This powerful account of theater, both in prison and in the free-world, eloquently reveals that those two worlds—and the people who inhabit them—are not distinct. This is an ethical, moving act of scholarship that matters.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, National Book Award Finalist and author of Thick and Other Essays

Well thought out, masterfully researched and heart wrenchingly honest, Ashley delivers a book for the ages. With heart and soul she reveals to us the power of theater to not only transform stages, she shows us how it transforms lives.

Shaka Senghor, author of Writing My Wrongs:Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison

This is an essential book on prisons in the global age of mass incarceration, the fine-grain deep damage that a crude system inflicts on human beings and their families. This is also one of the great books on theater, the shared and inexplicable phenomenon that shifts perceptions, changes lives in real time, and instigates collective reimaginings of moral action, hierarchy, and purpose in the face of unexpected vulnerabilities and difficult truth-telling. Prison theater is perhaps the one place where theater works as it did in early societies, with lives at stake, piercing questions of justice, and the soul of a nation or a community or a family hanging in the balance. Professor Ashley Lucas, herself the daughter of a father who spent more than 20 years in Texas prisons, writes with stunning insight, attentive to the nuance and detail of process within large institutions and informal groups, alert to the circumstances in which emotional life is transfigured and revealed, and the conditions under which it is buried alive. A deeply inspiring book that demonstrates hundreds of positive, healing, and creative ways forward from a misbegotten culture of failure and shame.

Peter Sellars, Director of the Boethius Initiative and Distinguished Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, USA