Show Business: Players from Prisons

Inside a Riker’s Island Prison theater in New York City last week, the players were setting up on stage. The audience entered in rowdy chaos—175 women, mostly black and Puerto Rican, dressed in sleeveless, hemless shifts, and monitored by hefty black female guards in starchy white shirts. A loudspeaker voice cut through the clamor to introduce the program: “‘The Family’ started behind the walls and it is now functioning outside the wall. And every member is a professional. Today we will see Straight from the Ghetto.”

The Family is a tightly knit repertory troupe—18 actors, musicians and playwrights—who, in addition to touring prisons, are currently staging an off-Broadway hit, Short Eyes, at Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theater. A year ago, most of them were inmates in New York prisons. Kenny Steward, 32, ex-drug addict, spent 16 years in and out of jail cells as he progressed from parking-meter pilfering to armed robbery. Tito Goya, 22, The Family’s composer, scaled his way through prison and music simultaneously. At 17 in Comstock, he learned piano and guitar; in two years at Auburn, he added bass and theory, and at Sing Sing, trumpet. Miguel Piñero, 27, is playwright-in-residence and author of most of Straight from the Ghetto and of Short Eyes. Ghetto street child, ex-burglar, and drug addict, Piñero began writing plays while in Sing Sing for armed robbery.

The paterfamilias, director and centrifugal force of The Family is Marvin Camillo, 36, a dark, mustachioed man inclined to high-riser blue shoes and flowered shirts, whom his company —not entirely jokingly—call “Poncho God.” Camillo, one of the few members of The Family who is not an ex-convict, is a veteran actor who grew up in the Newark ghetto, where “I spent my life avoiding situations that would get me into prison.” In 1971 Camillo did go to Sing Sing, however, to help with a prisoners’ theater workshop. A year later he opened his own workshop at the nearby Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, beginning with a group of six men that quickly grew to 40.

Using material from the black poets and playwrights like Melvin Van Peebles and Ed Bullins, the Bedford group flourished where other groups had failed because, says Steward, “they used to visit with plays that just didn’t relate. The great majority of prisoners are black and Puerto Rican ghetto citizens—they want a play about what they left and what they are going back to.”

For the prisoners in the workshop, theater provided a purpose and a commitment that they had not known before. “When you’re in prison, you’re nowhere being nobody,” says Piñero. “You’re a number. Writing and acting made me somebody in the land of nothing.” When a member of the Bedford group suggested that the workshop might continue on the outside, Camillo agreed to try. Beginning in March of 1973, as one by one the men began to be released, Camillo met them at the gate, and The Family was born. Since then they have performed in churches, high schools, the streets. In between, Camillo has often manufactured rehearsals just to keep everyone working. “Most of us lived with our parents,” says Steward. “Between our mothers and Marvin, we scraped along.”

Quick Hit. Last fall The Family found a home as resident company at Riverside Church, an interdenominational congregation in Manhattan. The church got a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce Piñero’s Short Eyes. Short Eyes —prison slang for a child molester —plays out the ostracism and eventual murder of a prison newcomer charged with the one intolerable crime. Papp first saw the Riverside production at the urging of Actress Colleen Dewhurst, who had become interested in the group while it was forming. The play opened last month at the Public Theater to solidly favorable reviews. As drama, it is rough and repetitive; its considerable impact comes from the sheer explosive energy of its not-quite-professional performers. Nevertheless, Producer Papp believes that Short Eyes is strong enough to move uptown to Lincoln Center, where it will open in late May.

Even with a hit, The Family troupers are still struggling. They hope to find backing for a cross-country prison tour, but so far they have received no new grants. In fact, Camillo admits that he does not know how to go about getting application forms. But the members are unanimous in their enthusiastic commitment to their theatrical future, and in their insistence that the company is not simply an ex-con’s rehabilitation program. “We’re not trying to rehabilitate anybody,” says Steward. “We’re just a bunch of dudes hooked up together and trying to make it.”