The Secret Lives of Numbers

InterAct and Mural Arts join forces to bring prisoners' stories to the forefront.

by A.D. Amorosi

Matt Slaybaugh City of Numbers

[ theater/visual art ]

"It's the city that I see daily — a city that struggles but also overcomes." So says Jane Golden, director of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, which for the past three years has developed a Restorative Justice program encouraging prison inmates to create large-scale community art. It's that gentle notion of rising above, of the healing power of creativity, that sparked Golden's first conversation with InterAct Theatre Co. boss Seth Rozin in 2008. Their mission: Partner up on a play that tells these prisoners' stories. Their method: Interview "life-term" inmates at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford and to use those chats for a theater piece that details the experience of the sorrowful and the saved.

Enter Sean Christopher Lewis, the New York state-born actor and writer who spent time in Philly as InterAct's playwright-in-residence for the 2007-2008 season. During this residency, MAP approached Lewis about the prison project, and the playwright — author of Militant Language: A Play with Sand and The Aperture — got to work interviewing inmates in June 2008.

"I interviewed a man ... who told me that he'd lived in Philly for 30 years and never had left his neighborhood. He'd never been to North Philly or West. My initial knee-jerk reaction was, 'That's horrible,'" Lewis remembers. "But then I thought, Have I left my neighborhood since I've been here? No. I decided that I wanted to [really] see the city."

Originally planned as a 20-minute play to be performed for the inmates using only their words, the project began to transform after Lewis left Graterford in July 2008. "On the final day there, I couldn't help but feel that we were missing a huge portion of the conversation," he says. "I'd spent time with inmates listening to their issues with the system — but what about victims or everyday citizens? Each day I worked on the project I'd pick up a paper and there'd be more murders. It became necessary to tell those stories, too — if the inmates weren't going to be faceless in this piece, then why should the victims?" Instead of hanging solely at Graterford, Lewis interviewed family members of victims and ER doctors, dug into public records and snatched bits of speeches made by Mayor Nutter at the peak of Philadelphia's late-'00s murder wave. The collage-like result — first named Killladelphia, then changed to City of Numbers: Mixtape of a City ... as statistics began creeping into the script — would become a powerful one-man show blending a dozen-plus characters' perspectives, including his own.

City's documentary feel and ruinous torpor is reminiscent of another real-life crime drama presented by InterAct, Thomas Gibbons' 1993 drama 6221, based on the 1985 MOVE bombing in West Philadelphia. But this time, after the savagery and sadness falls away, what's left are glimmers of hope and redemption, which Lewis found both in his behind-bars charges and in his own mind. "I never expected to write this piece," he says. "City of Numbers is a play completely about and for a community."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

City of Numbers, through Feb. 21, $25-$29, InterAct Theatre Co. at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-568-8079, interacttheatre.org. View Restorative Justice artwork at the exhibit "Color By Numbers," opening reception Thu., Jan. 28, 5:30-7:30 p.m., free, exhibit through Feb. 28, Thomas Eakins House, 1727-29 Mount Vernon St., 215-685-0750, muralarts.org.