Playwright of A Good Boy and Founder of Hidden Voices
In the early 2000s, playwright Lynden Harris had a vision for a company dedicated to uplifting the voices of the voiceless. At the time, she was Artistic Director of the Carrboro ArtsCenter, where she had introduced a series called “Hidden Voices” to this local company’s stage offerings. The idea quickly caught on, and for over two decades now—together with creative partner Kathy Williams and others—Lynden has brought empowerment, expression, solace, and some real change to varied and diverse communities in North Carolina and beyond. No community has received as much attention from Hidden Voices as the incarcerated and their families. Dramaturg Mark Perry sat down to interview Lynden Harris about Hidden Voices and the story behind A Good Boy.
MARK PERRY: How long have you been working in prisons? And how long with death row?
LYNDEN HARRIS: Well, our first piece was with women in prison. So that’s 24 years … It was 2013 when Peter [Kuhns] invited us to come work on Death Row. He had seen our piece on the school-to-prison pipeline … One of the guys inside actually read an article about us and tore it out and took it to Peter, who was this lead psychologist there at Central Prison [in Raleigh], and he worked on Death Row. He was the head of programs. So he came to see the show, said, “Would you come inside?” I was like, “Not right now, but give us six months and I will.”
MP: So that’s really interesting that the work opened itself.
LYNDEN HARRIS: Always … Every project happens because somebody hears about something else and says, would you come?
MP: Can you tell the origin story of A Good Boy?
LYNDEN HARRIS: So it was after a reading of “Stories from Death Row”, and there was about 500 people there … some big place here on [UNC] campus. So many of the families don’t live in North Carolina, but we invited families who lived in North Carolina to come if they could … So we had dinner for folks at somebody’s house, and then they came to listen to these stories, which we knew wouldn’t be easy … [T]hat was the first time any of these people had met someone else with a family member, a child sentenced to be killed. So that was really quite remarkable for them to first meet each other. And some of them are still in touch.
[Because the audience were] students and faculty in this [UNC] community, they were just on their feet. People were stomping and whistling and clapping and crying. A lot of people just weeping. And the families were stunned. I mean, they had never imagined anybody would care. And it’s not an easy thing to sit through these stories because a lot of them reflect on childhood experiences and these are their families listening to them.
So afterwards, one of the moms came up to me … I thought she was going to say how incredible that was. But she looked at me and she said, “What I want to know is when are you going to tell our story?” And it was just … chill bumps … I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I promise we will.” So that was when this started.
MP: What have you learned from the 12 years of immersion in these stories, in these lives and in this situation?
LYNDEN HARRIS: So many things, but one thing that occurs to me is how people are either in this world or they know nothing about this world. How very hidden, how very intentionally hidden so much of the Carceral system is … They just want to be under the radar. And I think that’s incredibly unhealthy for everyone. I think we really need to understand what we’re doing … we as a society …
It’s poverty, it’s underfunded schools, it’s addiction … We just finished this two-year project on reentry in rural communities and going out and doing those performances and conversations in rural communities. After the performance, the first thing, whoever the facilitator was would say is: “Before we start, I just want to know how many people here have been personally touched by incarceration? Either you or somebody really close to you?” Like 75% of the hands go up… That wouldn’t be necessarily the case if you did that elsewhere.
MP: What do you think the folks whose stories you’ve told—those from death row and death row family members, what have they taken away from the interaction with Hidden Voices?
LYNDEN HARRIS: I would say, as a generality, the men inside took away a certain amount of self-confidence, a belief in their capacity to make a difference. I think that creating that small community for a couple of years where they were all supporting each other either in telling stories or writing stories … that, for many of them, hasn’t stopped. They’ve gone on to write all kinds of essays and articles and be published and be writing plays and writing short stories … Agency. It’s incredibly restricted … Almost everybody in my experience is motivated by … if you offer them a pathway to make life easier for someone else, to help prevent someone else having to endure what they’ve endured, they will jump at it. “I’ll share my story if it’ll make a difference for someone else.” It’s just a huge human motivator.
MP: Do you have a sense of an ideal audience member response for A Good Boy? What’s the range of responses that you are aiming for?
LYNDEN HARRIS: [O]ur target audience is people who don’t know but could learn to care … I think it is that care and compassion and desire … the willingness. The willingness to feel the feelings, the willingness to be aware—oh my goodness, there are people in Hillsborough, there are people in Durham, that big building by DPAC … with the little arrow slit windows next to DPAC. There is some power to just being aware that thing is full of people. I think that the awareness in a felt sense is critical, because if you don’t care, nothing will change.