It’s in the Title
In the summer of 2023, several men on death row in Mississippi performed "Death of a Salesman," facilitated by outside artists Alison Turner and Julie Rada. This production made visible to prison staff, other incarcerated people, and a small public audience, that these men are creative, collaborative, and committed to finding beauty and joy in an environment designed to destroy expression and life.
Imagine you’re sitting in a circle with nine other people holding the same script of a canonical play. Your circle is dead center of a stuffy gym without air conditioning in Mississippi and it is July. Birds swoop and puddles of water linger on the floor from the last rain. In four days most of the people holding this sweating, canonical script will perform this play, though it is clear now that most people in the circle have not yet read it. Imagine the script everyone holds is Death of a Salesman, and that six of the people in the circle wear red pants, which means that they live on death row and that the gym that holds you is in a prison. Imagine the heavy silence that follows when one of the men living on death row says of the play Death of a Salesman that the point of the play is that“We know the main character’s going to die because it’s in the title.” You can’t breathe until he finishes his thought: “Knowing he will die makes us care about him the whole time.”
Before joining the circle of men living on death row in the stuffy gym full of birds and holes and puddles, you would have already been granted access to Mississippi State Penitentiary through a large gate off Highway 49 in the Mississippi Delta. After showing the guard your ID and answering “no” to her question about whether you have weapons in your vehicle, you would have entered the former plantation, also known as Parchman, sprawled across 18,000 acres in Sunflower County. As of 2025, around 2,500 men are incarcerated at Parchman, and the racial disparity makes visible the living haunting of the region’s history: 1,592 Black residents, almost twice as many as the 840 white residents.
After the gate, you passed the chapel, a hospital, an archives building, and an abandoned unit rusted over with Virginia creeper and wire. Those living on the farm who don’t wear red pants wear black and white stripes or green and white stripes, depending on their custody level. The vision of men in stripes working the fieldsmight feel like you’re in a Coen brothers movie if not for the real bites from real mosquitoes and the heat so heavy you have to carry it when you leave the car.Sometimes, if it’s not too hot or too cold, a man in green stripes rides a horse around the farm, moving slowly from one abandoned-looking building to another, each structure with a slumping front porch. Sometimes, ponies gallop through pastures, and people driving from one carceral unit to another stop to watch.
If you’ve ever been inside a prison as a visitor, volunteer, or staff member, you know the drill. First, there is the security screening, ranging from performative to intensely suspicious depending on the day or the staff member or the staff member’s mood on any given day. There might be a security screening machine large enough to take up most of the check-in station, or there might be a table and chair and a guard with a walkie-talkie. You bristle a bit, unsure what will be scrutinized and what will go unnoticed. Maybe your earrings are too dangly (even though you wore that exact pair inside last time); maybe this guard on this day doesn’t want you to bring inside your sunglasses (though you’ve been doing so all summer); maybe the guard eyes your shirt and you worry if the prison clothes you chose for this day are the wrong color or too tight or too low cut. It takes only a few times inside to learn that the arbitrariness you experience during a security screening is just a fraction of the arbitrariness the residents of this place experience daily.
After you’ve made it through security, you pass through a fenced pen with doors on either side that will not open simultaneously, trapping you for seconds and sometimes longer, depending on the whims or distractions of a guard watching you somewhere and pushing the buttons to open the doors. When you arrive at the gym, you will likely have a few minutes, maybe many minutes, to yourself because the participants, who stay across a yard of fences and concrete, are only summoned by a guard after you arrive. You can spend the unknown number of minutes shuffling papers, relationship-building with any guard who happens to be in the area, or letting your brain push and pull over what it would be like to never be able to leave here.
Currently, there are over 2,000 people living in the United States with a death sentence, the title “going to die” framing how others see them. Parchman houses the 34 men living on death row in Mississippi, and the one woman in Mississippi with a death sentence resides hundreds of miles away among other incarcerated women. These numbers change, as convictions and executions are ongoing; the number has already gone down less than a year after you worked on this play, when the state executed a 79-year-old man whom you never met, but who everyone you worked with had lived with for decades. The cases that lead to death sentences in the South get a lot of press, but you don’t know these cases and you don’t know these men well and they don’t talk about it and you don’t ask. And you haven’t been in the South long and you don’t make a habit of looking up the people in prison before you go in to work with them. A few days after producing the play with these men, however, you might be at home and comfortable in bed, from where you open your laptop and Google the men you have just collaborated alongside. The stories you read collide with the actual memories you have of these people. They are highly visible online, but the play enabled each man to make visible another version of themselves, one version among other versions of what happened and who they are.Several of the men who performed in this play publish their own writing, some of which you can also find online and read here, here, and here. Anyone who reads some of this writing or could see these men perform in a play will surely be more confused than when they saw these names listed on the internet next to the summary of a crime. You become more comfortable with confusion. Again.
Death of a Salesman is about a failing salesman named Willy Loman and his attempt to connect with his wife and two sons. Or, it is about capitalism and masculinity, or about pride and loneliness. Or it is about a man driven to die and who thus lives with his own death every moment of the play. What can any of us know about Arthur Miller’s classic without seeing it performed by a cast of men living on death row in Mississippi? What can any of us know about men living on death row in Mississippi without seeing them perform Miller’s classic play? People living with death sentences fight every day against death, playing the role that reminds everyone, on stage and off, to keep creating the ways in which we are alive.
When the actors arrive at the gym for rehearsal, you can choose between turning on the giant, industrial fan for relief from the heat or to hear each other and be a little bit hotter. If you have taught a class or facilitated a workshop or collaborated on a project with a group of people who want to make art while they are incarcerated, then you have probably felt it: the specific form of focus that does not seem possible in any other setting, despite the best efforts of professors, teachers, and facilitators in other spaces. This focus forms from a group of people who have not only chosen to be in this particular room, but have perhaps looked forward to being in this particular room all week, or even all month, for how what happens in that room breaks the routine of food trays, count, interrupted phone calls, commissary, food trays, count, count, count. When a group of people are in a room because they are choosing to make their life artful within a system and structure that seems to want nothing to do with art, it begins to feel like attention paid to one another. It begins to feel like care. It begins to feel like anything is possible. Whatever that group creates begins to feel like a soft spot on an earth whose surface seems to have become hard.
When a man in green and white stripes and plastic gloves pushes in a cart of food trays, you must stop for lunch. No matter if an actor is on the cusp of clicking into his character, no matter if someone is in the middle of the most important epiphany they have ever said out loud, or if nothing could feel less important than food at that moment, because actually nothing is more important than food at any moment for anyone who is incarcerated in the deep South or, let’s face it, almost anywhere else. One of the actors, the man who will play Happy, is also a preacher, and he will offer a prayer before beginning whatever meal the men in green and white stripes push into the gym. Everyone at the table will hold hands, and why wouldn’t you let yourself be part of a circle, attention paid to what all of us have and not what we have not.
Most of the men on death row in Mississippi have spent their time there on lockdown. Before 2022, these same men were on 23-hour lockdown seven days a week, shackled for any movement outside of their cells. There are stories from men who performed in this play and from men who live next to them about wearing flip-flops for years—summer, fall, winter, spring—because someone on the other side of the unit (and not on death row) tried to escape; stories about plumbing so bad that one man stepped out of his cell and saw a turd floating by; stories about people starting fires to get the guards’ attention; stories about people having sex with guards, people finding condoms in the food—prison stuff. Stories of waiting to see if a friend who was taken to the death house across the former planation might come back, after all, because the thing about living on death row is that it’s never over until it's over.
In 2022, upper Administration had a change of the guard and listened to a few key staff members on the ground pushing for change on death row. First, there was the chaplain who cared an extraordinary amount about these men and fought for their access to programs, knowing that men with death sentences need programs just like anyone in prison. Non-profits, higher education in prison programs, and DOCs across the nation typically direct resources to incarcerated people who will“return to society,” justifying the time and money spent on these programs as an investment for all of us, those inside and outside, so that human self-improvement is bound up with contributing, being productive, and participating in economies of labor and consumption. So that another person’s life should be better because of the way it improves yours. Wouldn’t you feel better if someone leaving prison has read Gwendolyn Brooks, painted using the color wheel, or felt the vulnerability of literally (when costumes are possible) walking in another person’s shoes in front of an audience? (Wouldn’t you feel better if everyone you passed on the street or interacted with on any given day has read Gwendolyn Brooks, painted using the color wheel, and felt the vulnerability of walking in someone else’s shoes in front of an audience?). But art is not only for sale. There is intrinsic value in people making art even if—or perhaps because—they are labeled as people who will live in prison until they die (or are killed) in prison.
On death row in Mississippi, it started with a book club. This was possible only if the men in red pants gathered in the middle of the zone surrounded by a K-9 SWAT team with shock shields. Then the shock shields came down, and then K9 didn’t have to come every time the group gathered to talk about literature. By the summer of 2023, these men were crossing the yard—without chains—and spending time in the gym to rehearse for a play.There is always a staff shortage, so Major S., one of the first officers to be with the men with their cell doors open and their hands uncuffed, volunteered to sit on her days off in the stuffy gym with birds swooping left and right so that these men could do something new and creative. She watched and smiled and read along with the script during rehearsals. Actors went up to her for hugs and she talked about retiring soon, maybe in Florida, except it was hard to leave these guys. One day she brought muffins.
In theatre, you close the loop when you invite an audience in to watch the show.Of course, it feels good (and it matters) to play theatre games, to laugh, to imagine yourself as another person, but it’s only theatre when you turn to others: “see what we did?” If you have ever participated in a play, you know that it’s theatre when the shimmering of who you are shines through the facade of character, the both/and-ness of performing, of expressing and masking yourself at the same time. It’s theatre when this process of being-and-not-being is witnessed by others who are there to see your transformation. It’s theatre when everyone’s individual self-serving impulses and anxieties are subsumed by the whole, where the collective goal is prioritized above all else. It’s theater when a group of people work together to create something for another group of people, and believe with their whole hearts that what they offer to an audience is a new way of seeing the world.The play is the thing.
Every facility and DOC will tell you something different about who can and cannot attend something like a play. If you work your butt off, you might be permitted to invite a mixed audience of encouraging outsiders that might include lawyers, other volunteers, and teachers, along with off-duty staff members and approved residents in the facility. Some of these residents might wear red pants, other residents of the row, but most likely it will be men in stripes. If you’re really lucky and you really work your butt off, you might find a way to get actors’ family members in the audience. And maybe how hard you work bears no relationship to your luck.
Whoever makes up the audience, they will probably arrive early and all at once. When seated, they face the set: a water-stained wall, mustard-yellow plastic benches winged outward, and two rectangular folding tables leaned back the tall way. Enter Biff and Happy, brothers overhearing their father’s madness in the kitchen below. The brothers talk women, career, disappointment, possibility. Enter Howard, cooly rolling a cigar out of transparent tobacco and a paper towel (you could feel the audience breathe in with longing to smoke one, too); there is Charley pulling out a deck of cards that he and Willy Loman throw back and forth as they get angrier and angrier with one another; there is a plastic bottle of iced tea offered as a flask of whisky. Birds swoop over the heads of the actors and hop around at the audience’s feet.
In the q & a after the performance, people who already support the actors will stand up to celebrate their accomplishment. Chaplains, lawyers, and officers talk about hope, the actors taking care of their health, feeling the importance of getting out of bed every morning. A member from someone’s legal team might stand up and say I love you guys and mean it. There is an impossible paradox of feelings in the humming high of having seen a play that can exist only because of pain: to be so glad the play happened in this place and with these men at the same time as wishing that it didn’t have to.
An inevitable distraction interrupts this humming when someone in green and white stripes pushes food through the doors. This won’t be regular prison food, either, because you will have connected with one church group or another who knows the importance of home cooked food on special occasions. A preacher or a chaplain will bless the food and someone helpful removes the lids of pans holding fried chicken, mac and cheese, biscuits. The actors and the audience will break into worship song, and depending on whether you are there as volunteer, staff, or audience, you may be the only one who does not know the words.
A photographer in green and white stripes snaps photos of the play, the meal, headshots of the actors. If you are a volunteer facilitator, the actors might want a photo with you and ask you to share it on social media, and maybe you will, acknowledging the request of someone to be seen as an artist and unable to post the photo on their own; or maybe you won’t, worried by the weight of carrying either the brightness of the virtue signal or the darkness of what any victims might feel. People on death row have presumably done things that have caused profound suffering to individuals and families, and there are people out there who want these men in red pants, and these men in green and white striped pants and black and white striped pants, to suffer. What does it say about all of us that images of joy are political?
While you’re in the gym, tossing around soft juggling balls for warm-up’s, gathering up homespun props, or passing out certificates after everyone has eaten, it is easy to forget what’s in the title. Only later, when you are pumping your arms and your breath on a run, pushing and pulling your thoughts, are you weighted down by the title, of the deaths foretold. State-sanctioned executions are their own performance; death chambers have curtains that open and close. There are masks to obscure identities, there is a climax and a denouement. When the state has finally killed, the drama concludes. The threat is contained, and the public sighs in relief.In the official record, the loop is closed.
But until the state picks up the narrative, the men who act in a play about death while living with a death sentence continue living. Most people on death row do not have execution dates yet. Their cases drag on for decades through layers of courts, procedures, appeals, and hope.People who used to live next to these men have been released, exonerated, and expected to return to their lives and pretend that those decades of surviving on death row never happened. The man who plays Charley insists that when an innocent man is released, this is a cause for joy, yes, but also for acknowledging that the system fucked up: the exonerated man has been wronged. Who is pushed on stage when this happens and who stays in the audience?
At the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman takes his own life. The audience doesn't witness his death; they are suspended in knowing it will come. In the script, Linda,Willy Loman’s wife, Loman’s only mourner, cries alone at his grave, “Attention must be paid.” But in this production, you probably decide to cut Linda and her famous line. You have an all male cast in a homophobic part of the country, with minimalist props and time to rehearse. In this time and in this place, maybe this performance can only end with a question. When Willy Loman runs off the stage, every other actor calls after him, together: “Pop?”, a question that means more than a name. The actors will practice this again and again, inhaling together, and they will get the unison right at the performance. When Willy Loman runs off the stage, perhaps to die, and Howard and Biff and Happy and Bernard and Charley call after him, it is also men with other names—men with multiple names, as many names as you or everyone you know has, the names on birth certificates, the names your loved ones use, the names we call one another—calling out with concern, with alarm, with a question. Calling out for attention to be paid.
If you’ve ever facilitated a workshop inside a prison, maybe you’ve stayed late enough to leave with the sun setting. If you’re in a prison in the depths of the Mississippi Delta, the ground as swollen as the air, the land you drive away on was probably a former plantation, now gridded by long straight roads with deep cracks. You might see snakes resting on the warmth of the concrete after slithering from the fields that remember death and labor and suffering and pain and laughter and poetry. The sun is setting and you see it across a violent vastness and it should be hideous but it is one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen. If you have never seen a play inside of a prison, the feeling is kind of like that.
Writer, editor, oral historian, and scholar, Alison facilitates creative writing groups in shelters and prisons and is a Reader/Advisor/Editor with The GOAT POL, a community-writing project that supports disenfranchised writers around the world. She is the Curator of the South Dakota Oral History Center and thinks a lot about archives and creativity. She waits all summer for fall.
Theatre maker, educator, and scholar focused on prison arts and community-based performance, Julie has created performances with refugees, people with disabilities, youth experiencing homelessness, professional actors, and people dying in hospice. For over 12 years, she has created original works with incarcerated artists, founding programs in four state prison systems. She helped establish the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI) and now directs ACT Ensemble within the Colorado Department of Corrections. Her writing on abolitionist and participatory performance appears in Into Abolitionist Theatre: A Guidebook for Liberatory Theatre-making (2024), Prison Pedagogies (2018), and journals including ArtsPraxis and Theatre Topics. Julie also led youth justice advocacy with Mirror Image Arts, advancing policy reform and community awareness. She is Chair of Visual & Performing Arts at the Community College of Aurora and co-founder of Grapefruit Lab, a Denver-based queer multimedia performance collective.
