play

Thomas (center) with the cast for the first rehearsal

When the Rattlestick Theater commissioned playwright and San Quentin volunteer Cori Thomas to write a play in 2016, she penned a draft featuring a 62-year-old man who has been incarcerated since he was 16 called Lockdown. At the time, she had never visited a prison or envisioned having her first play, which debuted in New York City, become a tool for discussion about the criminal justice system.

“It’s about a group of people who are incarcerated and the challenges they face—individually and within the system itself,” said Daniella Topol, the artistic director for the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, who commissioned Thomas. “The play is also now about some- thing much larger: forgiveness, humanity and empathy.”

Thomas added, “It’s becoming a tool for prison reform conversations.”

Lockdown, which runs at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater from April 17 to May 19, unless extended, shows the difficulty of earning freedom for a man serving a life sentence for committing a heinous crime, even though the man turned his life around and mentors youth.

“Forgiveness is a really hard thing,” Thomas said. “I made sure to go into the victim’s point of view. I want to make sure the audience sees both sides, what’s it like to suffer loss. But I think that when a person has remorse and has had a transformation because they now understand what it is that they have done, they can’t forget. They live with that forever, and that’s a form of punishment.”

After each performance, the Fortune Society, an organization dedicated to helping formerly incarcerated people become successful on parole, will host discussions with the community about issues raised in the play. Different stakeholders, including formerly incarcerated people, will lead the conversations.

Lockdown, starring Zenzi Williams, Keith Randolph Smith, Eric Berryman and Curtis Morlaye, is Thomas’ first world premiere to debut in New York City, although the accomplished Marymount- Manhattan College theater program graduate has penned several others over the years.

Her first big break was a play called “When January Feels Like Summer.” It won an American Theater Critics Award, and Sundance chose it for a development retreat. It premiered in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Lockdown may go even further than her past plays. It was chosen for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and Thomas said commercial producers like Shadow Catcher Entertainment are interested in taking it to bigger theaters.

“Everything that happens with this play, I get happy because I feel like it honors the men inside,” Thomas said. “If it’s being recognized, they’re being recognized.”

Lockdown isn’t Thomas’ only play aimed to spark change.

“Pa’s Hat”, based on a trip with her father to Liberia, West Africa, where a child soldier pointed a gun at her, led to the creation of the Pa’s Hat Foundation.

“It broke my heart,” Thomas said. “Why would a young boy be on a street corner pointing a machine gun at me? I wanted to bring attention to child soldiers and how they’re forced to do that.”

The nonprofit helps former child-soldiers and other under-served citizens in Liberia, West Africa, with education and employment opportunities.

Currently, Thomas is work- ing on another play about incarcerated people, this time with the No More Tears self- help group, where she volunteers at San Quentin State Prison.

Thomas is co-writing with No More Tears the sequel, ’Til You Know My Story 2; the stimulus for it occurred back in September of 2016, when Thomas visited a prison for the first time. She came to conduct an interview for an Amazon Audible project and was surprised by what she found.

“I thought I’d meet a bunch of people whispering, ‘Hey, I didn’t do it, get me out of here,’” Thomas said. “What I met are men who are articulate, intelligent and who take accountability for the crimes they committed.”

No More Tears, founded by Lonnie Morris, an incarcerated man who has served more than 40 years, helps men address trauma and heal. No More Tears first wrote, produced and performed the play “ ’Til You Know My Story” in 2012.

Morris and Thomas met when she came into the prison’s media center. He asked her to work with him on the sequel “ ’Til You Know My Story 2”, also to be performed at San Quentin, and Thomas agreed.

“When I left this prison, I knew immediately that I want- ed to write “ ’Til You Know My Story,” Thomas said. “I met Lonnie and was struck by how intelligent and articulate everyone was. I had no idea that these types of minds existed in people who are locked up. If I don’t know, other people don’t know.”

Thomas plans to turn inter- views with incarcerated men into monologues for “ ’Til You Know My Story 2.” “I did not know a whole lot about the criminal justice system in this country,” Thomas said. “Coming in here made me open my eyes and made me want to use all the tools I had at my disposal, which is writing and words. I have the ability to let people know.

“I believe there’s a role incarcerated people, if freed, can serve in society because there’s no one better equipped to teach the young people than them. They could actually have civic duties. I think there’s a role for them that hasn’t been tapped into and that they could actually make communities safer.”

Playwright Dr. Ayodele Nzinga was already collect- ing stories of communities impacted by the carceral system when she met Glenn Bailey, in 2014.

She had just started work on “Beyond Bars: Growing Home,” a performance that explored how returning citizens processed the trauma of coming home, inspired by interviews with men recently released from San Quentin Prison.

Bailey had just come home himself, after serving 52 years inside.

His tale is remarkable in its own right. But Nzinga was quick to see how it fit into the larger story of a unique and mostly invisible demographic: Lifers, those Nzinga describes as “hav[ing] spent half a century, a quarter of a century, in the belly of the beast.”

Out of conversations be- tween Bailey and Nzinga, a book project began to take shape, as well as a play based on Bailey’s experiences called “Lifer.” The Lower Bottom Playaz, an Oakland-based theater company co-founded by Nzinga, first performed the play in January 2018.

For a group interested in exploring “what creates the potential for thriving in marginalized spaces,” “Lifer” was a natural fit. Nzinga said she’s invested in bringing

The cast of Life after the performance right way. It wasn’t easy. The pressures of prison are hard. I was blessed to have Bailey as a mentor.” He add- ed, “I graduated from college because of this man.”

The same lessons, they said, applied for returning home.

James, who now works as a reentry coordinator for Ta’leef Collective in Freemont and for San Francisco’s Bayview Senior Services ex-offender program, summed up the shared wis- dom. “People need support coming home,” he said with life changes large and small.

“They need to know how to work a cell phone. I just learned how to work an iPad, and I’m a case man- ager. I’ve been out for years, and I’m still learning how to come back after being away a long period of time.”

The event attracted a full house, including students from Concord’s De La Salle and Carondelet high schools. Speaking directly to the young people in the audience, James said, “What we need [is for you to] go get those degrees, come into the system and support those who are coming home.”

Mike Aquino, who teaches a criminal justice class for the two high schools, was enthusiastic about the performance. He noticed that his students responded differently to the play and spoken word than they did to other kinds of public events, including the Barbershop Forum.

“I really love the question-posing that art does around criminal justice,” Aquino said, “[it] can be a way to get students to think about concepts that talking to a person or reading an interview alone can’t really capture.”

In the coming months, as Nzinga continues to write Bailey’s life story, the conversation will move from the stage to the page, bring- ing the possibility of a new, larger audience into the next round of dialogue.

Cori Thomas brings attention to criminal justice system with play

Lifer: A play about former SQ resident Glenn Bailey