Theater as a Lens for Justice

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

For many Californians the concept of justice feels deeply out of reach. According to Prison Policy Initiative, nearly 200,000 individuals are incarcerated at any given time in California, with about 35,000 incarcerated people released each year. Those numbers are sobering. They are made worse when we remember that the families connected to those individuals are not counted in those statistics. But their lives too are affected by incarceration. We seek to build connection and engage with this community and offer them space not only to attend live theater performances, but to engage with the work through talkbacks, workshops, special classes, and the performance of their own work. We believe this type of support and engagement is vital to the successful reintegration of incarcerated people upon their release, as well as the prevention of recidivism. Put simply, incarcerated people and their families are members of our society and deserve support and not stigmatization.

The Theater as a Lens for Justice initiative has three components: bringing currently and formerly incarcerated youth to performances; bringing our productions into prisons; and allowing systems-impacted young people a space to create and perform. Participants will attend performances of The Brothers Size, Waiting for Godot, and Furlough’s Paradise. We are also in discussions with the prison in Victorville to bring them our production of Waiting for Godot. This will be the first year of a long-term initiative, in which we will also sow the seeds for providing employment pathways into the theater industry for formerly incarcerated young people through meaningful education opportunities in all aspects of theater, including technical, artistic, and administration. To achieve our goals, we are partnering with UCLA’s Center for Justice, The Last Prisoner Project, and ManifestWorks. It is important to us that our work is guided by our partners’ expertise, their deep and impactful community ties, and their long experience working with individuals and families impacted by incarceration. Centering their voices means that our programmatic goals must remain fluid. That said, we anticipate offering talkbacks with field-leading experts, arts workshops for students, both incarcerated and not, special class offerings focused on honing writing and performance skills, and a performance of the students’ work in our Audrey Skirball Kenis blackbox theater.

In Furlough’s Paradise, Sade and her cousin Mina have a fleeting opportunity to imagine a brighter, freer world for themselves while Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison. Few works allow us to look at a world without prisons, or at least a world where those once imprisoned find a true path towards freedom. We believe this play is a first testament in the new canon of work challenging our understanding of justice. It is on this premise – that theater can be a crucial part of conversations about justice – that we are developing the Theater as a Lens for Justice initiative. More expansively, we believe this program offers an opportunity to be a part of the support network for incarcerated youth and their families. We acknowledge that the families of incarcerated youth are deeply affected and believe that by engaging incarcerated young people while in prison and by supporting their successful reintegration, we will provide a path to healing and stability for the community at large.

This is a new initiative for Geffen Playhouse and the 2024/2025 season will be its pilot year. Like our existing community engagement and education programs, we will measure success quantitatively in the number of incarcerated people and their families that we are able to impact throughout the season’s activities – how many people attend performances, talkbacks, workshops, etc. Additionally, we value qualitative feedback that we will collect through one-on-one feedback sessions with our partner organizations, and post-event surveys administered to participants and partners.
It is our goal that this program continues as long as it is needed, and that in addition to engaging participants as audience members at performances and attendance of special workshops, through partnerships like ManifestWorks we can also support training and employment in theater for formerly incarcerated young people.