“Prison Poetry” Premieres at Historic Lincoln Theater

Photo By EDI/E.Watson
Tensions rise in Kymone Freeman's "Prison Poetry" as Shujaa, portrayed by Duane A. Rawlings, is forced to share a jail cell with the "bougie".

By Edith Billups
WI Staff Writer
Thursday, March 9, 2006

Kymone Freeman’s award-winning play, “Prison Poetry,” made its world premiere at the Historic Lincoln Theater last week, offering often ignored points of view and controversial commentary on a range of issues effecting today’s society.

Directed by acclaimed actor Clayton LeBouef, the play follows the lives of three men from three different generations when they share the same jail cell for one night. They include a young and uppity middle class lawyer (W. Ellington Felton); a poet (Baye Harrell); and a wise old griot (Duane C. Rawlings).

It is never revealed why the three end up in jail, but we learn about their differences through confrontation and their similarities through the poet’s passionate and thought-provoking words.

From the first opening scene, the play takes us on a gripping journey into class struggle and the tension between the older architects of the “Civil Rights Movement” and the younger generation that inherited both its pros and cons. At the play’s opening, Shujaa, played engrossingly by Rawlings and based loosely on the real life of exonerated death row prisoner Shujaa Graham, is reclining in the cell when the puffed-up Tobias Washington III (Felton) enters. The cocky attorney assumes that the older man is nothing but a good-for-nothing drunk and berates him when they get in a heated discussion over several topics, including the circumstances that often derail young Black men in this country.

What plays out is a pitting of strong minds and wills as Tobias has his ego taken down several notches. Not only does the griot know Black history hands down (“Don’t you know that you’re standing on the shoulder of a sharecropper from Mississippi?”), but he can quote facts on the plight of other oppressed peoples around the globe, ranging from recently executed San Quentin prisoner Tookie Williams to Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley’s “Roots.”

Serving as mediator between the two is Poet, played convincingly by Harrell, who uses the language of poetry to build a solid camaraderie between the two men. But not before playwright Freeman has his say on how many of the issues addressed in the play go beyond the perimeters of the Black experience. He points out that incarceration in its many social, economic, cultural and artistic manifestations, is becoming increasingly normal in American society, and he demands a solution to its ills.

The quest for the latter was discussed in a question and answer period afterwards, during which several audience members stepped to the mike and asked the cast members, and several spoken word poets who opened the evening, to give their thoughts on viable solutions to society’s troubles.

Rawlings received loud applause on what he saw as the solution. “I think we need to move back to the Spirit of God. God is love, and we need to start loving each other more.”

Freeman received the 22 nd Annual Larry Neal Award for Drama for “Prison Poetry” and was a DC Mayor’s Art Award Finalist for Excellence in Service to the Arts in 2006.

 

For more information about “Prison Poetry,” visit www.prisonpoetry-theplay.com.