Arts & Entertainment
For 3 Years, Theatre Y Documented Life for a Group of Men Inside Stateville Prison. A New Film Shares Their Stories
In silence, a group of men cloaked in purple and gold graduation gowns dance incongruently. Some slowly crawl. Others jog and jump in place, arms stretched upwards. Arms behind his back, hunched over, a man hesitantly walks to the front of a stage, toward the crowd of his peers. All are incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center.
They were tasked with performing the “dance of life” — an unprepared, unpracticed exploration of life from birth to the present. It’s the audience’s introduction to the men in the film “Not To Be,” which captures the dance and poetry performances of Theatre Y participants inside Stateville. The production company had a class inside the prison prior to a judge ordering most men to be transferred out of the facility due to poor conditions.
On Tuesday, those outside the prison had their first look at the performances at a packed screening at FACETS. For about three years, Theatre Y brought a camera into the prison to document performances, classes and life inside.
“Not To Be” shows their first and only performance inside Stateville, using a script Melissa Lorraine, director and co-founding artistic director of Theatre Y, wove together from the men’s writing. That writing heavily relied on answers to personal questions that psychologist Arthur Aron studied to attempt to create closeness among people, like, “When did you last cry in front of another person?” or “What does friendship mean to you?”
“We set out to create a performance with the goal of introducing the public to the people that we have thrown away,” Lorraine said. “We thought the best way to get into the conversation was to bypass all of the stereotypical conversations that people imagine having with people serving long-term sentences and really dive into questions that no one asks them.”
Raúl Dorado spoke to the crowd: “At our kitchen table, my mom has shortly cropped hair and it’s dyed like a deep red or maroon. And she’s got ripples in her hair like petals on a flower. It reminds me of an image of a red poppy that I saw on the cover of a calendar. And she’s got these dark green eyes, but it’s hard to see the exact hue of her eyes unless you look real carefully. So we’re sitting down, eating, talking and I’m trying not to let my mom catch me, staring at her eyes. And it occurs to me, I’ve never had the vulnerability to tell my own mother how beautiful her eyes are.”
Nearing the end of the film, a piano melody breaks through. Over it, Lonnie Smith speaks.
“Captive of this living hell, my soul continues to be tortured for my worst day. I wake, I pray and see structured movements of bodies that look like mine. I cannot see my whole face, for I’ve grown old and fat in this cage,” he said into the mic.
Demetrious Cunningham, playing the piano, picks up from the sentence singing: “Change is coming. It’s on the way. A brand new dawning, the breaking of day. The light will shine. No change will bind. A world filled with peace. A lovely story. We shall overcome.”
Going through years of footage wasn’t the most difficult task for Lorraine — it was being separated from the students as Stateville closed. Since then, Theatre Y has not resumed courses, as participants are at about nine different prisons across the state.
“I went from spending four hours a week with them to spending 16 hours a week going through footage, which was both painful and beautiful,” Lorraine said. “It’s been a real loss to be separated from them, to no longer be in community with them. … Some of them had been in community with each other for over 20 years.”
There was a second film shown at FACETS on Tuesday, a “rough cut” that Lorraine said she hopes becomes a series focused on the individual men. But beyond a portrait of participants, it serves as documentation of the last days of incarceration at Stateville. The class size dwindles from 25 students, to five to two. They spent their last days speaking about an experience that taught them something new about love. Classmates dance through the hallways of the dilapidated prison. The last two students speak of their hopes of being reunited.
Lorraine, and the students inside, hope the film can change the minds of those who might be concerned about recidivism if someone is released from prison. From there, they hope it can impact policy decisions, like reinstating parole, which Illinois abolished in 1978. Parole Illinois, formed by men incarcerated in Illinois prisons, has pushed to bring back the system.
“This film and footage is trying to tip the scales from the fear of what an individual might do if they were released to the fear of what we might not have in the world if they aren’t,” Lorraine said.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion with formerly incarcerated men. One of them was class participant James Soto, an exoneree who served the longest wrongful conviction sentence in Illinois history. Lorraine pointed out he is the only man from the program that she has been able to be with on the outside.
While incarcerated, Soto was among the first group of incarcerated men to receive a bachelor’s degree from a top 10 university, Northwestern University. On top of community organizing around prisons, he is now a paralegal with Northwestern Law School’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, a research assistant with the Epistemic Reparations Global Working Group at Northwestern University and the 2024 Justice Practitioner Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago.
“You take any one of them, those men that you saw on the screen, and you put them out here, they will all thrive, and they will all do similar things that I’m doing,” Soto said.
There is an additional screening of “Not To Be” at Theatre Y, 3611 W. Cermak Road, at 2 p.m. Saturday.
Contact Blair Paddock: @blairpaddock | [email protected]
