At least until now. Her new play, "Relative Captivity", has its world premiere at HSU on November 29. Combining drama and comedy, it takes a unique approach to this neglected contemporary subject: the emotional and social realities faced by the families of the more than two million individuals incarcerated in the U.S.
The HSU Department of Theatre, Film and Dance production is directed by John Heckel, with songs by Margaret Thomas Kelso and Missy Hopper. The multi-racial cast includes two HSU faculty members, Bernadette Cheyne and Sharon Butcher, as well as students and community members.
Missy Hopper plays the goddess Sigyn, who considers herself the patron saint of prisoners’ families, and whose efforts to be relevant in the modern world provide a comic thread through the stories of these families, based on interviews and actual accounts.
With the help of this career-switching goddess, a DJ and a trickster god as rock drummer, the cast brings those stories alive. In addition to Cheyne, Butcher and Hopper, the actors include Thomas Tucker, Kristin Hoffman, Joey Angelakis, Robin DiCello, Joe Castro, Johanna Hembry, Alexander Gabriel, Michelle Cartier and Charlie Heinberg.
As one character says, “Everyone who gets sent inside takes a whole bunch of others with ‘em: wives and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends.”
Their stories include those of an imprisoned mother and her troubled son, his grandmother and self-righteous uncle; an uncertain college student beginning a relationship with a prisoner through the mail; two mothers of very different classes with a shared past and future; a couple separated by bars and probably a lot more; an imprisoned father complicating the life of his adult son, and a mother of a convicted killer overwhelmed by her first visit.
They grapple with issues in their lives -- addictions and responsibilities, independence and connection, separations and hope, fear and rejection, birth and death, guilt, penance and redemption, and the transcendent knot at the heart of it all: love.
Margaret Kelso has been listening to these stories for more than a decade. “I started researching this because I tend to write on subjects that people don’t talk much about. There’s a lot of sociological research on prisons, but not on the families. I talked to prison guards and people who had been in prison, but mostly I talked with family members.”
Her collaboration with director John Heckel and a core group of HSU students began last spring. Heckel also directed her first play presented at HSU ten years ago, "The Sex in Question."
"Relative Captivity" will have its world premiere at the Gist Hall Theatre on the HSU campus at 7:30 PM on Thursday, Friday and Saturday--November 29, 30 and December 1—and again the following weekend, December 6-8. Tickets are $10, $8 students/seniors, with limited free seating for HSU students from the HSU Ticket Office (826-3928). More information: http://HSUStage.blogspot.com