News
Page 4
T I
pi
IT
i
i
i •
Street Roots • Oct. 7-13, 2016
rmoioo dt ju^crn ULUU
y
Johnny Stallings, an actor and theater director, founded the Open Hearts Open Minds program at Two Rivers Correctional Institution. The program consists of an annual theatrical production,
as well as weekly dialogues, where inmates talk about their lives and how they can improve them.
BY AMANDA WALDROUPE
STAFF WRITER
t is Saturday, Sept. 24, and a dozen men
imprisoned in Two Rivers Correctional
Institution, a medium-security prison in
Umatilla, wait in the prison’s visiting room
for their guests to arrive.
They are not dressed in their prison
uniforms, the blue denim jeans and navy
blue t-shirts with the red stamps that say
“INMATE.” Instead, they wear cream
colored tunics with ruffled sleeves and black
tights. One inmate is dressed in a full tuxedo
and plays Chopin on a piano that sits on top
of a small stage bordered by Grecian
columns.
Two inmates hand out a playbill at the
door.
“Enjoy the show,” one says, smiling
broadly.
It is opening night, a night the men have
looked forward to and worked toward for six
months. Tonight, and for five subsequent
shows, they perform Mary Zimmerman’s
“Metamorphoses,” a Tony Award-winning
play adapted from the classical Roman poet
Ovid’s epic work.
The play tells the tales of various Greek
myths, such as the story of King Midas, a
greedy king whose wish to turn everything
around him into gold by touching those
objects brings about ruin and heartbreak
when he touches his daughter; of Echo, a
mountain nymph who repels the advances of
her would-be lover until her heart is broken
by Narcissus, whose own beauty makes him
so proud and vain that he falls in love with
himself; of Erysichthon, who was cursed by
the gods to be endlessly afflicted by hunger
after he cut down a sacred grove of trees.
The stories are ultimately about love -
how we find and lose love, and possibly
regain it. The play is almost radical in how
starkly its message - and the warnings
I
Opening hearts
and minds
Through dialogue and theater, Johnny
Stallings helps inmates step back from their
troubled lives and discover their potential
implied in it - is portrayed.
In many ways, the stories mirror the love
and sense of self-discovery the inmates have
found because of the man who originally
brought theater to.them: Johnny Stallings.
Stallings, 65, is an actor, a theater
director and the founding executive director
of Open Hearts Open Minds, a Portland
based nonprofit that seeks to transform the
lives of Oregon’s inmates through dialogue,
music, theater and artistic expression.
He has never stopped thinking about the
meaning of life - how we can be happier,
more peaceful, freer, more loving. Since
2006, he has facilitated a weekly dialogue
group at Two Rivers, where a group of self
selecting inmates gather in a circle and
spend two hours talking about their lives
and how they can be better.
In 2008, they asked him if he would direct
them in a play, and since then, inmates at
Two Rivers have performed an annual
production.
Through the work done in the dialogue
group and as actors intersect, the inmates
consider people’s motivations, how anger or
frustration or happiness is expressed, how a
person’s actions affect others - some of the
most fundamental questions we face.
“I think all people are hungry for meaning
and to think about and be asked, what’s
going on here? What does it mean? What is
your life about?” Stallings said.
He calls the work of Open Hearts Open
Minds “the nonstop love-in.” He is not being
facetious or expressing nostalgia for the late
1960s. He has met dozens of prisoners,
many of whom have committed heinous
crimes. What he found is that they all have a
humanity and potential that is rarely
expressed.
“At the core of everybody, everybody,
without exception, there is something
extremely beautiful, something perfect,
something good,” Stallings said.
To the inmates, Stallings is part father
figure and part guru who has helped them
to completely change their lives and
discover the good within themselves.
i4 "]\ Tetamorphoses” begins with the
IVACosmogony, the story of the
creation of the universe.
The audience of 30 - family and friends
of the inmates, as well as theatergoers who
support Open Hearts Open Minds - took
their seats arranged in a U-shape around a
shallow pool built out of board and
decorated with colorful fabric.
Minutes before the play began, a couple
of inmates scurried throughout the room,
placing props and organizing the costumes
they and their fellow actors would change
into. Two of their co-directors, Victoria
Spencer and Anna Crandall, gave last-minute
advice.
The piano had been removed from the
stage, but the tuxedo-clad inmate, who was
trained in classical piano since he was a
child, had written an original score for the
play and began playing, a signal that the play
had begun.
Jack Baird, 52, an inmate with silky, swept-
back hair, a trim goatee and prominent
cheekbones, was perfect in the part of Zeus.
He smoked a fake cigar as he looked down
into the pool, what would be the universe.
The rest of the actors surrounded the pool
and gazed into it, as well.
Zeus creates order out of chaos - land
and sea, air and fire. But he realizes
something is missing: man. He creates man,
played by the actors sitting around the pool.
But something is still missing - words, so
Zeus gives man the power to speak.
See DIALOGUE, page 5