The IMC Building on Broadway in Urbana, IL. Photo by Alyssa Abay.
The best way to illustrate a point has always been visual, so why not be theatrical?
That’s the goal of Insurgent Theatre, a Columbus, Ohio-based theater group that aims to combine radical politics with intense theater. Active since 2003, Insurgent will be stopping by the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center on December 15 for its Lucasville Tour. The group will be performing its new play, Know Your Enemy, and screening The Great Incarcerator, Part 2: The Shadow of Lucasville.
Writer and performer of Know Your Enemy Ben Turk said that Insurgent is all about facing those difficult issues. “We try to make theater that confronts the basic assumptions that … maintain our vastly unequal and increasingly authoritarian and racist society,” Turk said. “So we try to confront and really get people to examine those underlying assumptions that are, often, unconscious.”
Mark Enslin, a local composer, actor and teacher, met the group close to four years ago during one of its previous shows, Paint the Town. Sharing an interest with combining theater and politics, he has invited the group back to Urbana three times prior to this tour. Enslin said Insurgent wants not only to make people confront the harsh issues that maintain society, but to converse about them.
“Since their goal is more to grapple with issues and with people’s thoughts and feelings and actions, they really take discussion seriously afterward, even if you don’t like what they do or have disagreements with them,” Enslin said.
The issue at the heart of the group’s new tour is the U.S. prison system and its intersection with human rights. According to the group’s website, “Know Your Enemy examines the role of police using stripped-down interactive theatre, critical understanding of history and the power of silent refusal,” while “The Shadow of Lucasville will be exploring the fight for human rights and media exposure through inmate uprisings in response to mass incarceration and dehumanization supported by the prison industrial complex.”
Turk said Know Your Enemy is there to see the whole picture when it comes to the police. “It’s about police, and the role the police have in our society,” he said. “And the way that that has historically come about and the ways that it’s changing right now.”
Know Your Enemy stars Turk as a police officer and neighborhood liaison who believes himself to be a good cop and acknowledges the existence of bad cops in the system. Each show, a volunteer is selected from the audience to participate in a mock police interrogation. From there, Turk’s character goes through some self-reflection.
“He starts to think more systemically about the role of police and his role within that,” Turk said. “A lot of contradictions come about, and then they get examined with the audience involved.”
Turk will also be screening The Great Incarcerator, Part 2: The Shadow of Lucasville. The documentary, by D. Jones, is a sequel to The Great Incarcerator, Part 1: Dark Little Secret, an independent film documentary that examined the conditions and rights of prisoners in the U.S. prison system. The Shadow of Lucasville covers the 1993 prison uprising at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, located in Lucasville, Ohio. After the screening of the film, there will be time for questions and answers with two death-sentenced survivors of the uprising who will be calling in from Ohio State Penitentiary, Ohio’s supermax prison. Enslin said that touring with the film is part of Insurgent’s work with activist groups that focus on prison issues.
“They see that as part of their tour,” Enslin said. “And I think they would hope that people would both see the play and the film.”
Insurgent Theatre will present its performances on December 14 from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and on December 15 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. and from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center in downtown Urbana.