(Im)migrants of the State
(Im)migrants of the State, at The Actors’ Gang through May 13th, takes a hard-yet-hopeful look at the gristmill that is our justice system from the point of view of the grist.
The 90-minute play grew out of The Actors’ Gang Prison Project (TAGPP), a prison outreach begun in 2006 that has since steadily expanded. A theater-ministry to the incarcerated, TAGPP
provides theater arts programming in prisons and reentry facilities. Our mission is to establish a supportive community, offer participants tools for recognizing and managing their emotions, and create systemic change by centering the voices of those who have been system-impacted...Of the original 25 men that joined TAGPP during the first year at Avenal State Prison, 18 had Life sentences. 17 of the 18 have gone before the Board of Prison Terms and have been found suitable for release and are freed. 22 of the original 25 are now home.
(Im)migrants’s co directors are Jeremie Loncka, a long-time member of The Actors’ Gang, and Richard Loya, who spent 30 years in California prisons. Loya explains the show’s title:
All of our cast were incarcerated at young ages...transferred... often, up and down the State, from one institution to another...[at] anytime. As wards/inmates of the State, we migrated to different prisons during the decades of incarceration we survived.
The 90-minute play’s compelling intimacy derives from its unrefined raw material: transcriptions of the experiences of felons who have lived their lives slaloming around—and occasionally caroming off—bollards that our racist culture and justice system place—often arbitrarily—in their paths.
About 30 minutes in, I realized that (Im)migrants is a nightmare version of A Chorus Line, both plays growing out of interviews with the relatively powerless: (Im)migrants with prison alumni, A Chorus Line with Broadway hoofers. But from those humble origins they diverge sharply. The slick Broadway musical’s sophisticated choral harmonies, complicated choreography, and complex character interactions contrast gaudily with (Im)migrants’s minimalist production, its tense soundscape interrupted by piercing sirens; its stark and garish lighting comprising shadowy projections of palm trees and barbed wire; its diabolically clever (un)folding guard house; its staccato police-chase choreography; and its frank presentation of the fatal intimacy of prison yard stabbings. (Minimalist productions are among the joys of live theater at The Actors’ Gang. Since its founding in 1981 its spare sets have seduced audience members into using our imaginations. In playing along we become part of the play.)
But where A Chorus Line presents emotionally fragile dancers doing what they did for love, (Im)migrants presents emotionally armored felons doing what they did to survive. Where A Chorus Line‘s cast members are playing roles, (Im)migrants‘s cast members are playing themselves: All the actors have done time in California’s immense, widely disbursed penal system—as of 2020, 117,000 people were incarcerated in 35 prisons—and their 13 interwoven stories are, for better and worse, their own. If live-theater documentary existed, it would look like (Im)migrants of the State.
A Chorus Line (a play I love) is a theatrical confection, bright and shiny, Broadway pretty, all rhinestones and sequins, footlights and mirrors, its actors playing roles. For audience members the experience is mediated, buffered.
(Im)migrants of the State, on the other hand, is a gut punch. Its actors are playing themselves. These are their stories, their narratives, spun—in collaboration with theater professionals—into gold threads of theater that stitch a communion between actor and audience. Behind its simple costumes—the white t-shirts of gangbangers, the prison-issued blue shirts and jeans of inmates—(Im)migrants’s audience members can feel the living souls of, can register the heft of, its actors’ lived lives. We watch their naïve hopes constantly being shattered, see their disproportionate punishments handed out almost whimsically by a casually indifferent justice system, observe—feeling increasingly helpless—their (literally) existential struggles.
Though serious and sometimes horrific, (Im)migrants can also be sardonically funny: In a scene shocking both for its absurdity and undeniable accuracy, a disengaged judge directs an impersonally hostile bailiff to spin a carnival wheel to determine a defendant’s sentence. Because of how precisely it mirrors the capriciousness of America’s justice system, the scene continues to reverberate. Hearing these actors’ interwoven stories, because they are their stories, takes audience members into the actors’ lives and then sends some part of those lives home with them.
Particularly surprising is the high level of the ensemble’s acting. Acting can be just pretending—we all act, more or less convincingly, at work every day—but good acting is projecting the invisible. Despite the sneers of smug conservatives rotely repeating anti-Hollywood tropes, good acting is a hard-won craft requiring lifelong learning, relearning, and refining. (Im)migrants’s actors came late to the theater, many of them well into adulthood when TAGPP entered their tightly constrained lives.
Yet have they really come to acting so recently? As do most people of color in a supremacist White world, (Im)migrants’s former inmates have acted all their lives, both before prison on the streets and in prison after the spinning of the carnival wheel.
JOHN (John Dich)
Welcome to suburbia. A great place to raise your family and retire, but if you ain’t white, you ain’t right.
MONTY (Montrell Harrell)
In my high school, all of the sports teams went to the playoffs, but out of 2022 students only 55 were black.
SCOTTIE (Scott Tran)
In my neighborhood everyone feels safe leaving our garage open, and when my mom cooks she invites all the neighbors, but when she goes to the supermarket they tell her to go back to her country.
YAHAIRA (Yahaira Quiroz)
Everyone I go to pilates with wants to know if I clean houses too.
In both those worlds—street and yard—toughness is currency: Keeping external dangers at bay requires continually projecting toughness both externally and internally. That must be exhausting both physically and spiritually.
Projecting external toughness is relatively easy. It’s mostly costuming: clothing, hair style, body language, strut. Projecting inner toughness—good acting—is harder. It demands skills. So perhaps acting skills developed on the streets and in prison yards are transferable. Judging by the quality of acting in (Im)migrants of the State, it seems they are.
As one sees from lurid headlines, sometimes acting tough in the theater of the street breaks the fourth wall. (The fourth wall is a theatrical convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from audiences.) Paradoxically, the fourth wall is more permeable on the streets and in prison yards than on stage. On the streets and in prison yards people acting tough sometimes collide with other people acting tough. In those moments it becomes necessary to breach the fourth wall, to be tough. Being tough—as opposed to acting tough—can mean real weapons and their bloody aftermaths.
Much of (Im)migrants visceral impact derives from its relationship to the fourth wall, not so much breaking it as simply ignoring it. In fact, during parts of (Im)migrants, the audience is part of the play: Entering the theater itself, we find ourselves in a quasi-prison environment with prison guards firmly and loudly instructing us how to comport ourselves, making consequences clear if we don’t; elsewhere in the play, characters address the audience. The cumulative effect feels personal, like a direct connection between actors and audience members that is simultaneously theater and conversation. But it is conversation with people whose lives I, having lived a privileged (White) life and taken for granted the economic, political, and emotional support group that Whiteness provides, could not imagine.
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Not needing to imagine those lives is itself a privilege. For those who own that privilege, (Im)migrants makes the point that yes, joining a gang is risky. But not joining a gang is riskier. And it also makes a less-obvious point: that it is the broader economic and political environment within which minority communities exist that creates the conditions in which gangs flourish.
GREG (Greg Leon)
I’m sorry dad, I let you down. But I promise you! I tried to hold my ground. They asked me to join their gang, and I said “No!”
(Men slowly converge around the edge of the spotlight.)
That was my dad’s wishes before he had to go. Not to join a gang and to remain the same. But this guy yelled “Fuck it! You’re in.” I didn’t even know his name!!!
(Men start swinging at “Now I’m surrounded.” A slow motion fight.)
Now all of a sudden I’m surrounded by shadows. I stood on my feet. I didn’t want to lose this battle. But there were too many and I was only 14.
(As GREG finishes his monologue, men surround him at the edge of the Spotlight, shadow – Freeze.)
There but for the grace of Whiteness go I.
At the end, ensemble members gather in a semi-circle facing, and including, the audience. There is no fourth wall (from either side).
(Once everyone is seated . . . EDGAR leads Red Hot Sharing.)
EDGAR (Edgar Rodriquez)
Alright, everyone welcome. Let’s start the way we do. Who can tell me the pillars of Red Hot Sharing?
ENSEMBLE
Listen from the heart.
Speak from the heart.
Be spontaneous.
Be lean.
EDGAR
Thanks for that. I invite everyone to take a deep breath together and the floor is open.
(The ensemble is then free to share anything immediate that is going on just like in a normal RHS.)
We in the audience are invited into the difficult process of de-toughing and de-armoring, accompanying the ensemble on a frightening voyage to vulnerability.
The old saw about things produced by committee notwithstanding, the still-evolving (Im)migrants of the State works and works well. The collaboration comprises 30-year prison inmate and now-TAGPP Program Manager Rich Loya, codirector and TAGPP Director of Programs Jeremie Loncka, cowriters from TAGPP Alumni Network, and other theater professionals from The Actors’ Gang, all joining in the weaving and shaping of these actors’ stories into theater, all helping to create a play the impact of which stays with you.
(Im)migrants of the State
- Writers: The Actors’ Gang Alumni Network and Jeremie Loncka
- Directors: Jeremie Loncka and Richard Loya
- Producers: Kathryn Carner, The Actors’ Gang Prison Project, and The Actors’ Gang
- Stage Manager: Gloria Briseño
- Assistant Stage Manager: Andrew Gamboa
- Set and Props: Ezequiel Gonzales Lemus
- Production and Sound Design: Cihan Sahin
- Lighting Design: Bosco Flanagan
- Original Artwork: Javier Quintero
- Costumes: The ensemble
Cast:
- Chris Bingley
- Robert Chavez
- John Dich
- Montrell Harrell
- Shaun Jones
- Greg Leon
- Richard Loya
- Henry Palacio
- Yahaira Quiroz
- Edgar Rodriguez
- Scott Tran
- Marcy Valenzuela
Actor's Gang, "(Im)migrants of the State," Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., through May 13. The Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd. Culver City, CA, 90232.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
