Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at midnight, a crowd gathered in the ’92 Theater to watch Perri Yaniv ’04 perform his senior thesis performance. The experience of watching “Word Infirmia: The Criminal Perspectives Project” began as soon as audience members walked into the glass-enclosed Zelnick Pavilion. Small groups were summoned into the hallway and ordered by ushers in warden garb to show their IDs and, in some cases, empty their pockets. Some play-goers were escorted outside, then led back in.
Yaniv, in character as a prisoner, stood in the entrance of the theater, warmly greeting the incoming audience members. Even after they were seated he continued for several minutes to joke with them.
“Stay in school,” he told one student. “I didn’t.”
Suddenly, the lights went out. When they came back up, Yaniv had transformed into a different character, another prison inmate. Behind him, a screen displayed photographs taken at a prison. For the next hour and a half, Yaniv acted out the monologues of thirteen people connected with incarceration—inmates, survivors of violent crime, police officers, and prison officials.
The genesis of “Word Infirmia” goes back two years, to an idea Yaniv had as a sophomore.
“I was taking a criminology class and directing a play about criminals,” he said. “The notion of crime is central to the way people conduct themselves, how they base their value systems and is the root of fear. By exploring the perspectives of criminals, I was actually hoping to decriminalize them and present them in relation to society’s conceptions.”
When he returned from study abroad as a junior, Yaniv applied for and received a Davenport grant to work at the Prison Performing Arts Program at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Pacific, Mo. He worked with 28 inmates on a production of the play “Gospel at Colonus” by Lee Bruer. He also conducted interviews with prisoners that would later provide the raw material for “Word Infirmia.”
“I continually ran into people who seemed immediately interested in the idea and would start telling me of their experiences,” Yaniv said. “This was when I knew that I had a viable concept. It lent itself to immediate storytelling. Here’s the catch: the entire research process was a search for stories. I was looking for characters, and ended up interviewing several people who were completely unrelated to any of the institutions I was working for simply because they had intense stories.”
Yaniv conducted more interviews in New York, then cut and rearranged them into finished monologues, some of which represent composite characters.
“One of the things that was most powerful for me while I was rehearsing ‘Word Infirmia’ was remembering that I was representing real people and that it was my job to represent them admirably no matter what faults I chose to include in their monologues,” he said. “Whenever I would doubt a choice or have actor’s block (like everyday), I would just think about what struck me about this person and how I had perceived their place in society.”
Leon Hilton ’07 attended the performance and was impressed.
“I thought it was a very powerful piece that used the tools of theater very well,” he said. “It was well-integrated in terms of use of lighting and video and photography and text. I thought it was very impressive the way he shifted between characters, and you could always tell which character he was going into by his changing his physicality and changing his voice.”
He felt that Yaniv handled a sensitive subject wisely.
“I thought the portrayal fit the complexity of the subject matter very appropriately,” Hilton said. “It’s not something for which there is an easy solution. I thought the piece was complex enough and varied enough that it made you really think about the issue in terms of all of its subtleties and all of its difficulties.”
Andrea Silenzi ’07 agreed that the performance was well-executed.
“It was wonderful acting,” she said. “And you could see how much of himself went into it.”
Silenzi questioned the effectiveness of having the audience ushered into the theater as though they were prisoners.
“The point of it was to make you feel like you were being brought into a prison setting, but at the same time you felt really disconnected with him,” Silenzi said. “We were able to laugh at him as though we were a safe distance away, [which defeated the purpose] of bringing you into the setting.”
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