The Law: Prison Playwright

"I was going insane in that room," says "Roach" Brown. A onetime street hustler convicted of murder, he was talking about his solitary confinement after a 1968 riot at the Lorton Reformatory near Washington, D.C. Brown lost track of time—first the date, then the day of the week, eventually even night and day. "I used to talk to myself and laugh and cry," he remembers. "I wanted someone to see me, to say they cared." Finally, one day, the sliding panel in his cell door clicked open, a hand reached in with two packs of cigarettes plus a ration of candy, and a guard's voice said, "Merry Christmas."

Somehow, starting from the absurd incongruity of that gesture, Rhozier Theopelius Brown Jr. began his trip back to sanity. He scratched "Christmas in prison" in the dust under his bunk, and then he began expanding the phrase into a poem. Released from solitary after seven months, he found the poem growing into a play. He started scrounging materials for a stage set and recruiting prisoners as actors. He and 18 other inmates were finally allowed to put on the play. "Most guys came to ridicule us," says Brown. "If we had laid an egg, it would have meant a lot of embarrassment, because there's no place to hide in a prison."

The play was a success, and since then, "The Inner Voices," as Brown's theater group is now known, have made 463 trips outside the prison to perform various plays and participate in community discussions. Last week the Public Broadcasting Service network showed an hour-long program about one such encounter. It included excerpts from Brown's Christmas play; then, in a question period, members of the audience incredulously asked the actors about the reality of such scenes as the casual murder of a convict by three other prisoners.

Roach Brown insists that his play about how various prisoners react to Christmas is all too accurate. Indeed, after every trip outside, it has taken all his strength to readjust to prison. "Sometimes I think it's harder doing time this way than staying in Lorton all the time," says Brown. "Comin' back in, I move slow. Try to get the feel in the air. I take three times as long to put on my shoes, lace 'em up. I got to get the feel. If I can't, if I laugh or tell a joke 'cause I'm feeling good and haven't felt the vibes of the prison—if I can't get with the mood, the agony, the pain of the place, I could get killed, and it would be just another accident. That's prison."

But Brown and the other actors always go back. Brown himself has been out some 800 times. In addition to supervising The Inner Voices, he has taught drama courses to workers at the National Institute of Mental Health, reported on prison life before various groups of Senators and Congressmen.