In November 2021, I opened my Sun-Times to my favorite section: the editorial pages. I’d been following the series on the violence plaguing Chicago’s poorest communities. The latest editorial declared that it was time to invite new voices to the table to offer solutions. I took that editorial to my writing group and posted it on the chalkboard. When members arrived and read it, they got really excited about the prospects of giving our input.
We were a theater group in a room full of playwrights focused on social justice. This was the invitation we had been waiting for. We spent the day using our personal experiences to start writing our new play until a correctional officer came in and told us it was time to return to our units.
We were incarcerated men at the Dixon Correctional Center who created the Dixon Performing Arts program to channel and stimulate creative energy. Through the program, we learned how the performing arts and poetry that centered on our life experiences could be therapeutic and a way to shift narratives.
We assembled a 12-man writing team with men from different neighborhoods and varying ages and experiences with violence. We did worry that people “on the outside” would not genuinely believe our objective was to curtail violence, but we plowed ahead because we knew we had something to say.
Our team leader, Toussaint Daniels, said of our goals: “First, we wanted to uncover and hold accountable the systemic conditions that cultivated high-crime areas in communities of color while holding ourselves accountable to confront the fear and stereotypes we too often reinforced. Second, we knew we needed to look forward, envisioning restorative and transformative justice pathways to create solutions to combat violence and reimagine safety in our communities.”
We titled the play “The Story Of Violence,” because the conditions that have led to the bloodshed didn’t happen overnight, and the solutions that might curb it wouldn’t either.
The lead characters meet in a Chicago hotel to write a eulogy about a teenage girl’s killing. When a young man comes to deliver food and inadvertently gets involved in their conversation, it generates a clash of ideas and different perspectives. The play ultimately reveals how violence-plagued neighborhoods have lost the ability to define themselves due to the distortion of our culture. It also displays how we have lost our unity, which isn’t a solution, but a necessary reckoning with where to start.
We started writing this play right away but couldn’t complete it until 2022 due to numerous lockdowns and the suspension of our program because of COVID-19 restrictions in the prisons. These delays ate at our confidence in our ability to perform the play for our incarcerated community.
Eventually, we submitted the play to the Stillpoint Theatre Collective‘s “Playwrights from the Inside” program. We were surprised when theater officials offered a reading of the play, allowing our families to hear our production for the first time. The reading boosted our morale and made us more determined to perform “The Story of Violence.”
In late 2022, we received permission from the Dixon Correctional Center administration to perform the play during Black History Month. Then tragically, the young man whom we chose to play the lead died in the prison under unexplained circumstances. To complicate matters, Toussaint was transferred to another facility before we could finish production.
In spite of those obstacles, we remained undeterred. We performed “The Story of Violence” as planned in February 2023. It was the first time an audience outside the prison was allowed into the facility to watch one of our performances.
That summer, the play won first place in the drama category of Pen America’s 2023 National Prison Writing competition. We were so proud. More recently, we’ve collaborated with WBEZ’s “Prisoncast!” to air a radio play version of “The Story of Violence” at 7 p.m. Nov. 6, on 91.5 FM.
Those accolades are wonderful. But we are most honored by the impact that we had on our audience at the Dixon Correctional Center. Men were crying and applauding and expressed excitement about the play. Serious conversations were sparked. They haven’t stopped. To this day, the dialogue continues about how we stepped up and took a seat at the collective table to contribute to finding the personal and systemic solutions to ending violence in our neighborhoods.
Brian Beals is the founder and executive director of the Mud Theatre Project, a nonprofit that produces original plays that promote community organizing and healthy emotional growth. The Mud Theatre Project is an outgrowth of the Dixon Correctional Center Performing Arts, which Beals founded while he was imprisoned for 35 years on a wrongful murder conviction. He was exonerated in 2023.