Starring at Juvenile Hall: Art and the Unusual Suspects

THE EYES OF THE 20 TEENAGE BOYS SHONE WITH CONCENTRATION AND the adolescent male’s love of showing off. The actors were decked out as scientists, park rangers, a gorilla, a tarantula, an exotic bird, a cheetah and “a boat with a soul,” among other characters.

The play was titled “The Eggs Weren’t Mentioned ‘Til the End,” a whodunit comedy set in a jungle. It had the accomplished air of professional behind-the-scenes involvement, and a limited run recently in East Los Angeles. At Central Juvenile Hall, to be exact.

Every cast member was facing charges of murder or attempted murder. Many, if not all, were bound for long stretches, perhaps even life, in adult prisons when they reached legal age.

“The Eggs Weren’t Mentioned ‘Til the End” came mostly from the pen of 17-year-old Irving Holloway. By the time you read this, Holloway’s trial for premeditated attempted murder, carjacking and robbery may have taken place. He may now be free (he says he did not commit the crimes), or he may be shouldering a sentence that will have him in prison for as long as 50 years before he’s eligible for parole.

Holloway has been in Central Juvenile Hall almost two years, since a gunman tried to steal a young woman’s car outside a convenience store at La Brea Avenue and Rodeo Road, then fired a bullet into the shoulder of a man who stopped him. The victims and a witness identified Holloway from police mug shots.

He was 15 then, a freshman and an indifferent student at Dorsey High School. Holloway especially hated English class, and if there was a drama program at Dorsey, he was not aware of it.

Out of boredom at juvie hall, however, Holloway signed up for a play being mounted by a volunteer theater group called The Unusual Suspects. Thus did the shy English-hater begin his metamorphosis into playwright.

The Unusual Suspects is the creation of Laura Leigh Hughes, an actress who, after the 1992 riots, resolved to do something positive for at-risk kids in the city. She recruited volunteers from professional theater to help teenagers in foster care and in Central Juvenile Hall write and perform plays. In 2000, The Unusual Suspects staged six full productions on a total budget of $27,000.

At Juvenile Hall, The Unusual Suspects focuses on inmates who wear the bright orange coveralls of high-risk offenders. “When you work with them and get to know them, they’re just like any other children,” Hughes says. “You get to see the sweetness in them and the compassion and the damage that’s been done to them. To see them going away for life--and it happening in silence--makes me think, ‘Why is there no uproar about this?’ ”

Irving Holloway has been in three productions and was the principal writer on the most recent two. During the writing of “The Eggs Weren’t Mentioned ‘Til the End,” he learned something about a writer’s power.

“When you’re the main person writing, all the other guys come to you, saying, ‘Make me the killer. Make me the killer,’ and as the main guy, you’ve got to say, ‘No, I got a different idea.’ ”

Doing a play in a youth prison is fraught with special uncertainties. Principal participants keep getting dispatched to their adult-sized fates in the midst of rehearsals. In the second play, Holloway, a reluctant actor, had to take on the main role because the inmate who’d been rehearsing it was abruptly sent away.

Holloway is no romantic about the transformative effects of The Unusual Suspects. “You have to change yourself,” he says. “I don’t think other people can change you.” Yet the experience gives participants a new respect for one another, racial and gang lines notwithstanding. “You can see the joy on everybody’s face, black and Latino, when guys are talking about the play, trying to get it right,” he says.

I know a mother who, when her small daughter asked, “Why do people use guns?” replied, “Because they can’t use words.” Something like this may be going on in Holloway’s case. It’s been amply demonstrated in several studies that a significant percentage of even case-hardened adult prison inmates change after being seduced into making art.

“Art shows them ways to repent and reflect on why they’re in prison,” says Paul Minicucci, the former head of California’s official Arts in Corrections program, now deputy director of the California Arts Council. “It’s real hard to lie in art.”

Even if Holloway is on his way to an entire adulthood behind bars, he can take a little solace in this: Significant art programs exist in every one of the state’s prisons. Wherever he spends the ensuing years, he, and we, have reason to hope his words don’t stop flowing.