Playwrights in Residence

Playwrights in Residence The Virginia State Penitentiary squats smack in the middle of Richmond, a graying wad of concrete plopped down in a dreary commercial neighborhood of decaying buildings. It is a maximum-security prison that houses 1,200 inmates whose offenses run from rape and robbery right up to multiple murders. Improbably, it also houses one of the country's fastest-growing and most enthusiastic drama schools.

There the prisoners have come up with a desperately passionate full-length play, Later, Jason, written and twice performed inside the penitentiary by inmates. It has also been performed at two prison farms, and this week WCVE-TV, the public-television station in Richmond, aired the TV version using the original prison cast.

Familiar Terrain. "It's an old-hat drama," Playwright Otto Jefferson Gibson says diffidently. In an eerily contemporary sense, he is right. In Later, Jason the generation gap between father and son is aggravated by the son's serious involvement with drugs. The son cannot pay the pusher who supplies him. Finally the son murders the pusher and is sentenced to life in prison. Jason's terrain is familiar; what is special about the play is that it is hardly an academic exercise. In this case, art imitates life with unsettling directness. At times the actors move furtively, almost fearfully through their roles, but their very awkwardness adds power to their portrayals.

Although Later, Jason lacks polished slickness, its honesty coupled with the experiences of its author and principal actors give it special conviction.

>Author Gibson, 28, is in his ninth year of a sentence for murder during armed robbery. "I went to rob him," he says of the farmer who was his victim. "No gun. I hit him with a stick. He lived five days and died. I got $560." And a 45-year prison term. "I was a fool. I'm so goddam sorry, but what good does that do now?" Gibson, a high school graduate, worked as a stone polisher on the outside. In prison, he scribbled the play on scraps of paper to kill time when he could not sleep; he would stretch out on his stomach on the floor of his cell after lights-out, sticking his hands through the bars to write by the corridor lighting. > Jerry Pulliam, 27, plays Jason, who kills a hood by stabbing him with an ice pick. It is grimly reminiscent of his own crime. "I killed an acquaintance with a knife," says Pulliam, now in his fourth year of a life sentence. "There are so many Jasons in here," says Pulliam, who finished high school in prison. > Thomas Abshire, 40, a clerk in the prison school, plays Jason's father. He is working off his sixth conviction, an 18-year sentence for burglary. Among his previous crimes: impersonation of an income tax collector. Abshire's is the most professional acting in the entire cast, for which he has a ready and plausible explanation: "I'm a conman."

Monotonous Pall. One of Gibson's and Jason's most ardent advocates is the prison chaplain, the Rev. Walter B. Thomas. "The Rev," as he is called by the inmates, persuaded the prison hierarchy to produce the play. To him it seemed a way of breaking through the monotonous pall that hangs over American prison life. The prisoners seem to agree. More than 25 inmates are now at work on original scripts. A playwriting course taught twice weekly by the head of the drama department at Virginia Commonwealth University is now under way at the prison.

Christopher Brennan, 31, public-service director of WCVE-TV and producer of Later, Jason, has unusual reasons to be enthusiastic about his experience with prison drama. "In the pen, you don't have to worry about the actors showing up late or about union problems or paying the cost of meals. If you want to move a camera one inch, there are a dozen guys rushing to help you." But he has more conventional reasons to be thankful. Brennan needed a scant $3,000, which his station did not have, to produce the drama. So he went out beating the bushes for it. An Episcopal girls' school gave $1,000; two Richmond businesses and two private foundations donated the rest.

Brennan now envisions a series of original dramas emanating from the Virginia prison. Says Author Gibson: "We're assumed to be, and probably are, the dregs of society. We never had an outlet before. Now we do."

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