Description

The Drama Club at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women was founded in 1996 by Kathy Randels, social worker Lorraine Gibson, and 16 women then incarcerated at LCIW, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts' (NEA) Regional Artists Project (RAP) grant.  For thirty years, the Drama Club has been an important resource for creative expression and self-examination for hundreds of incarcerated women, and has performed for audiences inside LCIW comprised of incarcerated women, security and administrative staff, and very occasional visitors.

From 1997-2014, Mary Katherine Politz served as a co-director.  In 2000, ArtSpot Productions invited Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective to introduce African dance and culture to the Drama Club.  Kumbuka director Ausettua AmorAmenkum co-directed the Drama Club for twenty years, and in 2012 she helped co-found and co-direct a new program comprised of formerly incarcerated members of the LCIW Drama Club called The Graduates.  Additional artist/teachers during that time include: Laura Patillo, Brotha T, Zohar Israel, Michaela Harrison, Chen Gu and Amelia Parenteau.

In 2024, Rodneka Shelbia began serving as co-director and peer leader of the Drama Club, and since 2025 we have enjoyed the additional services of assistant director Maggie Tonra and healer Menhati Singleton.

Major funding for the program over the last thirty years has come from Alternate ROOTS; Armature Philanthropy; the Louisiana Division of the Arts; the Lambent Foundation; the Mellon Foundation and the Roddick Foundation.

Performances

• The Portia Show (1996), modeled after the Oprah show, was a talk show that explored race relations through a fictional family which Portia, the hostess, is interviewing. The mother, a maid for a wealthy white Louisiana banker, appears on the show with her four daughters. The eldest daughter is an "oreo"—a person who is black on the outside but acts white on the inside; the next daughter is a militant black nationalist and a former Black Panther; the third daughter, played by a white actress, was an illegitimate child by the maid and the banker; and the youngest daughter is a rapper who is getting a business degree at the local university. The banker's wife and legitimate daughter also appear on the show. The piece explored several elements of African-American culture and race relations in a light-hearted manner.
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• For St. Gabriel's Nativity (1997), the Drama Club restaged the story of Christ's birth in modern day Louisiana. Mary is an inmate at LCIW who is visited by the angel Gabriel and conceives the Messiah immaculately while on lockdown. Throughout the performance, the inmate cast members tell their own personal birth stories.
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• In An Evening of Poetry (1998), the Drama Club members read their own poems and staged chorally For Strong Women by Adrienne Rich and Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou.
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• In Waiting for Godot (2000), the Drama Club explored elements of clowning in this classic Becket piece that was often frighteningly relevant to the inmates' situation.
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• Gifts of our Ancestors (2001) was the first piece on which Kumbuka African Dance and Drum Collective collaborated with ArtSpot Productions and the Drama Club. In this piece, the women told stories about their ancestors and performed three traditional African Dances.
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• The Healer (2002) Kumbuka and ArtSpot collaborated with the Drama Club again on a project that explored traditional African concepts of healing through art, conversation, Adinkra symbols, song, dance and community.