The Incarcerated Mass’ performance of “Not to Be” with back row: Jimmy Soto, Joe Dole, Rodney Love, Michael Sullivan, Raul Dorado, Reginald BoClair, Taji Chesimet, Tyrone Brewer Jr., Lonnie Smith and front row: Carlvosier Smith
/Photo: Karl Soderstrom

“Who am I?,” Steven Ramirez asks at the beginning of Theatre Y’s film, “Not To Be.” He’s standing on a stage in a purple graduation robe, a gold stole and sneakers so white they shine. “I’m the son of a preacher. I’m the youngest of thirteen siblings.” He is also a father, a brother, a best friend and a boyfriend, says Ramirez, and he is among approximately 4,300 men serving life or de facto life sentences in Illinois’ prisons.

“Not To Be,” the creation of North Lawndale arts incubator Theatre Y, features the work of Ramirez and other members of The Incarcerated Mass, Theatre Y’s long-running theater program for residents of Stateville Correctional Facility that closed, along with the prison itself, in September 2024. The film, which premiered this past February to a sold-out crowd at Facets, follows The Incarcerated Mass’ first and only full-length performance inside Stateville, in which they implore the audience to look beyond what they have been taught to believe about incarceration and justice.

Programs like The Incarcerated Mass have turned Chicago into the home for a growing community of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated actors and playwrights who produce exciting work in and out of prison. Anthony Spaulding’s one-man play “To Cut a Barber’s Hands,” about his struggle to obtain a barber’s license post-release, received praise for its debut at The Second City this past July, and companies like Brian Beals’ returning-citizen-led Mud Theatre Project have sold out recent shows at Steppenwolf Theatre. Beals and Mud Theatre are also assembling a first-of-its-kind festival to celebrate work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated actors and playwrights.

If most theater aims for your heart, these projects choose multiple targets. They’re aiming at the hearts and minds of the public, but also the legal system and legislators in Springfield. They’re aiming at the prison walls.

Members of The Incarcerated Mass prepare ahead of their performance of “Not to Be.” Melissa Lorraine pictured (right)/Photo: Karl Soderstrom

In the performance at the center of Theatre Y’s “Not To Be,” The Incarcerated Mass performs an original theater work in front of their peers at Stateville using a script drafted by Theatre Y artistic director Melissa Lorraine from the ensemble’s writing and poetry. The work starts with a “dance of life,” in which the performers translate the story of their lives into an improvisational dance performance. From there, the men talk about their mistakes, their triumphs, their families and their memories of life before prison. The result is a captivatingly vulnerable performance from a group of men for whom vulnerability is often a liability.

“Not To Be” was created as a way for these men to reintroduce themselves to the public, says Lorraine, who began working with residents at Stateville in 2018 through DePaul University’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Lorraine soon helped form The Incarcerated Mass, bringing together a group of men who took classes with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP), a group that has offered degree-granting educational programs to students at Stateville for over a decade.

At the time, many members of PNAP and The Incarcerated Mass were also involved in organizing Parole Illinois, a grassroots coalition aimed at reinstating Illinois’ discretionary parole system. The group wanted Lorraine’s help creating a performance that would communicate the necessity of parole for legislators, and that would expand the public’s preconceived notions of individuals serving life sentences. Nobody votes with their heads, they told Lorraine; they vote with their hearts.

Jimmy Soto and Joe Dole in The Incarcerated Mass’s performance of “Not to Be.”/Photo: Karl Soderstrom

“To be quite honest, I think it was therapeutic for all of us,” says Jimmy Soto, a member of The Incarcerated Mass and a founding member of Parole Illinois. Soto was released in 2023 after serving forty-two years for a crime he did not commit, the longest wrongful incarceration in Illinois state history. “Each and every one of us found some relief or some sense of healing in doing both the practice and then the actual performance…It was an otherworldly type of space, like we were in this bubble when we entered there. We just felt protected from the outside world, and for that matter, the prison.”

Soto and his peers brought forth a number of lawsuits about deteriorating prison conditions that forced a federal judge to order the closure of Stateville in September 2024. The final days of The Incarcerated Mass were captured in footage that was shown at Facets alongside the premiere of “Not To Be.” The men, joyous, dance through the halls as the nearly hundred-year-old prison crumbles around them.

If and when the members of the Incarcerated Mass are reunited on the outside, they can join a growing community of theater makers in Chicago who share their experiences with Illinois’ criminal legal system.

(left to right) The cast of “Searching for Justice” Toussaint Daniels, King Moosa, Darrion Benson, Wendell Robinson, Temika Queen Cannon, Brian Beals, and Darius Franklin. Wendell Robinson is also the executive director of Restore Justice./Photo: Tone Stockenstrom

Actor and playwright Brian Beals founded Mud Theatre Project for just this purpose; he wanted a space for returning citizens to be able to continue the creative pursuits they developed while incarcerated. When he started the project in 2023, Beals had just finished a thirty-five-year prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit—the second-longest wrongful incarceration in Illinois’ history after Soto.

While in prison, Beals had helped create the Dixon Correctional Center Performing Arts Program alongside fellow residents Toussaint Daniels, Darrion Benson, Brian Harrington and Darius Franklin. It was a theater program aimed at providing therapeutic rehabilitation through the arts. In 2023, the program’s participants took home the top prize in drama in PEN America’s Prison Writing Contest for their piece “Story of Violence,” about community violence in Chicago.

“For me, [the Dixon arts program] was a way to get beyond the walls, to talk about press and culture and conditions, to put a true face on what is often distorted in movies and the media and to give us a voice.”

Daniels and Benson joined Beals in founding Mud after his release. The project was founded under the auspices of the Still Point Theatre Collective that helped assist Beals with his creative work through their Playwrights on the Inside program while he was still incarcerated.

Beals debuted his first play outside of prison, “Searching For Justice,” to a sold-out crowd at Steppenwolf Theatre in January. The play follows five characters as they talk about their experiences with the criminal legal system, trying to convince a legislator to change his tough-on-crime mindset. Some members of the cast, like Benson, are still incarcerated, allowed to participate in the play only under the supervision of a prison work-release program.

Beals and Mud Theatre are gearing up to host the Resilience Festival, a theater and performance festival showcasing work from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated playwrights and performers. The festival will begin with performances this spring and conclude with a larger showcase in the fall, partnering with other Chicago area groups like Theatre Y.

“It’s really a showcase to present to the communities out here that we want to come back and be productive, we want to come out and help rebuild our communities. So that’s our ambition with the Resilience Festival: to showcase the incredible talent and the resilience of the communities coming out of the system and the ability to contribute to our community out here.”

Theater, says Beals, is the ideal vehicle to remind audiences of the voices we lose when people disappear into the prison system.

“With theater, you can write narratives that tell accurate depictions of what communities are going through, stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told. You can mobilize and organize through these stories as well as educate. I just think that theater is the perfect canvas to elevate and emphasize voices of people and have their story told and give them the agency to tell it.”

Mud Theatre will perform “Searching For Justice” on May 7 at Definition Theatre in Hyde Park as part of Illinois Humanities.