One of the Education Department’s goals is to deepen students’ understanding of themselves and the world through the medium of theatre. In most cases the opportunity for students to study and attend a live professional production at MTC is a key component of our programs. But in some cases, through accident of geography or circumstance, young people we serve don’t have access to the performing arts. For more than a decade the Education Department, in partnership with Island Academy, a public high school on Rikers Island, has served just such a population by facilitating playwriting workshops for teen inmates through the Write on the Edge (WrOTE) II program.

The overall goal of a WrOTE unit, whether in a traditional classroom setting or at Island Academy, is for the students to connect to theatre through the creation of their own short play. “While we strive to instill an understanding of the basics of playwriting,” notes David Shookhoff, “a concurrent benefit of the WrOTE program is the way it invigorates students’ imaginations. I’ve witnessed plays that deal with the events and circumstances that led to the student’s incarceration, but I’ve also seen plays about being visited by guardian angels, being trapped inside a whisky bottle, or about the complex, fraught relationships between fathers and sons.

To help lay the foundation for the writing process, the classroom teacher and MTC teaching artist meet prior to the start of a unit to discuss their educational goals and to work together to create a writing prompt that will be used as a guide for the student playwrights. While for non-incarcerated populations writing prompts draw on themes from the MTC production the students will attend, in the WrOTE II unit the teaching team will craft a question that is relevant to their particular class. Previous prompts have focused the students’ work on family connections, reconciliation, overcoming past traumas, or dreams deferred or achieved.

To start the nine-visit unit, the MTC teaching artist imparts the building blocks of playwriting. As the students begin to construct their original plays, professional actors/guest artists visit the classroom to read the students’ work aloud. Listening to their plays affords the students the opportunity to hear what is and isn’t working in the piece and ultimately makes rewriting an easier task. At the final classroom visit, the guest actors perform the plays for the class or for a larger audience of students.

Teacher Irwin Naymen notes that having the actors/guest artists attend the class becomes integral to the development of the students’ plays. When the students can hear their work read out loud during class, it gives them a sense of what is still unclear about their play and helps fuel the revision process. “Students had been reluctant to rewrite their work prior to completing the WrOTE program. However, they have learned that their plays must be rewritten several times before the work could be presented. They now apply this process to all forms of writing.”

An exciting variation on the program arose three years ago when MTC teaching artists began facilitating units in Spanish. “We were seeing guys who were smart and excited about telling their stories, but whose English skills weren’t strong enough yet to keep up with the other students,” explains teaching artist Andres Munar. “As a guest artist in the English language class, I found myself doing a lot of translation. All of a sudden it just clicked for us [the MTC teaching team] and the classroom teacher that a Spanish language unit would really offer an opportunity for a larger group of students to experience the program in a more positive way.” Maria Martinez, Andres’s partner teacher for this spring’s Spanish language unit agrees, “The students engaged in theatre experiences were developing intellectually and emotionally through the experience.”

The lessons that our students on Rikers Island learn about both playwriting and creativity stay with them even after they are released. As a former WrOTE participant recently noted in an email to teaching artist Carl Capotorto, “I thought of how you inspired me three years ago. I thank you for this. And will forever be grateful.”