Early in Felon: An American Washi Tale, poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts talks about how, as a prisoner serving time for a carjacking, he heard his fellow prisoners calling to each other in the dark, looking for something to read. “Yo, send me a book!” they called out, and in the dark, he heard the paper slide across the cell block floor. It took him a while to muster the courage to ask for himself — “Yo, send me a book!” The poetry anthology that slipped under his door set him on the path to his freedom.
Felon: An American Washi Tale — which ran at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street, Saturday and Sunday, as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — is the result of a collaboration between Betts and playwright and director Elise Thoron.
Since serving his sentence more than 20 years ago, Betts has written a memoir and three books of poetry about prison and its lingering effects on those whose lives it touches. He’s also a lawyer who has helped others navigate their paroles, and has founded a nonprofit, Freedom Reads, to help incarcerated people have better access to books. The experience of prison, Betts writes in an accompanying note, “is marked by paper. Paper gets you in and sometimes gets you free. Chasing paper on the front is the catalyst to cuffs for many; making paper — that is, parole — is the hope of freedom for others. Inside, letters from family are lifelines, earning the slang moniker ‘kite,’ and there is an edge of exhilaration when a kite is slipped into a cell by a guard during mail call or under a cell door by another prisoner. For years after my release, I carried around a slip of paper in my wallet. A receipt for twenty-five dollars and seventy-one cent, the last of the money I’d earned working for 45 cent an hour in a Virginia prison. Transforming the paper into art complexifies the experience, makes it more than loss, more than the account for crimes and prison time that seem to stalk.”
Elise Thoron’s recent experience working with a Japanese papermaker brought the theme into her work with Betts. As Betts’s solo show was developed for the stage — based on the poems in Betts’s collection Felon — the theme was pushed a little farther. For Betts’s story, it’s not just paper, but often the words that are printed on them that matter, and as this moving show amply illustrates, it’s Betts’s words in particular that are the vessel for his liberation, not only from incarceration, but the way that prison time shapes the lives of the formerly incarcerated long after they’re freed.
The play is aided by the set design, which features a table and chair at its center, a bookcase full of books, and what — for most of the show — look like three disorganized piles of papers. Betts roams the set, delivering his story in clear language that turns on a dime from humorous and self-deprecating to pointed and thoughtful to lyrical and almost painfully expressive. He is a winning narrator of his own story, laying bare his shortcomings and marveling, with wry detachment, at the decisions of his youth. He also delivers his accomplishments (such as getting into Yale Law School) with a light touch. This rhetorical move isn’t just about being humble; it’s because Betts has a larger point to make.
For while the title of the piece might suggest that the piece will mostly deal with life in prison, Felon is actually much more focused on the precariousness of life after prison. Betts may be an example of an extraordinarily successful life by any measure, but his difficulties finding employment, of getting back on his feet, of going back to school, are familiar parts of the biographies of anyone who has served time. By connecting himself to that broader experience, Betts opens the door to some real insight: the way that carrying the label felon after people have served their sentences affects not just the surface-level situation of education and employment, but people’s relationships to everyone in their lives, both those they knew before they went to prison and everyone they meet afterward. That, in turn, affects people’s own perceptions of themselves.
When do you tell a stranger, a friend, a lover — your children — that you served time in prison? How much do you let yourself be defined by the word the judicial system has attached permanently to your history? What is the path to becoming truly free of it? Betts navigates these questions with breathtaking honesty and nuance, especially when he broadens the story to include the legal work he did in helping his friends he served time with get through their own paroles. He’s an easy man to root for, but Betts doesn’t make it that simple. He’s much more interested in showing the spiky complexity of what it is for him to move through the world, knowing that both harsh judgment and perhaps too-fawning praise are just double edges of the same sword, and somewhere in the arc of his biography is a man still wrestling with who he is, how he wants to seen and how he would like to see himself.
Near the end of the piece, Betts pulls ropes that have been hanging innocuously around on the stage, and the piles of paper are hoisted into the air, a flock of paper kites like the ones Betts describes. In the context of Felon, the kites are a source of bitter strength, a reminder of just how far Betts has come, how far he still feels he needs to go, and the tricky, fickle nature of what freedom really needs. His days in prison are long behind him. But the memories shape him still. What does it mean to be free of those?
The International Festival of Arts and Ideas runs through June 26. Visit its website for a full list of events.
