New Play Tells It Like It Is

Aaron, a White playwright, needs his new play to work out for the sake of his career. Tone, an Inca of the Latin Kings, is serving a prison sentence for conspiracy to sell drugs; he has a story to tell about his conversations with the man in the next cell over — Justin Volpe, the NYPD cop imprisoned for attacking and sexually assaulting Abner Louima in an station house bathroom in 1997. What follows is a power struggle that actually contains several power struggles. 

There’s one between Aaron and Tone, who are working together even as their motivations are sometimes at odds. There’s another between Tone and Volpe, whose palpable anger toward one another cause each to examine their reasons for fighting. And then there’s the struggle Aaron and Tone each have with themselves. Is Tone’s story really Aaron’s to tell? Why is Aaron drawn to telling stories about Black and Brown people, and specifically bad things happening to them? Can Tone truly forgive Volpe, and find his way back from his own crimes and traumas?

This is the tense, fraught ground covered by Tell, a new play still in development by New Haven-based poet and librettist Aaron Jafferis and Antonio ​“King Tone” Fernandez, former NYC leader of the Latin Kings. The latest draft of the play got a staged reading, directed by Chay Yew, at Bregamos Community Theater on Sunday afternoon, featuring Felix Solis (from Ozark), David Anzuelo, Patrick Ball, Nefesh Cordero Pino, Sam DeMuria, and Anthony Holiday. Community organizer Ala Ochumare facilitated a discussion about the play after the reading.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the play is that it is largely true. Co-author Fernandez really was an Inca of the Latin Kings in the 1990s, who worked toward transforming the organization from a street and prison gang to a movement working for social justice — even as he was sentenced in 1999 for conspiracy to sell narcotics. During his years in prison, he really did find himself in the cell next to Volpe, who is still serving time for assaulting Louima. While Fernandez was in prison and when he got out, he became the subject of a few books as well as a documentary. He was released in 2009 and has since gone on to found Grow Up Grow Out, an organization working to end mass incarceration of youth and to help youth develop constructive lives.

Jafferis connected with Fernandez through David Brotherton, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Brotherton had written a book about the Latin Kings, called The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang, which featured Fernandez.

“I got connected with David Brotherton” while working on the musical Kingdom, about the Latin Kings, Jafferis said. ​“He had already been connected with Tone because he had written this book about him.”

Meanwhile, Fernandez had already heard about Kingdom while he was still in prison. ​“Kings called me in jail,” he said, ​“and they were mad that he killed me in the play.” ​“I told them, ​‘it’s a play,’ ” he said with a laugh. When Fernandez was released, Brotherton connected him with Jafferis.

“When I called Tone to talk to him, he said Kingdom was cool — and I would never know how close I came to getting whacked because of it,’ ” Jafferis said.

“We ate lunch and I told him, ​‘so all the shit I did to stay alive, you fucking killed me in the play.’ And he laughed, and we’ve been friends since,” Fernandez said. 

Fernandez also told Jafferis that ​“he had a better story,” Jafferis said, about his prison encounters with Volpe. In Fernandez’s opinion, that he and Volpe would end up in neighboring cells wasn’t a coincidence. 

“They did it on purpose,” Fernandez said. ​“That’s what they do. ​‘How can we get them both to do something to each other to justify punishing them more?’ They win again. So forgiving him was the greatest weapon I could use. The best thing to do was to forgive this guy.”

The conversations between Fernandez and Volpe that led to Fernandez’s breakthrough — which didn’t come easy — form the heart of the play. ​“Tone actually conceived this whole thing, of making a movie about his conversations, his arguments with Volpe in maximum security isolation,” Jafferis said. ​“So I started interviewing Tone, and we started building our collaboration. But at some point we realized it was not going to be as real and provocative a show if I wasn’t also questioning my own role in it. So when my character started working its way into the show, things started to break open.” 

Thus Tell also becomes a play about who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, and what it means when some are given a platform to speak while others are silenced. What is gained and what is lost? Who has the power to decide who speaks? How can those who don’t have that power get it for themselves?

In the context of the play, those questions have a decidedly personal edge. ​“We’re both defending our trauma,” Fernandez said. ​“What does our stance in life, what we believe in, what we think we should do, our character, make us be? And are we big enough to break all that, to forgive someone who hurt us?”

For Fernandez, Volpe was just the start. ​“For me it was my greatest excuse to be violent, and I found out it was not an excuse. How could I have justice and peace? I had to be peaceful to get justice.”

“You got to heal the trauma, not just live with it,” Fernandez continued. ​“That’s when you’ll be free. You got to forgive the perpetrator as we forgive ourselves.” 

In the post-performance discussion, however, what emerged from both the audience reaction to the play and the questions that it raised was that healing trauma, finding justice, making room for forgiveness, was as difficult as it was imperative. Issues of personal responsibility blended with the long history of racism and oppression in the United States. That Tone indeed committed crimes that sent him to prison didn’t negate the fact that he also lived in an oppressive society where the deck was stacked against from the start. That Aaron was a talented playwright with a successful track record did not necessarily give him the right or the permission to tell Tone’s story. The questions raised by the play had no easy answers. But the play helped bring them into the light; perhaps, like Tone’s finding a way to forgive Volpe, it was a start.