May 10, 2024
The best stories are not just one story at all, but many. From one perspective, Prisontown is a ghost story. From another, it’s a story about small-town America. Or a story about reckoning with race and history. Or a story about immigration. Or a story about injustice. I grew up in a town in the midwest not unlike Lumpkin. So for me, this play immediately struck a nerve about the way we think about the people we grew up with, or really anyone who took a different path than we did or has a different viewpoint about the world. Regardless of your particular flavor of politics, there is no denying that this has been a remarkably divisive period of history. It has been helpful for me to be reminded through the stories in this play that in reality, we are often separated by mere moments. One right turn rather than a left. One circumstance or choice that took us this way rather than that one. If I had stayed in my hometown, how might I be different? That me would still fundamentally be the same person in many ways, but also one with a different lens, a different way of seeing. Maybe in the end that’s the only way we ever get close to something like the truth--with enough different lenses that something more than any one perspective finally comes into focus: a perspective that includes seeing all of us.