“How do you think the outside world imagines people in prison? They see us as animals in a cage.”

This is one of many captivating lines in theater professor Ronald Jenkins’ play, “Recycling Pain,” which had its world premiere Wednesday night at 7 p.m. in the CFA Hall.

“Recycling Pain” channels the stories of various men and women wronged by their respective correctional institutes—specifically, the fallout from needless exposure to deadly chemical toxins contracted through smashing electronics for precious metals. He juxtaposes those stories with selected poems from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

The play is an amalgamation of interviews conducted by Jenkins and his class in Connecticut, in addition to interviews collected from Jenkins’ work over the past four years in New York, Italy, and Indonesia. Jenkins prefaced the piece with a reminder.

“Sadly, everything that you will hear is true,” he said.

Most of the stories are told through the character of a young woman, Donna, incarcerated from the time she was a juvenile. Donna represents those inmates who struggle with the consequences of the repeated exposure to deadly chemical toxins.

“Recycling Pain” was performed by Saundra Duncan, Lynda Gardner, and Deborah Ranger, three former prisoners of the York Correctional Institute in Niantic, Connecticut. Though the women were not actors, they drew upon their personal connections with the stories and characters to infuse their performances with real, captivating passion.

Gardner committed herself fully to the role of Donna, often contorting her body on the floor as a visual metaphor for her psychological and physical agony. She later revealed that this piece was especially close to her because she was assigned to work with toxic metals while in prison.

“I just had my blood tested last week for those four metals,” Gardner said. “My levels are very high in cadmium, arsenic, and lead, and I also worked in the recycling plant.”

Ala Faller ’12, a former student in Jenkins’ prison outreach class, accompanied the play with a cappella renditions of songs ranging from “Summertime” by George Gershwin to the slavery spiritual “Motherless Child.”

After the play, there was an hour-long Q&A session with the playwright and performers. The former inmates were quite candid about their personal experiences at York Correctional Institute.

“The buildings went up very quickly there and there wasn’t a lot of thought and consideration that went into what was going to happen to them later,” Ranger said. “Within the first six months I was there, they flushed out the vents…because there were no opening windows. So we were breathing recycled air…and all this black stuff came out, and then it never happened again. So for eight and a half years, the vents were never flushed.”

Gardner commented on the lack of education in the prison.

“It’s not a correctional institution, it’s a corruptional institution,” Gardner said. “In order to help [the prisoners], you have to teach them something…or else they’re going to come out and not be able to get a job…they need the tools.”

All three women asserted that their cries for justice while behind bars went unheard. Now that they are released, Duncan, Gardner, and Ranger have dedicated their lives to raising awareness of what they describe as the intolerable conditions at the penitentiary.

“I want to go back to help the women of York,” Duncan said. “I am a social worker by profession…and I am pursuing a degree in law so I can go back and make changes…I will challenge them until the day I die to make changes within the prison…[I]n terms of food, water, how they sleep…they are treated like animals. So that’s my reason [for going back].”

A few former students of Jenkins’ class were present at the premiere, and spoke about how the class impacted them. Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14, who worked with male prisoners in Gates Correctional Institute last year, briefly discussed the lasting impression the experience had made on her.

“I’ve been aware of what prison does to the people inside of it for a while,” she said. “But actually going in

and hearing people’s stories firsthand and…being able to convince them that they have incredible gifts to share…being part of that transformation for anybody…is a blessing that I will always have from the class.”

Faller also had a few words to say about her experience.

“I feel so blessed to have worked with these amazing [people], both here and at Gates Correctional Institute,” she said. “I think, especially as a Wesleyan student…living in this [bubble] reminded me kind of what it meant to be human to leave and to connect with people who don’t exist in this bubble. It was necessary for me as a student, as a person, to see it and connect with them.”

The women in this play dedicated their performance on Wednesday to the memory of their friend Deb Czarneski, a fellow prisoner who had also been working on the play. Czarneski succumbed to lung cancer she developed from her toxic metal exposure just two days before her expected release.

On December 1—the end of the semester—current students in Jenkins’ prison outreach class will perform pieces of those prisoners who have not yet been released and are therefore unable to perform their own works.

The women ended the night by urging everyone to take advantage of Jenkins’ prison classes, insisting that being part of the experience is life altering experience for all parties involved.

“Art is a foundation for us…to build a new life for ourselves,” Ranger said. “I am really grateful that I went to prison because it changed my life. It brought art into my life.”

Interviewing the Playwright

This writer sat down with the playwright, Professor of Theater Ronald Jenkins, to learn more about the production.

The Wesleyan Argus: How did you get started in prison-theater collaborations?

Professor Ronald Jenkins: Before I came to Wesleyan, I worked in prison theater projects in Boston. I’ve also worked in prisons in South Africa, Indonesia and Italy.

A: Did this play come out of your experiences in the prison outreach class?

RJ: The three performers are all formerly incarcerated women who worked with us while they were in the correctional institute. They’ve been working with us in the course now as teaching assistants to help orient the students; they knew what it was like inside, so now they can work with the students to help prepare them for what to expect when they go inside.

A: How did you narrow the performers down to these three women?

RJ: These are the only three women who we worked with who have been released. Most of the women we worked with are still serving time. We have the writings of the other people who are still in prison, which they perform within the prisons.

A: How did you make the connection between Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and the modern issues of prison being discussed in your play?

RJ: The themes in “Dante’s Inferno” are very modern. During last year’s work, the prisoners were reading Dante and making their own connections about waste and greed, and then they talked about the fact that so many people are wasting away in prison who have talents that could be used in different ways. In this case, human beings are treated worse than garbage, and these ironies are also present in Dante’s work.

A: How do you select the specific prisons in which you do your work?

RJ: The hardest part about working in prisons is getting in. You “select” a prison when the administration is open to this kind of work and understands its value. The only place I got into a prison without trying was South Africa, where I was arrested during an anti-apartheid demonstration. And it was in jail that I first experienced the power of arts for incarcerated people, because an awful situation—a jail cell with over 100 men—was transformed into a celebration of resistance. Although they were in prison, through singing songs, telling jokes about the guards and dogs, and turning the whole thing into a festival, no one was telling them what to do; they were free. And now, years later, I’m discovering that the men and women I work with still say the same thing: although they are in prison, they are free when onstage because they are expressing what they need to express.

A: Do you concentrate on people who are in prison for a specific crime?

RJ: We never ask why people are [in prison]. That’s not what’s important to us. People don’t want to be defined by their crime, and that’s not a reasonable way to define somebody—the worst thing they ever did in their life, none of us would like to be defined by that. So through this project, they have the opportunity to redefine themselves because I don’t see them as prisoners, I see them as thinkers, as artists, as writers, as performers. And now the three women who have been working with us, I see them as great teachers, because they have really inspired the students to continue their work, and this has become part of their process of re-entry into society, which is one of the hardest parts of getting out of prison.

A: What do you hope to gain from this first reading?

RJ: I hope to let these voices be heard that are normally ignored—that’s the most important thing. Even though the federal government did an investigation and unearthed these horrible things, people don’t know about the report because it’s hundreds of pages and it gets buried, so this story needs to be told, the voices of the men and women in prison need to be heard, so that’s the primary goal. And also to stimulate discussion. Students who have worked in the prison will be in the talk afterward, so it will be an open dialogue. And I hope this dialogue will break down stereotypes that people have about what happens in prison and about who prisoners are. People hold certain stereotypes about Dante, that he’s this old medieval poet who doesn’t have any more relevance, but people have been discovering relevant inspiration from Dante’s work—in and out of prison—so we try to break down many different kinds of stereotypes as we encourage a discussion about these issues that brings people in contact with voices that they ordinarily wouldn’t hear.