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Encounters, transformations, and reflections from in-prison and post-release theater workshops
See Me is a collection of intimate dialogues about collective experiences in the context of prison theater workshops. Each essay is a collaboration between two or three people who connected profoundly in the temporary community that a workshop can create. Part I is an exchange grounded in the prison theater workshop between the author and one of the incarcerated participants. They alternately tell the story of what they found in the workshop, each other, the future they imagined together, and the social turmoil and utopian aspirations of the times. Part II consists of essays jointly written by eight other people impacted by close relationships spawned in diverse in-prison and re-entry theater workshops.
As a professional Prison Arts Practitioner, with a career spanning 40+ years of working
intimately from the center of marginalized communities that society often labels as outcasts,
outlaws, and outsiders, I discovered myself and my work within the pages by Jan Cohen-Cruz
and her cohort of collaborative authors in their stunning book, See Me: Prison TheaterWorkshops and Love.
— Curt L. Tofteland, Founder, Shakespeare Behind Bars.
This book is important because it is made up of stories by and about incarcerated people … It will be an inspiration not only for people currently and formerly imprisoned but also for families and communities—because when you can tell your story it means that you have been able to work through some of the root causes that contributed to your incarceration and are now ready to have an impact on changing an unjust system.
— Cheryl Wilkins, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Columbia University’s Center for Justice
Jan Cohen-Cruz’s co-written and edited book See Me: Prison Theater Workshops and Love is an extraordinary account of performance projects with incarcerated communities in the US, UK, and New Zealand. Through a series of searingly honest dialogues…we get a compelling insight into the different ways that prison theater has affected the lives of all those involved in it. The picture is of a world where the injustices of mass incarceration are multiple, but the relations fostered by theater provide a rare bulwark against their worst aspects. The book teaches us about the history of prison theater but equally, the power of theater in and of itself.
— James Thompson, Co-Editor, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
Jan Cohen-Cruz is a former professor of drama at NYU and founder of the department’s applied theater minor. As a past director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, she co-founded its journal, Public. Her numerous books include Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It, Local Acts, Engaging Performance, Remapping Performance, and two co-edited texts on Augusto Boal. Cohen-Cruz was director of field research for A Blade of Grass and an ATHE awardee for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. She currently teaches at Touchstone Theatre/Moravian University.