story (paraphrased).  He, alongside Blanca Espinoza, actress and founder of Chola Vision Productions and Peter Pasco, actor and playwright of Yoli, Alfredo, y la vida, went on to encourage the students to just create in whatever ways they could—on their phones, on social media, with their pens, etc. The actors, through their acting talent and their wisdom as creatives of color, uplifted the students and showed them that their stories mattered; their voices mattered. One student thanked me afterward, saying “you made us feel important.”

Through my engagement with PEP, I have been thinking a lot about the carceral state and how unjust and dehumanizing our systems of control and punishment are. Creative expression as an outlet and antidote to bigotry or injustice seems to me, now more than ever, a moral imperative. It is liberatory for an individual who gets to imagine the world they’ve lived in and the world they’d like to see, but also, for a collective sense of belonging, affirming, and liberation.