“Five minutes!” Scott Stevens calls out. It’s the standard stage manager’s warning, familiar to actors the world over. And Stevens, a burly, bearded 26-year-old, is as much a stage manager as this gypsylike collective has. But it’s not five minutes to curtain time; it’s five minutes till the bus leaves for Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.
It’s 6:30 AM on a Wednesday morning in May. Allowing time to pull over at a truck stop for gas, coffee, doughnuts, and newspapers, Stevens is planning on a two-hour drive to Stateville, one of the Illinois prison system’s most hard-ass joints.
The actors sign a contract with the company, just as actors in any troupe do. This contract, though, includes an item asking whether the actor has ever been convicted of a felony, as well as a clause exempting the company from liability “in case of a riot or hostage situation.”
In the middle 70s he stopped. “I really lost contact with people, with who people were. I didn’t like any of the directions I was taking. Also, I ran out of money. I ended up in a tiny little town called Kewanee [Illinois], which was my girlfriend’s parents’ place. I left theater for two years and went to work in a foundry. I needed to establish contact with whatever this thing called America was, of which I had been so critical.”
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Cunningham is still at Stateville, though with recent program cutbacks she’s had to reduce her time there. The inmates’ drama group she formed there–the Con-Artistes–is still running. Its track record includes five full productions since 1981: Mr. Roberts, 12 Angry Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and A Soldier’s Play (all dramas dealing with issues of justice and institutionalization) and an original musical, Out A’ Joint, written and performed by inmates under the guidance of two off-Loop theater professionals, director Ron Falzone and music director Tom Sivak. Con-Artistes shows have toured to other prisons, though never outside the prison system. “These are max guys,” says Cunningham–“max” meaning maximum-security.
Right after starting at Stateville, Cunningham sent letters to college and professional theaters all over the country, in general looking for help and specifically looking for all-male scripts. One such letter landed on Bergman’s desk in Iowa. He responded by offering to lead a workshop on creating original scripts through improvisation. To demonstrate, he organized a group of university students who developed a production expressly for the Stateville audience.
