Abstract
Erin Rachel Kaplan describes her work as a teaching artist, director and performer creating theatre with incarcerated youth, first as an undergraduate member of the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), and for the past fifteen years since, conducting workshops in prisons, juvenile detention centers, schools, and community centers with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated boys, girls, men, and women. While chronicling specific residencies, the author describes in detail the daily challenges, setbacks, and triumphs that adhere to working with justice-involved people. Kaplan speaks frankly about her need to confront her privilege as a white woman working within the institutional realities where the vast majority of the population are Black and brown people who have been marginalized by the outside world due to ongoing systemic oppression. Approaching her work from the standpoint of both social justice and literacy, the author describes various means by which she uses applied theatre skills in a process-oriented approach that allows participants to study relationships to power, tell personal stories, examine causes and consequences, and build interpersonal trust as an interdependent and supportive performance ensemble.