A National Residency Performance Project
The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) was founded in 1985 in acknowledgement of the inherently social process of theater. The organization has historically used theater with other means of public education, organizing, partnering and activism to call attention to the plight of the poor. With Agents and Assets, LAPD has initiated a national theater project that puts day to day experiences in a larger social and political context while exposing the root causes and policies that help perpetuate poverty.
The text of Agents & Assets is a March 18, 1998, hearing transcript from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (the committee charged with the oversight of the government's intelligence agencies). The allegations in question in this session were made in a 1996 series of articles by journalist Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News, which alleged CIA involvement in crack cocaine trafficking into the Los Angeles area.
Each performance is followed by a discussion on drug policy and approaches to recovery from addiction, including different models and metaphors, including the current prohibition and military models, as well as proposed public health models that emphasize treatment rather than incarceration. These discussions are initiated by presentations from scholars, recovery professionals, drug policy reform advocates, community leaders, and politicians, and quickly become general discussions with audience members. The intent is to create a discussion in which the lived expertise of community residents is engaged and presented and where all present can speak as citizens on an even footing.
LAPD has toured Agents and Assets and does workshops with local theater and social justice organizations that also stimulate awareness and organizing around policies affecting drug offenders. This project builds networks of project participants and organizers in different parts of the country who are concerned about the impact of drug policies on communities.
Agents & Assets was first performed in downtown Los Angeles in 2001.
In 2002, LAPD conducted a residency and production in Detroit. In 2004, LAPD conducted another residency and production in Cleveland, Ohio at the Cleveland Public Theatre. LAPD returned to Los Angeles to build on the work undertaken in 2000-2004 and performed Agents & Assets in May 2005 at the REDCAT Theatre and the Democracy Forum at JANM downtown and at the Compton Community College in South Central Los Angeles where the first town hall meetings where held in the wake of the News accounts in 1996. At the end of 2005 Agents & Assets was invited to investigate Dutch drug policy by the Vrede van Utrecht Frestival in Utrecht. In the fall of 2006 LAPD conducted another residency and performed Agents & Assets at Art Sancuary in Philialdelphia, and the Theatre Project in Baltimore.
AGENTS & ASSETS in Los Angeles 2001
January 2001 at Sidestreet Projects Performance Space. Produced by LAPD, Old Stories: New Lives and Sidestreet Projects.
Recognizing the devastating effects of drugs on the Skid Row area, LAPD has for years worked with recovery programs and conducted performance workshops with drug recovery program participants in Los Angeles and other cities. A pilar of recovery is that individuals become responsible for their actions. Agents & Assets addresses the role and responsibility of governmental social policy in creating or abating the drug problem.
In the 2001 production of Agents & Assets, cast participants included women from the Safe Harbor Recovery Program. Agents & Assets was rehearsed during the fall of 2000, at the time of the national election campaign. In California proposition 36, a treatment vs incarceration initiative was on the state ballot and was approved by the voters
Whatever the approach to the material, LAPD's themes and subjects are always immediately relavent to the lives and experiences of Skid Row residents. Although the ensemble’s artistic approach has been primarily improvisational — formatted to have both structure and improvisation, in order to best express what Malpede calls, "that wild Skid Row energy"— in recent years, scripted material has been more frequently used. The show running during this research, Agents and Assets, was entirely scripted: The "script" was the literal transcript from a Congressional hearing on CIA involvement in crack cocaine sales in California. The text was ultimately an indictment of the Wars on Drugs, but only out of its original context.
In this case, long passages of dry, undramatic material were delivered by actors unused to either memorization or the delivery of such material. Text and context were clearly more important elements of the production than, say, performance technique. For the audience, it would have been difficult to overlook the irony of hearing the words of educated, skilled politicians spoken by actors who at some point in their lives were casualties of the Wars on Drugs. I spoke with audience members who were moved by the production, and they all agreed that it was the act of witnessing an event so fraught with contextual weight that produced emotion in them, pathos for a plight, and not necessarily with the performer's character.
I cannot say whether audience members were moved to action after they left the building. However, there was a panel after the show, which included an expert on Third World politics and an expert on CIA involvement in drug smuggling. If standing at the microphone to address this panel during the after-show discussion, or even remaining to listen to the hour-long conversation counts as action, then I can say that a large percentage of the audience was provoked to action.
AGENTS & ASSETS in Detroit 2002
Agents & Assets, an investigation into the advent of the U.S. crack epidemic, was remounted in Detroit with four performances and post show discussions. The show, which was originally developed and produced in Los Angeles in 2001, was recast for the Detroit audience using a combined cast of LAPD members and Detroit residents from communities that had been heavily impacted by drugs and drug policy.
Five of the eight Detroit cast members were program participants and staff members from the Mariner's Inn, a residential drug treatment program in central Detroit. The project was developed during a month-long residency as a means of achieving significant local community involvement. Performances and dialogues attracted a diverse audience that included the recovery community, the Detroit theater and arts community, drug policy activists, students, community residents from the Cass Corridor area of Detroit, peace activists, and others concerned with the issues presented in the play.
LAPD timed the residency to build public awareness of the issue of treatment vs. incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders; an issue scheduled to be addressed in the November 5, 2003, election. Organizers hoped that the company's efforts would directly enter into the public discourse as people thought about how to vote on the issue. While no one actually got to vote on the issue (because it was knocked from the ballot), it remained in the forefront of the public eye. The Governor of Michigan signed legislation just before he left office in January that helped return sentencing discretion to the judiciary but left untouched stacked sentences, life sentences, and many other areas in need of reform. From this, LAPD learned that something they thought was strategic—scheduling the residency directly in front of the vote on the initiative—ultimately was beyond their control. However, it also became clear that the issue of drug policy reform is a long, protracted struggle that would continue to build momentum in the public consciousness. This ultimately gave the artists more flexibility in thinking how they might contribute to the debate through their residencies.
Another outcome of the project was the beginning of a "recovery theater," a theater group comprising people in recovery in Detroit who work together to learn theater craft and develop and present theater within the inner city Detroit area. The Drug Policy Forum of Michigan initiated an ongoing series of community dinners that include and involve a greater number of members from communities severely impacted by drugs and drug policy in their organizing efforts.
Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities
In designing the dialogue, LAPD collaborated with Peter Sellars producing group "Old Stories: New Lives", which had co-produced the public conversations and panels in the Los Angeles production of Agents & Assets . The Michigan-based Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP) worked with the company in constructing the panels and in involving Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) and Citizens Alliance on Prisons & Public Spending (CAPPS) in the planning process as well. Ron Allen of Urban Community Visionaries carried on an ongoing dialogue with LAPD Director John Malpede, leading to the formulation and construction of the panels and public conversations. The result was a profound series of public conversations that convened speakers and topics for discussion that have particular resonance in the host community and provided audiences with a broad context for discussing current as well as alternative policies
AGENTS & ASSETS in Cleveland 2004
Agents & Assets LAPD and Cleveland cast. Nov. 2004. produced by LAPD, Cleveland Public Theater and Y-Haven Recovery and Transitional Housing Program.
LAPD’s national project, Agents & Assets, focuses on communities most severely impacted by drugs and drug policy, and questions the pursuance of a military rather than a public health solution to the drug problem. LAPD’s approach brings together community members, including people in recovery, to share their lived experience and on the ground expertise with policy specialists, journalists, academics and public officials.
We chose to mount the show in Cleveland because it now claims the dubious title of “poorest city in America” and because we wanted to find out what happened to the reform efforts in Ohio. Agents & Assets’ public forums participants included, ED Orlett, former state representative and the campaign manager of 2002’s failed reform initiative and Dan Forbes the free lance NYC journalist who had broken the story of the Governor’s zealous efforts to defeat the reform initiative.
LAPD’s Alexander Anderson and Rickey Mantley (w/hats) lead a discussion at Y-Haven
Participants’ Comments:
“ This goes back to the root of growing, selling and manufacturing narcotics. We make more money on narcotics and the tentacles of it than anything else this country is involved in. Illegal drugs and legal drugs, jails, hospitals, treatment centers and all. See, this is the biggest business center in the world!”
“This is about conquering people, taking over Nations. The United States wants to be the sheriff of all of it, and we are! We are the businessmen for this enterprise: the world business. So, we are the victims.”
“Ohio has the second largest penal system in the US. Now, does that make sense to you?”
“The strongest asset that the African American community has, is a black man who is not addicted, who is educated and who is spiritually connected: that is our responsibility. I mean that is the antidote. “
“The smoke screen of the Iran / Contra is still happening in this past election. Where they took nobody looking at the homelessness, the poverty level, the war, and all that other stuff that is going on here. They took it and said: “same sex marriages” and “a woman’s right to say no”. And they’ve got all these people to come out to vote for this one candidate that stood on the platform of “God” , this, and “I believe in”. And it had nothing to do with the real issues and struggle and the cancer in this country. They stood on that platform and had up a smoke screen.”
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