The Graterford Prison Project: Negotiating Change

The writer reflects upon a year of teaching at the State Correctional Institution, Graterford, Pennsylvania, USA, where she and twenty-four prisoners collaborated on the development of an original play. In preparing the men to both perform and write their own dramatic work, based on stories from their lives, she employed both autoethnographic writing and improvisatory theatre practices, namely Augusto Boal's Forum and Rainbow of Desire exercises and Jo Salas's Playback techniques. In the article, the author again utilizes autoethnographic practices, now in combination with scholarship, in an effort to define prison theatre. She elucidates certain challenges encountered, specifically those that occurred when transferring the work to other parties for evaluation and performance. Considering how the prisoners' text changed, as it passed through various communities and struggled to fit into those communities' discursive practices, the writer looks at the unfortunate results of such traffic, specifically how the traffic itself affects the original intentions of the work. However, she admits that only in bringing the work out of the prison and into other communities can it have continued life and presence, which holds the potential to create a wider public forum on community-based work in the justice system.