Expand Upon: Incarceration was the newest edition of Mirror Stage’s Expand Upon staged reading series. This events included two plays featuring the same acting cast. The plays that were read during this event were The Assailant by Alma Davenport and Swimming Pools by Stacy D. Flood. Both these plays were written in response to theme of incarceration. This edition of Expand Upon is about incarceration because this was the theme previously selected by the Seattle community as the theme of the current Expand Upon show.
These readings were quite lively and full of emotion. The readings were performed with a striped-down set and costume design in order to emphasis the words being said during the plays as to increase audience empathy and awareness. I thought that both plays stripped-set and costume design was profound and helped convey themes of both the plays clearly.
The scene of arrest within the play The Assailant was quite profound to watch absent of policing paraphernalia such as weapons and uniforms. I think that the absence of this paraphernalia brought a great amount of humanity to police violence. I think this scene with the absence of this paraphernalia allowed the audience to clearly see and understand the unmasked pain and insanity of police brutality.
The Assailant centers around the plot of an attorney grappling with a court case he is working on against a teenage boy criminalized for possessing illicit drugs. Swimming Pools by Stacy D. Ford is much more of a character focused play than Assailant and features a beautiful water motif interwoven into the incarceration system within the play.
During both these play readings, the injustices of the American incarceration systems were unveiled to the audience. Both of these plays shed light upon the American incarceration system. The rather generic dialogue of both these scripts fell flat, and read like after school TV programs. If these plays were to ever be performed again, I would recommend to incorporate more dialogue and story lines into these plays.
If you would like to help end incarceration injustice currently occurring within the Pacific Northwest please check out the NWDC Resistance/Resistencia al NWDC Facebook page, and sign the Crisis at the Northwest Detention Center petition.