The Theater Work. Into our theater workshops, we bring complete respect for everyone involved, we bring a full belief in the ability of everyone to work together and create a play, and we bring a strategy of discovery, using warm-ups, games, exercises, improvisations, and discussion to arrive mutually at the stories that are told through theater. We build our plays through improvisation (a method of figuring out plot, character, and themes together and developing them as we go). Original music sometimes accompanies the plays. By participating in the workshop, the participants gain skills in the conceptualizing, dialogue, casting, and blocking of a play, and they gain skills in working together, in creating ideas and images and putting them together, and in speaking publicly before an audience, which usually consists of peers within the facility and outside guests (youth performers are often able to bring the play to the University of Michigan as well). And the attention and praise of the audience, as well as the week by week growth in their ability to perform and work together, add to each participant's sense of his or her own possibilities. The themes vary considerably, but nearly every play centers on efforts to reestablish and form communities and reconstitute families, and on the effort of prisoners to have successful lives when they return to their communities; these plays often reflect the hard realities many prisoners have known, and they reflect the search for solutions, solutions which the actors consciously offer to their peers in performances. This reconstitution of community and family reflects both the desires of incarcerated people and the close-knit process of creation that leads to the plays.


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