Drama in prison: Speaker shares story
It's not often that prison inmates get the chance to study drama with a talented professor.
But that was the situation a few years ago when former Tabor College professor John McCabe-Juhnke took part in a prison arts program at the Lansing Correctional Facility.
Juhnke shared his story of dramas performed and lessons learned while at the April 24 Tabor Learning in Retirement program held at the Wohlgemuth Center on the Tabor campus. It was the last LRP session of the school year.
Now a drama professor at Bethel Collge, Juhnke took a sabbatical from teaching during the 2000-01 school year. He's taught for Bethel since 1986.
Juhnke decided to spend his sabbatical working with the Arts in Prison program, which seeks to help rehabilitate prisoners through drama programs. He worked with medium-security inmates at Lansing.
It was an experience both "ridiculous and sublime," Juhnke said, where things rarely went according to plan.
"My efforts often ended in disappointment," he said.
When he first arrived at Lansing, Juhnke had tried to publicize the drama program among the inmates, but they weren't signing up. So he decided to put on a one-man variety show to increase his visibility. After the show was over, 16 inmates signed up.
But on the first day, just two showed up. The next time, eight came. And Juhnke soon had built up a group who would rehearse the play "Hope is the thing with feathers," by Frank Pugliese.
Juhnke never asked the inmates why they were in prison.
"I wanted to vue them first as a group of actors," he said. "I wanted to expect of them what I would expect from a college class."
But he soon discovered this wasn't just a college class. One day he came to rehearsals to discover one of his best actors had been sent to maximum security and wouldn't be able to participate.
Why? He had bitten a fellow inmate's ear in a fight — only after "the other guy bit (him) three times before he bit back," according to another inmate.
Despite the trials and trevails that hit the "Act I Drama Troupe," the group still successfully performed their play.
"They stayed in character," Juhnke said. "They plowed on through."
The troupe performed the play in the fall. By the spring semester, Juhnke was back at Lansing again for another go.
This time, though, the prisoners seemed more unruly, he said. The members of his drama group were constantly trying to stay on top of each other, establish a "pecking order," but drama requires a spirit of cooperation. Old performers and new performers clashed.
But as before, the group ultimately worked together as they performed "Triple play," a series of three plays about baseball. The inmates used the experience to learn a new way to work through conflicts, Juhnke said.
"These actors finally did succeed in working together," he said.
Now back at Bethel, Juhnke is participating in a similar program at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility. He's working through the Prison Arts Project, and he just finished directing his third play there.
