Ex-inmates further their Fortunes Off Broadway

BY Chris Lombardi

Cassimiro “Caz” Torres, a thirtysomething man with substantial muscles bulging from under his black T-shirt, stood up Tuesday night, hot under the lights of the New World Stage theatre in Clinton. “I am a husband, and father, and an employee,” Torres said, letting a slow smile grow on his face. “And I am a taxpayer,” he added.

Beside him, Kenneth Harrigan, a 6-footer wearing a cream-colored suit, echoed the younger man. “I am a taxpayer.” So did Vilma Ortiz Donovan, still drying her tears as she affirmed, “I have a full time job, and I am a taxpayer.” Finally Angel Ramos, a courtly, graying Quaker in a three-piece suit, said dryly, “I have three cats!” before adding, with a wry shake of his head, “And I, too, am a taxpayer.”

The four weren’t simply affirming their status in some sort of post-Tax Day ritual, but instead speaking the last lines of the Off Broadway play “The Castle,” based on their lives in and out of New York’s correctional institutions. The Castle in question is the Harlem shelter run by the Fortune Society, the longtime Chelsea nonprofit that has been helping ex-prisoners find their way for over 40 years. The play, hailed by Variety magazine as “profoundly eloquent,” has moved to an Off Broadway stage just as the organization works to expand its role from helping prisoners to more actively advocating for change in state criminal-justice policies.

In some ways, Fortune director Jo Ann Page said on Tuesday, the play is a return to the early years and the group’s roots in Hell’s Kitchen. That’s when David Rothenberg found his Clinton office full of ex-prisoners after the play he produced in New York, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” first depicted difficult conditions in prisons. Forty years later, Fortune has helped as many as 3,000 ex-prisoners re-ignite their lives. Most have served time in maximum-security facilities, acquiring little education and few skills inside the prison walls. Fortune staff reach out to them from the moment they leave custody, providing counseling, food, shelter and layers of transition support—from résumé writing and housing assistance, to connections with college programs.

Since 1999, hundreds of Fortune clients have spent time at the Castle, solving both their need for shelter and a safe place to do the interior work they know is still before them. It was there, Page said before the performance, that the play was born.

“After all these years, we now have David [Rothenberg] working at the Castle as a volunteer,” Page said. “We have this Thursday night rap group,” she continued, “and David heard some of their stories, and he said, ‘I think I can do something with this.’ So he got a few of them together, and they rehearsed in secret.” Finally, the group performed first at the Castle—a former Catholic girls’ school purchased 10 years ago by the Society—for Fortune staff and fellow clients. “We were just weeping,” Page added.

Now the play is Off Broadway, but the core of stories told by the four principal characters remains. Harrigan recounts turning down a music scholarship at SUNY Plattsburgh, as a teenager who preferred partying and girls, only to find himself sent to Clinton Correctional Facility soon after for a string of drug offenses. In Torres’ vignette, he begins recounting a youth marked by homelessness and “running the streets” with his younger brother. “You could always tell after an apartment burglary which one was ours,” he said. “When the police looked after for what was missing, every time it was mostly just the food.” For each delivery, all four recount their arrival at the Castle, and welcome into the agency’s web of supportive services, as a gift they had had to earn.

While “The Castle” has been running at New World since early March (and was reviewed by Chelsea Now’s Jerry Tallmer in February), Tuesday night’s performance was special. Tickets were sold for $250 for the fundraising event, co-hosted by former Mayor David Dinkins and Tony Award-winning actress Christine Ebersole, whose program invited donors to further commit themselves as a “Friend of the Castle.” More than 130 tickets were sold, nearly filling the 199-seat venue.

“Some of the people here are [Fortune Society] board members,” said Fortune’s development officer Aziz Dehkan. “But the rest is just people who are interested. And the play does the rest.” Dehkan added that he had seen “The Castle” four times, and “ Every time I see it, it’s different...One time, I saw Caz [Torres] actually break down in the middle—something I don’t think had happened before.”

To Glenn Martin, Fortune’s new advocacy director, the play exists not only to tug at heartstrings, or even raise money for the group, as on Tuesday night. “We have a criminal justice system that claims to believe in rehabilitation and redemption,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell that that’s true, considering how many barriers we throw up for ex-offenders. But this play—it re-humanizes the picture of people who, for one reason or another, have been incarcerated.”

Martin’s advocacy program is just one of the ways in which Fortune has grown tremendously since its beginnings in Rothenberg’s Times Square office. The program, called The Rothenberg Center, adds an explicit legislative agenda to the agency’s long-running clinical, job-training and alternatives-to-incarceration programs. It also comes at a time when the issue of ex-prisoners’ fate has become a politically popular topic; last month, President Bush signed the “Second Chance Act” in a Rose Garden ceremony that formalized his “Prisoner Reentry Initiative.”

To Page and Martin, though, the hoopla surrounding the measure obscures one of the key facts Rothenberg’s earlier play was meant to illuminate: that prisons are not the way to address the core problems of these people’s lives. “We need to expand ATI and take it to the next level,” Martin said, speaking of the agency’s alternatives-to-incarceration programs. Between 300 to 500 young men and women participate in the Fortune ATI program, agreeing to undergo the agency’s drug treatment, education and job-readiness programs as court-ordered alternative sentencing. “We have about 100,000 fewer people in prison because programs like ours work,” Martin added. “But they still call them ‘demonstration projects, even though it’s been 20 years now!” Other legislative goals include reform of the state’s Rockefeller-era drug laws; restoring state tuition benefits for incarcerated prisoners, cut by former Gov. George Pataki in 1995; ensuring that people on probation know they have the right to vote; and continuing to work to lower barriers to education and employment for qualified ex-offenders.

“Our first bill this session,” Martin said, “would ensure that all the background-check companies educate their workers about the state’s non-discrimination laws,” which provide means of ensuring that an already served sentence should not pose an obstacle to employment. “We also have learned that some SUNY schools are barring out people,” Martin added. “It’s sort of a knee-jerk response to the Virginia Tech incident—understandable, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Fortune’s clients are full partners in these advocacy campaigns, according to Martin. “We have a hearing next week about the Rockefeller drug laws,” he said. “I’m not testifying; people whose lives are affected, like Kenneth [Harrigan], will speak about how these laws have been both harmful and wasteful.”

On Tuesday, such advocacy was mostly relegated to the Q&A session after the play, when all four principals spoke gently about ways in which they felt the prison system had failed to prepare them for life outside. “They’re not equipped to do the job,” said Harrigan, whose in-prison job included working in offices designed to help with such transitions. “They don’t even give the offices up-to-date books to tell prisoners where to go for help with drug treatment or jobs on the outside. There’s no money for that, they say. Meanwhile, last year New York State spent $33 million on prisons that stand empty. How crazy is that?”

But most of the performers put such issues aside on Tuesday. They spoke with affection of people from Fortune and elsewhere who had reached out to them while they were behind bars. And afterward, both Donovan and Ramos told Chelsea Now that they were mostly looking toward the future.

Donovan, busy earning an associate’s degree at Hostos Community College, spoke eagerly of becoming an executive assistant somewhere. “I want to be the top right-hand person in an office somehere!” Ramos, now working as a transition counselor at Fortune, said his core philosophy is drawn from the Religious Society of Friends, the group of Quakers who reached out to him in prison and taught him a different meaning of bravery.

“Now, my goal is to get through each day without being somebody’s burden,” he said.