Caged: Life. Beyond. Bars.

June 3rd, 2017

Awake Goy

Chris Hedges has taught in America’s most elite universities, including Princeton, Columbia, and New York University.

It was a class at a Maximum Security Prison, however, where he found “more brilliance, literacy, passion, wisdom and integrity… than in any other classroom…”

In Hedges’ class, 28 men collaboratively wrote a play in which the drama of their lives, so often portrayed by others, is finally told in their own words.

Inspired by their exceptional talent, Hedges promised that he’d share their voices with the world and—somehow, someday—mount the play.

Now, over three years later, Hedges, along with, Boris Franklin, the only writer who has been released from prison to date, are planning to premiere “CAGED” at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, NJ, during their Spring 2018 season.

If you haven’t had an immediate family member, a relative or a friend who has been swallowed up by the U.S. prison system, more than likely, you will. The numbers, well publicized by now, bare this out.

Since 1980, the rate of incarceration in the U.S. has gone up 800%. What this means in terms of today is that 1 in 3 young people under the age of 23 will be going to jail.

Couple those stats with the financial juggernaut of privatizing prisons and there is little doubt that human beings have become a commodity.

“CAGED” offers a unique perspective about mass incarceration. We view it from the inside out and hear the voices of the imprisoned, the forgotten, the lost and the damned. They speak of a system that is harvesting human beings for profit but they also press the real need to heal and reform the system.

With your help, we will be able to give the material the production it deserves.

Our current political forces are looking to roll back any and all progress in stopping mass incarceration, making projects like “CAGED” critical education and resistance tools for the general public.

“CAGED” (and the documentary film about it) strives to become a mechanism that can inspire, instigate and can provide both healing and reform inside and outside of the prison cell.

CHRIS HEDGES: Princeton. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he wrote with the cartoonist Joe Saco. He teaches in prisons in New Jersey.

BORIS FRANKLIN: New Brunswick. 11 years in prison. Released in May 2015 at age 42. Father of Four. Assistant director of the New Directions program for prisoners. Currently a full-time student at Rutgers University.

EUNICE WONG: Princeton. Trained at the Juilliard School Drama Division received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, a Barrymore Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress, and a member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA.

SEE THE BIOS OF ALL THE PLAYWRIGHTS HERE: CAGED

PASSAGE THEATRE: Passage is an award-winning professional theatre developing and producing primarily new plays that raise the visibility of under-represented voices within our communities. For more on PASSAGE.

MICHAEL NIGRO: (Filmmaker) Michael Nigro is an award-winning filmmaker, six-time Emmy-nominated writer-director and multi-media journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. More on his documentary UNCAGED.