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Sarah Shourd: The research was an intense period of in-depth letter correspondences that lasted intensively six months and less intensively about two years. I traveled to thirteen different prisons around the country to visit as many of the people that I corresponded with in person as I could. The prisons I visited included Pelican Bay, Elmira in New York, Edna Mahan facility in New Jersey, one in Southern California, and the Sacramento state prison.
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At the time I began researching and writing the play, what I really needed more than anything was to take a break from talking about and writing about my own experiences. I felt like it was a really important juncture for me to connect what I had been through and the aftermath—the suffering and pain of recovering—into something much larger. If anything, that's how it was useful to me: to step outside of myself into these other people whose lives I could relate to very intimately, but who were very distinct and in many ways just as inspiring as horrifying to me.
I think that in the beginning I was really fascinated by how other prisoners did things that I found so essential to my survival. For example, how people fill the time—a lot of people told me they did a lot of the same things I did, like obsessive counting, pacing, going through every event in your life. I used to call them "the re-runs"—just to get some kind of connection to yourself and the outside world.There are also things like how people pass notes. It took me about six months in prison to devise a clandestine method to pass notes to the other women in my pod, which is of course very risky, but some sort of human contact is so essential to survival that it's what people do. And I wasn't surprised that people do it here—it was just incredible to learn about the ways that they do it. And then the whole internal system of barter, and the makeshift and of course in many ways very warped but still beautiful community that develops.
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I don't think it's possible for anyone to ever experience anything close to what it's like to be in long-term isolation. I think that a lot of attempts to do that—recreating a cell, and having someone spend a few minutes in it—can be counterproductive, because we live in a world where all of us crave solitude. We're inundated with information and stimulus. So solitude can be a wonderful kind of relief…Solitary confinement is not the same as solitude. It's losing everything that you love, everything that gives any meaning to your life and makes you who you are, and not knowing if you'll ever get it back. And I think that this play will help people imagine themselves into that a little better.But ultimately, the goal for me wasn't for people to experience solitary confinement through this theater piece—it was for them to experience the people subjected to it as human beings.Can we talk about the set? It's really striking.
Sean Riley is an incredible set designer. All I had in the script was, "Three guys at the bottom, three guys at the top," and he had to really work his way around some serious limitations, one of them being sight lines. Because this space was a fairly large theater, we had to make sure that no matter where you were sitting, you could see into all of the cells, and that was one of the reasons we ended up having some of the walls be translucent.
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It's very easy to feel like nothing you can do makes a difference when it comes to mass incarceration, but I hope that people realize that something that seems small—like writing a letter to a prisoner—is a political act that can result in real change. The reason that our prison system has been able to get to the point that it has is that it's completely opaque, and there's no accountability. And developing relationships, sending out lines of communication that make the prison walls more porous—that make them breathe—is, I think, an essential way to start to force that transparency to become a reality.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. The Box is running at Z Space through July 30. You can buy tickets here.Follow Aviva Stahl on Twitter.