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This year’s Eugene O’Neill Festival is aiming to showcase the late playwright’s melding of the personal and political with an original, contemporary production this year that has become all the more relevant in the Tri-Valley and throughout the country in the years since it was first created and produced.
Georgia-based actor and playwright Lee Osorio’s “Prisontown” marks the first time since 2022 that the annual festival has featured a modern play in addition to work by the renowned playwright who spent his later career and retirement in the San Ramon Valley at the Tao House.
While a lot has happened in the years since “Prisontown” was first produced in 2017, the play is more relevant than ever, according to festival organizers.
Questions and concerns about incarceration have proliferated in the Tri-Valley in recent years, including activism and legal and legislative action over in-custody deaths at Santa Rita Jail, and the closure of the scandal-ridden Federal Correctional Institution Dublin last year – as well as concerns over its potential reopening as an immigration detention facility.
According to director Richard Perez, the play is coming to the Tri-Valley at a time when Californians in particular “are being forced to confront the moral and human cost of mass incarceration”.
“What makes this play so urgent is not only its political relevance, but its emotional depth,” Perez said in his director’s note. “Like the work of Eugene O’Neill, ‘Prisontown’ grapples with the weight of inherited trauma, fractured family bonds, and the deep yearning for redemption in the face of systems that seem immovable.”
The plot of the semi-autobiographical play – which stars Osorio – begins with a question the protagonist receives from his immigration attorney brother: “How much of an activist are you?”
Although that’s a question many in the Tri-Valley have faced amid increased scrutiny of the county jail and former prison housed in Dublin, the story is based primarily on Osorio’s own experiences revisiting his former hometown – the real-life “Prisontown” of Lumpkin, Ga.
“My in through my brother, and going back and talking to people who lived there, was just another example of me being forced to see something that so many of us don’t,” Osorio said.
Osorio said that the play is about 90% real, excluding the ghost who the protagonist encounters upon his return to his hometown. He and his brother – an attorney for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose deportation to El Salvador in March under what was called an “administrative error” and ongoing court proceedings have garnered national headlines – grew up in Lumpkin as the former agricultural town began to struggle in the present day amid a shift away from farming.
Since then, Lumpkin has gone on to be home to the Stewart Detention Center, which was established in 2004 – and which, Osorio said, has become the town’s primary economic force.
“One of the reasons that the story of Lumpkin and the detention center caught my eye in the way that it did is because I am the son of an immigrant,” Osorio said.
That experience also motivated his brother’s career, Osorio said, as well as making him think about the town in a new way as he visited and reflected on the detention center at his brother’s suggestion.
“It made me think about my dad, who was naturalized in the ’90s, but very easily could have ended up in a detention center,” Osorio said. “Or if we never left Lumpkin, I could have ended up as a guard there. So just how easily our lives can end up in very, very different places.”
While the story is centered on one small town and one primary character, Osorio said that “Prisontown” has served as a way for him to understand and explore the greater issues with incarceration throughout the country, despite their vastness and complexity as a whole.
“We live in a very extractive economy and environment writ large, and it doesn’t lead to good things,” Osorio said. “It can’t go on forever, and I think we are approaching the limit of how much we can extract.”
Osorio said that he believes the overall message of the ghost to his character in the play – urging him to truly see and understand the situation that has developed in his hometown – is what is needed on a larger scale in the present day. But so are more concrete steps.
“One of the central questions of the play is ‘how much of an activist are you?’ and along with that question comes ‘what do I do?'” Osorio said. “The easy way is to give money. There are people that I give to monthly, and I always encourage people if you want to do something super simple, give however much you are able to give in this moment.”
“The second thing is to really reflect on where you can have the biggest impact, which really means who is closest to you, what can you do in your community, start small,” he continued. “There are conversations that we can have with people that we love that we know think differently than us.”
“Start small, but start in your own community, and start. Don’t get paralyzed by how big these problems are,” he added. “The impact you can have is meaningful, even if it doesn’t feel like you’re solving the big, big problem.”
Osorio is set to discuss that and other questions later this month when “Prisontown” kicks off this year’s Eugene O’Neill Festival, with both showings set to feature Q&A periods following the play.
Eric Fraisher Hayes, the festival’s artistic director, also pointed to the importance of a shared discussion on the questions raised by “Prisontown” and said that Osorio’s “questioning of himself leads to questions for all of us”.
“In recognizing that we share many of the same questions, we come closer to shared answers,” Hayes said. “Prisontown is an important piece of theatre at an important time.”
“Prisontown” is set to kick off with a Saturday evening performance Aug. 23 followed by a Sunday matinee Aug. 24, both at the Veterans Memorial Building at 400 Hartz Ave. in downtown Danville. Tickets and more information are available at eugeneoneill.org.
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