The Road to Damascus comes to the Clifton Chenier Center at 220 West Willow St in Lafayette for one night only, Thursday, November 9 at 6pm. This new solo performance piece written and performed by Kathy Randels and directed by Odile Del Giudice uses the story of Saul/Paul’s conversion experience as described in Acts 9 of the New Testament as a call for an awakening to the role the church has played in creating and sanctifying the United States’ inequitable criminal legal system.
The Road to Damascus is produced by ArtSpot Productions, a 25-year-old New Orleans-based company equally dedicated to social justice and original theater, and is based in part on decades of experience teaching theater and performance at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. Designers Diane Baas (lighting), Kevin Griffith (set), Steve Gilliland (sound and music), and Shawn Hall along with stage manager Tricia Anderson, weave their unique artforms into this multidisciplinary performance experience.
In The Road to Damascus (as told by Grandmother to Little Red), Grandmother is an incarcerated woman who tells the story of Saul/Paul’s conversion experience to her granddaughter during prison visits as a way to illuminate the persecutorial nature of the system in which they live. They acknowledge one another’s sexual traumas and share stories of encounters with the Wolf and the Huntsman that leave questions as to which of these two figures is predator and which is savior. Grandmother casts her prison guard, who happens to be named Saul, as the Huntsman in the tale she weaves for Little Red. Through the telling of the tale, we all get to examine the perpetrator/victim/savior dynamic that is present in both stories, in ourselves, and in our national consciousness.
The Grandmother character is largely based on Gloria “Mama Glo” Williams, a longtime member of the LCIW Drama Club whose 52 years behind bars was the longest sentence served at LCIW. From 2019-2022, PDMNOLA led a “Free Mama Glo” campaign along with ArtSpot Productions, The Graduates, VOTE and St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church and its Center for Faith + Action to push Louisiana’s Governor John Bel Edwards to grant her pardon.
Consuela Gaines, who will lead the post-performance discussion, is an organizer for Voice of the Experienced/VOTE in the Lafayette, LA chapter. She’s a formerly incarcerated woman who served 22 years of a 47 years sentence. She’s a survivor of solitary confinement and currently serves on the Louisiana Task Force for Safe Alternatives to Segregation. While incarcerated, she participated in various leadership roles from being a counsel substitute to a literacy tutor; graduate of Office Systems Technology and Welding, just to name a few. Since her release from prison in 2016, she has been a member of the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls (Andrea James) and presented a workshop about Pardon and Parole Board Hearings for Incarcerated Women at the FreeHer National Conference in 2018 in Montogomery, AL; is a member of the local NAACP in Lafayette, LA, serving as the Criminal Justice Committee Chairperson; served as a Worthy Matron and Grand Associate Worthy Matron of the Order of the Eastern Star; won Best Essay prize in Popular Music in 2020, which she co-authored, “Sounding Lockdown: Singing in Administrative Segregation at LCIW,” which was published in ‘Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions,’ with Georgetown University Professor, Ben Harbert; she was in the second cohort of Women Organizing for Justice and Opportunity Leadership Lab (WOJO) under A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project (Susan Burton/California) in 2021; in 2022 the African American Heritage Foundation in Lafayette, Louisiana, named her as one of their Honorees for Outstanding Community Leadership; she was also in the second cohort for the 2020-21 Women Transcending Collective Leadership Institute cohort out of Columbia University, New York; she received certification as a Life Coach for Justice-Involved Individuals through Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, in 2022; is an instructor for the new women’s re-entry curriculum, “Life Support”, at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women; and currently studying to become a certified doula through the Ladies of Hope Ministries (Dr. Topeka K. Sam); Consuela is a proud registered voter who plans to vote in every election. She prides herself on being a voice for incarcerated women who’ve been silenced by fear of repercussions for speaking up and out. She dreams of opening transitional houses for justice-involved people.
At a time when Christianity is increasingly polarized by political interests and parties, this performance calls on Christ’s deepest teachings to help us look at the role we have each played in crime and punishment, harm and healing, and invites us to deepen our collective ability to look at and begin to heal the harm that has been done to our nation and its citizens in the name of Christianity.
The piece draws upon: Randels’ upbringing in the church as the offspring of two generations of Southern Baptist preachers; teaching theater to and learning from the currently and formerly incarcerated women at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women for 24 years; a decade of dialogue and action with St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church and its Center for Faith + Action around the ways in which faith communities can participate in long-needed criminal legal system reform in our state; and Del Giudice’s years of deep work identifying and addressing collective trauma.
We invite you to come witness this “Damascus experience” – and perhaps share your own – as a way to initiate or deepen the conversation around identifying the harm that has led to our current, dysfunctional legal system; and to collectively find ways to actively repair and end that harm.
The Road to Damascus runs 75 minutes with no intermission and is appropriate for audiences 12-years-old and up.
Please reserve your spot(s) by selecting the number of reservations you would like. If you would like to make a donation, you will have that option during the checkout process.
Please send questions to (504) 826-7783 or [email protected]
Photos by Shannon Brinkman
