New Haven Independent

The people whose stories were included in Friday night’s reading included the daughter of a Christian fundamentalist in the South, a girl who basically raised herself in the projects, a boy who bounced around different group homes in Puerto Rico, a middle-class white boy from Ohio, two college-bound best friends, and an illiterate 13-year-old.

They all wound up working for pimps, and tumbling through the system.

Their stories were captured in Deborah Lake Fortson’s Body & Sold, a documentary play that was performed at the Educational Center for the Arts by the New Haven Theater Company. The staged reading (the cast is pictured above) was part of a national campaign to raise awareness about child trafficking in the United States, according to Belina Mizrahi, who was hired by Fortson to coordinate the national campaign.

“We’re trying to help people understand the humanity of an individual that gets trapped in a situation that they can’t figure a way out of. They’re not seen as a priority: they’re just seen as bad kids, or their parents as bad parents, and not a priority for government funds —- as of yet,” Fortson said. “This is a complicated interactivity of poverty with the normalization of prostitution in the media. With the lack of employment opportunities, especially among the youth, they see this as a better option than working at McDonalds. They are told it is acceptable to work for a pimp to get some nice jewelry, that it is normal. And the society glamorizes the pimps. People are always talking about pimping their car, pimping their bikes. And then there are these guys who become rappers, who used to be pimps, and they built their studios and their careers on the backs on these young women. And it comes through in their music, and they are what we here on the radio.”

Some of the characters in the play address those very issues.

“It’s that fucked up patriarchy,” said Elaine Whitefield, played by New Haven native Tamika Pettway. “Where men are gods and women are just obedient.”

Although the names in Body & Sold are made up, and some of the locations changed, the stories are real, Forston said in a telephone interview on Sunday. Fortson said the dialogue and stories are all based off of interviews conducted in Boston, Minneapolis, and Essex, Connecicut. The dialogue is taken from taped recordings, and some of the background info is based on research conducted with employees and volunteers at shelters and safe spaces, social services workers, and documentarians. Some of the play’s characters represented the stories of people, and other characters were a mix of different people’s stories, at the request of the interview subject.

“All of the things that happened in the play, happened,” Fortson said.

Some were running away from hyper-Christian parents who didn’t understand their sexual orientation. This was the case with Christian, a middle-class boy from Ohio whose parents sent him to a therapy program to “cure his gayness,” read by Christian Shaboo; and Craig, who was sent to live with his “overly strict” grandmother, who kicked him out on the street at the age of 11 when she caught him with another guy. Craig’s character was played by Arturo Rosa. He wound up camping with trannies, turning tricks in the Mississippi Delta.

Rosa also read the part of Pimp, through which the audience was given a glimpse into what are called “obedience routines.” Most kids that wind up in these situations,

“There’s a psychological manipulation involved that is quite horrifying.”

Dora, a girl from Minnesota played by Hilry Brown, had a life-changing experience when her mother began seeing a revivalist preacher. After that, she is shamed for everything she does at home. She runs away, and on her second night out, goes into a bar that lets in underage kids. Her drink gets spiked, and she winds up on her way to Chicago, where she is first raped and beaten — then “trained” by a pimp who had “claimed” her.

After running away from a near-death situation, Dora finally gets a bus ticket home. But when
she gets off the bus and her mother isn’t there for her, she has no other options, or if she does have the options, she does not know about them.

“Who can help me that won’t either stuff me in a shelter or throw me in jail?” Dora asks. She winds up getting back in the car with her old pimp, who was waiting at the Greyhound station.

About a third of all teenage sex workers are white or middle-class, according to the website of Paul and Lisa Inc, the Connecticut based non-profit that took home the proceeds of the event.

At one point in the play, each of the characters attempts to receive social services.

One character was turned away from a shelter because it doesn’t accept prostitutes. Another can’t get ID because they’re not mailed to shelters.

In real life, Tawanna Woolfolk is a Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills community organizer, and a clinical social worker at Hill Health Center, where she works with cases of sexual trauma, prostitution, HIV infection, addiction, homelessness, and other public health issues.

On Friday, she played Linda Johnson, a woman who ran away after a friend of her mother’s got her pregnant. Department of Children and Families eventually takes the child away, and she goes in and out of jail after trying to get her life back on track to college.

Woolfolk said her work puts her in front of the very situations she and her co-stars acted out Friday, on a daily basis.

When asked about their motivation to get involved with the production, members of the cast (pictured) said they were moved by the subject matter.

“We hadn’t even read the script when we agreed to do this,” Shapiro said.

Director Matthew Wrather, a Yale graduate, said he was contacted for the production by his former classmate Mizrahi, who studied astronomy and physics before becoming project manager for Body & Sold.

“It’s so manifestly unpleasant,” Wrather said of the subject matter “but it’s also very compelling.”

Although there was no discussion after the play, some of the audience members said they were moved by the performance.

“There’s a disparity in the system between not wanting her to do this stuff, and providing the services to address it or prevent it,” said Francene Karlsson.