Offscript - Caged Birds Sing

Before September 2004, I’d never gone to jail to see a play. But to find out about Playmaking for Girls, I went not just behind the scenes, but behind the barbed-wire fences surrounding the Metro Regional Youth Detention Center.

In April 2002, Synchronicity Performance Group, a theater troupe that specializes in plays by or about women, teamed with the Saturday Institute for Manhood Brotherhood Actualization, a nonprofit group that organizes outreach programs for Georgia’s juvenile justice system. Synchronicity and SIMBA developed the bimonthly “Playmaking for Girls” workshops, in which theater artists spend two days with 16-20 teenage inmates and help them write, rehearse and finally perform sketches - mostly based on the experiences leading up to the girls’ detention.

On my visits, I learned that Metro Regional is a transitional facility that detains girls for up to three months. The girls are awaiting court dates, placement elsewhere, or simply release for time served. The girls’ sentences often involve prostitution and drug charges, although in my brief conversations with them, most would only admit to “running away from home.”

Compared to the Big House you see in movies, Metro Regional resembles a very, very high-security elementary school. Last September, the Synchronicity artists and I spent most of the workshops in a small cafeteria with bolted-down tables and chairs. Often, the girls would chat with or complain to the correctional officers as if they were teachers.

On the first day of the workshop, the theater artists teach the girls how to write scripts, using their own words and backgrounds. On the second day, the girls rehearse the scripts (none perform in ones they’ve written), which they act out that night for the rest of the inmates, as well as visiting family members, in the day room.

Since its inception, the workshops have developed about 111 sketches, most of which are only seen within Metro Regional’s walls. On Fri., June 11, at 6 p.m., Synchronicity will present 10 of the past year’s plays at the second annual performance of Playmaking for Girls, staged by both professional actors and about 10 former inmates at 7 Stages playhouse in Little Five Points. Admission is free, and the public is welcome to attend the performance.

Last September, I watched the creation of three plays scheduled for June 11. They seem typical of Playmaking for Girls’ subject matter. Some reflect simple wish fulfillment: You Reap What You Sow ... so plant good seeds, written by a pregnant teen named Nikita only a few weeks before her delivery, depicted an impregnated and abandoned girl who eventually gets even with the baby’s father.

Two aspiring rappers named Kathryn and Macey wrote the most creative piece, A Twist of Sibling Rivalry, which is a cautionary tale about feuding gang girls set entirely in rhyme. Other plays usually involve neglectful parents, drug addiction, predatory men and unlikely happy endings that prove all the more poignant for their implausibility.

Synchronicity co-founder Rachel May, who leads the workshops with actress Susie Purcell, mentioned the workshop’s therapeutic benefits: Sometimes, the girls open up about themselves more in the theater workshops than they do in their one-on-one counseling sessions. When I watched the generally enthusiastic process, the rambunctious warm-up exercises (rhythmic clapping, calling each other’s names) seemed as effective as the actual plays in alleviating tensions and letting the would-be artists simply be teenage girls.

“I felt like a celebrity when I heard the applause,” says a 10th-grader named Jasmin, who acted in Playmaking’s first public performance following a sentence for running away. As much as Jasmin enjoyed her time in the limelight, she admits to having some mixed feelings about it. “I think the plays made the situations seem lighter than the real world,” she told me. Jasmin questions if the plays could effectively warn at-risk girls her age to stay out of trouble. Jasmin says that before she went to jail, “I had the attitude that ‘You can talk to me all you want, but I have to learn for myself.’”

The June 11 performance will benefit from 25 hours of rehearsal over six days, and thus will be far more polished and practiced than the scripts’ first appearances. Some of the girls had never seen a play before writing their own, so Playmaking for Girls can’t measure up to the professionalism of conventional theater. But it can’t be expected to. The workshops’ intentions are exactly the opposite of the goals of the plays I usually review. I normally go to theater hoping for some kind of escapism, education or enlightenment to briefly take me outside myself. Then I clap and go home.

But the participants of Playmaking for Girls have already lived more drama than they can handle. The workshops give the girls an opportunity to try something artistic and put their lives in perspective. While stage actors often strive to lose themselves in their roles, the Playmaking girls might be able to find themselves - and perhaps experience some temporary release.

Hot Ticket:

Georgia Shakespeare begins its summer repertory with The Comedy of Errors, the mistaken identity comedy about two sets of identical twins, featuring Chris Kayser and Chris Ensweller. Through Aug. 12, Conant Performing Arts Center, 4484 Peachtree Road. $10-$35. 404-264-0020. www.gashakespeare.org.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com

Off-Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.