It’s easy to forget that Jesus was a total radical. After all, he dared to be loving, merciful, caring, non‐violent, fair, self‐sacrificing, forgiving and just. It doesn’t get much more radical than that, especially in these toxic, vitriolic, hypocritical times we are living in right now.
But on this Christmas Day, imagine the story of Jesus playing out in a prison yard. As John Lennon said, it’s easy if you try. After all, Jesus was a convict who was put to death for blasphemy, treason and inciting a riot. For telling people to treat others as one would want to be treated. To turn the other cheek. To think of service to one’s fellow man as service to God. To consider another’s crimes, sins and everyday mistakes within the forgiving context of our own many transgressions.
Hundreds of millions of us say we live by the teachings of Jesus. But seriously, how many actually do? How many of us, when asked for help by someone in need, have given literally everything we can spare, as required by the teachings of Jesus? When the temperature fell to minus-13 degrees in Denver on Thursday, how many of us opened our homes to the unhoused?
“When I was ill or in prison, you came to my aid.”
Who among us?
“Godspell” is a touchy-feely 1970s musical that shows a modern-day Jesus playfully teaching the parables to his flock – the foundational Christian tenets as chronicled in the Gospel of Matthew. “Godspell” is one of the most popular and profoundly moving musicals of the past 50 years, and it has changed many lives – including mine.
When I was a student at Regis Jesuit High School, my pal John Carroll Lynch asked me to come see him in a production at a Denver theater called The Original Scene. If that doesn’t happen, then a lot of things in my life don’t happen. I don’t immediately fall under the spell of the show, I don’t come back night after night, and I don’t eventually get asked to join the crew and work the spotlight. I don’t start performing in shows there myself, I don’t get asked to direct my own production of “Godspell,” and I don’t start teaching high-school theater. I don’t get asked to become the theater critic at The Denver Post, I don’t get asked to join The Denver Gazette, and I don’t teach a journalism class at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City. That’s where, on Dec. 9, I returned to watch a cast and crew of 90 residents perform their own production of “Godspell” that’s been six months in the making.
Talk about full circle.
This undertaking is the work of the University of Denver’s Prison Arts Initiative. Director Clare Hammoor essentially created two different productions, one featuring 90 residents of the Fremont Correctional Facility and another with 65 others from the Colorado Territorial Correctional facility, each performed on successive weekends. From costumes to sets to life-sized puppets, both productions were created entirely from inside their own barbed-wired walls.
I have spent my life as a kind of “Godspell” storm chaser. I’ve driven hundreds of miles to see professional, community and school productions. Each one is unique because the show allows you to treat each parable as a creative exercise of your own invention. For example, when I directed “Godspell” in the 1980s, my actors turned the story of the prodigal son into a timely feud between Jermaine and Michael Jackson.
I wasn’t going to miss this one, even if it was 100 miles away.
To see this production, you really had to want to be there. Security clearance begins three weeks in advance. On the day of the show, I left Denver at 8:45 a.m. for a 1 p.m. start in Canon City. You have to park, pass through a screening, take a bus and walk past many normally locked sliding doors to the actual cell block where the play was being performed. Most of the audience on this day were friends and family of the performers. They took seats on risers alongside the warden, prison staff and various members of the legal community. It was a history-making moment for the Fremont Correctional Facility. This was the first time members of the public had been allowed this far into the facility since it opened in 1958.
Some of the 90 residents of the Fremont Correctional Facility who performed 'Godspell' in a prison cell block, marking the first time the public was allowed deep into the facility in its 64-year history.
The musical begins with its joyful, signature call: “Prepare ye the way of the lord.” An explosive cheer rings out as Jesus (an actor named Daniel Wright) baptizes his entire flock with glitter. There is so much of the sparkly stuff, one of my Fremont journalism students named Bob later told me, “It was as if the show were designed by David Bowie himself.”
With childlike whimsy, Daniel and his followers sang songs and told the stories that for centuries have served as the foundational moral guidelines for living the Christian faith. The parables are absolute tales of crime and punishment, law and order, freedom and captivity, heaven and hell. The message is unmistakable: Actions, as these performers know all too well, have rewards and consequences. And yet, these stories of masters and slaves, rich and poor, greedy and givers make plain that Jesus believed any government that creates social and wealth inequalities is itself evil.
Bottom line: Jesus’ gospels are a call to do the hard thing, the right thing and the unselfish thing. To not judge. To forgive. And that call to action is more consequential in a prison setting. Like when the script calls for Jesus to say: “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors.” Only here, the line has been slightly altered to say: “Pray for your prosecutors.”
Theater doesn’t get any more powerful than that. It just doesn’t. And theater in a prison doesn’t get any more powerful than this:
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy.”
It takes incredible bravery for anyone to be an actor. Much more so when you are an incarcerated person, most likely performing for the first time. It takes courage to be completely vulnerable. To baa like a sheep or snort like a pig. To sing out at full lung capacity in front of your friends and captors when you’ve maybe never sang in public before.
The story ends, as it must, with Judas betraying his friend by accepting 30 pieces of silver. (Here, meaningfully, that’s 30 empty aluminum cans. Treasure in a prison.) And not with a kiss. Judas places Jesus in handcuffs and chains, and he is handed a red duffel bag. In a prison, the color matters. Green means you are getting out. Red means … something else. This Jesus is not going to be crucified. He’s going to the hole. Amid the plaintive wails of his fellow prisoners (and in some stunning shadows of light), he’s led off to solitary confinement, where prisoners are left in isolation for all but 15 minutes a day.
The point was powerfully made: In prison, you are just as dead in the hole as you are on a cross.
Like many in attendance, I was left in a puddle. For others, these men are their blood family. For me, eight of them are a different kind of family: My journalism students. Watching performers bask in the precious, fleeting moment of a deserved standing ovation, soaking up the appreciation of the audience, is my very favorite thing about live theater. I loved it even more for these men – and I wasn’t alone.
“Knowing some of these people for so many years, and now seeing them in their full individuality, has been one of the highlights of my career,” said Siobhan Burtlow, warden of the Fremont Correctional Facility. Afterward, she provided time and space for the men to gather with their families and linger in the afterglow for a bit longer. It was powerful to observe, especially knowing that those of us in the audience were the only ones who would be leaving this particular theater today.
One of my journalism students is a powerful creative writer and budding journalist named Raymond. He’s a former Eagle Scout who, as a college student, donned the Nittany Lions mascot uniform and prowled the sidelines at Penn State football games. Who once donated bone marrow to a 37-year-old mother with leukemia he didn’t even know because she had only a 2 percent chance of survival without his help. Who came to Colorado only to help an aunt and made a terrible mistake (he calls it “a fantastic fall from grace”) for which he has taken full responsibility and is atoning for every day.
But on this day, Raymond was not his prisoner ID number. He was an actor playing a disciple of Jesus, singing and dancing and acting with a believability and zeal I’ve seen lacking in professional theatrical productions. He was a star.
Afterward, I asked Raymond what it felt like to have had these six months with a daily purpose, a communal project, and a chance to make a profound piece of art.
“When we are working on this play,” he said simply, “I’m not in prison.”
The DU Prison Arts Initiative, founded by Dr. Ashley Hamilton, came to these two prisons and sowed some seeds among the rocks. But unlike the parable, this seed did not wither. It took root, and it produced a crop a hundred times more than what was sown.
Daniel Wright, right, flashes a peace sign with some of his castmates in the Fremont Correctional Facility's production of 'Godspell,' through the DU Prison Arts Initiative. Wright played Jesus.