"Pedro Castillo is Innocent" shows us how a whole family is imprisoned

[adamfrost]

Posted: 2/26/16 at 11:21pm

 

"Pedro Castillo is Innocent" shows us how a whole family is imprisoned

 

Adam Frost

 

One of the pleasures and obligations of a presidential election year is that we have a chance to step back and think about whom and what we care about most. Seeing “Pedro Castillo is Innocent” at Theater for a New City, my heart and mind were immured with the imprisoned Pedro and his family, all of whom were victims of an archaic and dangerous prison system that harms all of the people in it.

 

This play, which ran Feb. 4-14, tells the story of an exoneration, but unlike most exoneration stories, it focuses not on the victory and elation of liberation. That is the typical tale – the feel-food triumph of someone eventually winning, showing the power of persistence. That is here, too. But Pedro Castillo is Innocent instead focuses on the pain and the price of the time wasted, not just by an individual, but family, friends and attorneys. It tells a true American tragedy for our times written by a playwright and journalist who covered the case of Fernando Bermudez, who inspired the play. And this play shows us how journalism can lead to works for the stage, at once telling stories and showing us a slice of a bigger picture.

 

Claude Solnik, a business reporter today who at the time worked for The Villager, a weekly in New York City, saw a flyer when he was out walking. A father posted his grief about the fact that his son had been wrongly arrested and charged: please help us. Solnik began a long run of work involving private detectives, lawyers and prosecutors. After leaving the paper, he advocated for Bermudez’s release, picketing along with endless visits to prison to visit and plan strategy and months and years of waiting. Bermudez was exonerated and has continued speaking out for the need to do more to avoid wrongful incarceration.

 

A gifted playwright, Solnik, meanwhile, has taken the true story of Fernando Bermudez and used it to inspire a play that does not go into detail about the specifics of the case. Rather, the play focuses on an inmate and his family’s struggle in the huge gulf between conviction and exoneration. While TV shows focus on “just the facts,” this play focuses on the feelings and the situation. Pedro Castillo, based on Bermudez and played by John Torres, lives in stagnation and hope, reading the same classics over and over again, contending with jaded guards and crafty inmates, and meeting in a public room for brief, agonizing and tantalizing meetings with his wife Gwen and his teenage daughter Kaela.

 

Part of the power of this play is that, while being inspired by a real person in a real prison with a real family, it feels larger as if showing us a situation afflicting so many more. The dialogue is apparently inspired by visits the playwright had with Fernando Bermudez. But rather than sticking to the facts, the playwright fictionalizes some things, placing the character before a parole board, a paradoxical situation where one must admit guilt to be freed. This play is about what it’s like for an innocent man in prison, not specifically about the legal details of the case. Those who hunger for a feel good story of how an individual beat the system won’t find that so much here. Those who want a true sense of the experience of an innocent man and his family will find that.

 

When watching Gwen Castillo, played by Christine Copley, I experienced not just a dogged and sincere woman enduring ongoing suffering, but a whole world of women doing so day after day, month after month. This wider vision comes from the playwright and the director's shrewd decision to spend less time and energy on the particular details of the trial and the police blotter info about the crime of which Pedro is convicted, and instead to place before us vivid images that reach right into our hearts and brains and invoke our own family life-- shall we give our daughter a cell phone? What are my neighbors saying about me? I miss my father when he is away. When you finally come home, please don't fix the toilet—you’ll make it worse.

 

The strange contrast between the everydayness of their relationship, and the enormity of what our society is inflicting on them, keeps us within the walls with Pedro and Gwen and their daughter Kaela. Christine Copley's portrayal of Gwen captures this woman's stubbornness, power, sense of humor, and what one can only describe as regal loyalty. The point of this play is to show us what’s going on behind prison walls, letting us see how families wrestle with what occurs.

 

Samantha Masone, as Kaela Castillo, invoked my daughter and daughters everywhere with their intense, pure passion, hatred and love for us parents and our failings and our own steadfastness. This play holds up a mirror to an invisible America that, I believe, we need to see and should not ignore, while showing us human beings, not people reduced to inmate numbers. With so many people in prison, hidden away from the general public, a play like this provides a valuable window into the world not only of prisoners, but their families.

 

I have a friend who is a community gardener: He teaches us not to pull out weeds, but to divert their energy. His wife summed up the idea: "Life likes to live." What comes across to me about this family is that its life likes to live, even when the people living it have such a powerful reason to be miserable. It would be truer to say many reasons to be miserable, for the single fact of this man's arrest and imprisonment leads to a hundred sources of unhappiness: cold showers in an old prison facility, a prison guard groping Gwen during the entry search process, bagels with poppy seeds that Gwen brings to Pedro treated as contraband. There is an endless procession of indignities in addition to the central incarceration.

 

Pedro’s misery is so great that in the isolation of his cell he creates for himself an imaginary spirit, played by Stephanie Sottile, who both nurtures his hope and taunts him into despair. People when deprived of community must make it out of any material they can find, even if it is an imaginary figure, someone in whom to confide when confiding in others around him is dangerous or intimidating. Imagination is the last resort of someone who has no relief.

 

The evils, stupidities and waste that result from the simple act of long-term imprisonment make me shake my head in disgusted wonderment. I remember doing some work for a prison outside of Boston. It took two grown men a day of haggling, searches and locked doors to get a couple of computers into a prison and into the correct office where they belonged. I could just imagine what it would take to get some Jello to the inmates on a regular basis. Pedro Castillo and others like him live in the utter isolation that can go on for decades. This play in a few hours gives some sense of that situation.

 

In the midst of this insanity, Gwen brings what Hannah Arendt once phrased as “shining humanity.” Her description of her grief made me laugh in delight and then feel awful for her: “I cry at everything these days. I cry at the insurance commercials when the house burns down.” Just as she experiences the same pain over her husband’s incarceration, she watches the same house burn down again and again. Every day repeats the pain from a problem that doesn’t go away.

 

The prison authorities are represented in this play by Michael Shanahan, who plays both the guard on the cell block where Castillo lives, reads and dreams, and the guard who watches over the visiting area where Pedro, Gwen, and sometimes their daughter Kaela, meet. As a member of an extended Jewish family, some of whose members were murdered in Europe by the criminal Nazi state, it is impossible for me to watch this lanky, basically good-natured fellow say, “I’m just doing my job” when he stops Gwen and Pedro from dancing because it is “inappropriate physical contact,” and not feel an eerie awareness of the category of human behavior this “just following orders” falls into.

 

The strength of Michael Shanahan's portrayal lies in his successfully conveying the simple fact that he doesn't have a mean bone in his body. The creepy truth is that his body, and at least the surface part of his mind, is not his own, but is responding to verbal and chemical commands from the larger ant colony of which he is a part. The guard is a good person, but he is part of a huge machinery of incarceration.

 

At the heart of this play is the truth that humans are dual creatures. We are both drones in a large colony, and individuals with stubbornness, souls and creative minds. Pedro, Gwen and Kaela are both blessed and cursed by the vividness of this truth. Unlike some people, they cannot just go along, vaguely unsatisfied and puzzled at their fate, as so many in our culture do. They are forced by the accident of that night of Pedro’s arrest to be people with independent minds and hearts, and to oppose the colony in which they have been born and into whose hands they have been delivered.

 

Angela, Pedro's attorney, played by Kimberly Gomez, is kept up at night by knowing her client is innocent. All the witnesses have recanted. Only inertia, rigidity and lack of care keep Pedro in this hellish situation. Angela does, indeed, come across to me like an angel. She keeps showing up, keeps providing encouragement, and like all good angels, learns and acknowledges the limits of her magic. In one of my favorite scenes in the play, Gwen visits Angela and begs her to help convince Pedro to lie to the parole board so that they will set him free as a “rehabilitated” prisoner, which they will never do if he truthfully maintains his innocence.

 

Kimberly Gomez’s Angela, played with sincere, earnest purity, says she cannot tell Pedro what to do, but told him to follow his heart. Practical Gwen, now hard-headed but not hard-hearted, knows Pedro must lie to rescue his family. We don’t watch the case unfold, so much as the emotions of those engulfed by it. We know that in this play, Pedro will have to win in court of confess guilt to a crime he did not commit if he is to ever be paroled. We watch not only the family, but the attorney as she agonizes over what to do, how to win and at what price. We are Angela—we are not in Pedro's shoes; we can only root from the sidelines. Still, we are not just Angela. We are the larger community, the army of ants that make up the colony. But we are not just ants. As we watch, we feel compelled to do something to avoid putting people in these situations.

 

After the play’s first few performances, Fernando Bermudez, who inspired the play, spoke. After another performance, Alan Dershowitz addressed the audience. Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly imprisoned for 16 years, on another night talked movingly and precisely about what needs to be done. While most plays simply tell a story, Pedro Castillo is Innocent, at its heart, calls on us to become involved. Simply becoming aware is a start. Legislation also needs to be passed to improve identification procedures and prosecutors need to create offices that focus on reviewing cases for possible errors, encouraging a more rigorous review of cases of innocent people who have been imprisoned. These “conviction integrity” units are being started up, but are still not the norm. This show is more than just entertainment; it is part of a movement.

 

Some of us can find ways to befriend and support innocent people in prison and recently exonerated and released people. We need to hold public officials, such DAs, judges, and the police, accountable when they violate the fundamental principle that all people are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and if that guilt proves false, convictions must be swiftly reversed.

 

I came away from “Pedro Castillo is Innocent” believing that the evil the Castillos endure is a microcosm of that endured by all 2.5 million prisoners in U.S. jails and prisons. The particularly agonizing pain of an innocent man imprisoned, is surrounded by the massive pain of many guilty people. Guilty or innocent, people’s time, energy and good nature are being immured—walled in, frozen, and incapable, for the most part, of being used well. Think about how sinister this is—a system that discourages meaningful activity and thins out social interaction to the nth degree. This is how we intend to heal society of crime?

 

This system is an efficient producer of evils, shockingly similar to the system of slavery that Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography: a vast system that deprives people of the value and meaning of their work, that callously breaks up families, and where people’s spirits are warped and desiccated in inhumane conditions. This play reminds us that crime and punishment is not simply an array of facts. It involves families as well as facts and mistakes that, when made, must be rectified as swiftly as possible. The problem with wrongful conviction, it seems, isn’t the conviction alone. It’s that it can take so long to exonerate.

 

The play, however, doesn’t only look at an innocent man in jail, but shows us a guilty inmate trapped after committing a horrific crime at a young age. Michael Carlin plays Santos, an inmate who honestly admits that he murdered his best friend out of sexual jealousy while in a drugged haze. Michael Carlin lets us into this man’s world, including his real remorse and bewilderment at how he could have committed this terrible crime.

 

A loving society would seize the moment with Santos and help him out of this hell into a responsible life, helping him make amends and growing past this disastrous mistake. Our society does something quite different. This play deals with an important subject matter. This is not an episode of “Law & Order,” nor does it seek to be. While our televisions are full of crime shows, Pedro Castillo is Innocent shows us part of the reality that is often ignored, the punishment that can go on for lifetimes, sometimes for people who have done nothing, but been erroneously convicted for a crime someone else committed.

 

Pedro Castillo is Innocent sheds light on another America

 

Adam Frost

 

One of the pleasures and obligations of a presidential election year is that we have a chance to step back and think about whom and what we care about most. Seeing “Pedro Castillo is Innocent” at Theater for a New City, my heart and mind were immured with the imprisoned Pedro and his family, all of whom were victims of an archaic and dangerous prison system that harms all of the people in it.

 

This play, which ran Feb. 4-14, tells the story of an exoneration, but unlike most exoneration stories, it focuses not on the victory and elation of liberation. That is the typical tale – the feel-food triumph of someone eventually winning, showing the power of persistence. That is here, too. But Pedro Castillo is Innocent instead focuses on the pain and the price of the time wasted, not just by an individual, but family, friends and attorneys. It tells a true American tragedy for our times written by a playwright and journalist who covered the case of Fernando Bermudez, who inspired the play. And this play shows us how journalism can lead to works for the stage, at once telling stories and showing us a slice of a bigger picture.

 

Claude Solnik, a business reporter today who at the time worked for The Villager, a weekly in New York City, saw a flyer when he was out walking. A father posted his grief about the fact that his son had been wrongly arrested and charged: please help us. Solnik began a long run of work involving private detectives, lawyers and prosecutors. After leaving the paper, he advocated for Bermudez’s release, picketing along with endless visits to prison to visit and plan strategy and months and years of waiting. Bermudez was exonerated and has continued speaking out for the need to do more to avoid wrongful incarceration.

 

A gifted playwright, Solnik, meanwhile, has taken the true story of Fernando Bermudez and used it to inspire a play that does not go into detail about the specifics of the case. Rather, the play focuses on an inmate and his family’s struggle in the huge gulf between conviction and exoneration. While TV shows focus on “just the facts,” this play focuses on the feelings and the situation. Pedro Castillo, based on Bermudez and played by John Torres, lives in stagnation and hope, reading the same classics over and over again, contending with jaded guards and crafty inmates, and meeting in a public room for brief, agonizing and tantalizing meetings with his wife Gwen and his teenage daughter Kaela.

 

Part of the power of this play is that, while being inspired by a real person in a real prison with a real family, it feels larger as if showing us a situation afflicting so many more. The dialogue is apparently inspired by visits the playwright had with Fernando Bermudez. But rather than sticking to the facts, the playwright fictionalizes some things, placing the character before a parole board, a paradoxical situation where one must admit guilt to be freed. This play is about what it’s like for an innocent man in prison, not specifically about the legal details of the case. Those who hunger for a feel good story of how an individual beat the system won’t find that so much here. Those who want a true sense of the experience of an innocent man and his family will find that.

 

When watching Gwen Castillo, played by Christine Copley, I experienced not just a dogged and sincere woman enduring ongoing suffering, but a whole world of women doing so day after day, month after month. This wider vision comes from the playwright and the director's shrewd decision to spend less time and energy on the particular details of the trial and the police blotter info about the crime of which Pedro is convicted, and instead to place before us vivid images that reach right into our hearts and brains and invoke our own family life-- shall we give our daughter a cell phone? What are my neighbors saying about me? I miss my father when he is away. When you finally come home, please don't fix the toilet—you’ll make it worse.

 

The strange contrast between the everydayness of their relationship, and the enormity of what our society is inflicting on them, keeps us within the walls with Pedro and Gwen and their daughter Kaela. Christine Copley's portrayal of Gwen captures this woman's stubbornness, power, sense of humor, and what one can only describe as regal loyalty. The point of this play is to show us what’s going on behind prison walls, letting us see how families wrestle with what occurs.

 

Samantha Masone, as Kaela Castillo, invoked my daughter and daughters everywhere with their intense, pure passion, hatred and love for us parents and our failings and our own steadfastness. This play holds up a mirror to an invisible America that, I believe, we need to see and should not ignore, while showing us human beings, not people reduced to inmate numbers. With so many people in prison, hidden away from the general public, a play like this provides a valuable window into the world not only of prisoners, but their families.

 

I have a friend who is a community gardener: He teaches us not to pull out weeds, but to divert their energy. His wife summed up the idea: "Life likes to live." What comes across to me about this family is that its life likes to live, even when the people living it have such a powerful reason to be miserable. It would be truer to say many reasons to be miserable, for the single fact of this man's arrest and imprisonment leads to a hundred sources of unhappiness: cold showers in an old prison facility, a prison guard groping Gwen during the entry search process, bagels with poppy seeds that Gwen brings to Pedro treated as contraband. There is an endless procession of indignities in addition to the central incarceration.

 

Pedro’s misery is so great that in the isolation of his cell he creates for himself an imaginary spirit, played by Stephanie Sottile, who both nurtures his hope and taunts him into despair. People when deprived of community must make it out of any material they can find, even if it is an imaginary figure, someone in whom to confide when confiding in others around him is dangerous or intimidating. Imagination is the last resort of someone who has no relief.

 

The evils, stupidities and waste that result from the simple act of long-term imprisonment make me shake my head in disgusted wonderment. I remember doing some work for a prison outside of Boston. It took two grown men a day of haggling, searches and locked doors to get a couple of computers into a prison and into the correct office where they belonged. I could just imagine what it would take to get some Jello to the inmates on a regular basis. Pedro Castillo and others like him live in the utter isolation that can go on for decades. This play in a few hours gives some sense of that situation.

 

In the midst of this insanity, Gwen brings what Hannah Arendt once phrased as “shining humanity.” Her description of her grief made me laugh in delight and then feel awful for her: “I cry at everything these days. I cry at the insurance commercials when the house burns down.” Just as she experiences the same pain over her husband’s incarceration, she watches the same house burn down again and again. Every day repeats the pain from a problem that doesn’t go away.

 

The prison authorities are represented in this play by Michael Shanahan, who plays both the guard on the cell block where Castillo lives, reads and dreams, and the guard who watches over the visiting area where Pedro, Gwen, and sometimes their daughter Kaela, meet. As a member of an extended Jewish family, some of whose members were murdered in Europe by the criminal Nazi state, it is impossible for me to watch this lanky, basically good-natured fellow say, “I’m just doing my job” when he stops Gwen and Pedro from dancing because it is “inappropriate physical contact,” and not feel an eerie awareness of the category of human behavior this “just following orders” falls into.

 

The strength of Michael Shanahan's portrayal lies in his successfully conveying the simple fact that he doesn't have a mean bone in his body. The creepy truth is that his body, and at least the surface part of his mind, is not his own, but is responding to verbal and chemical commands from the larger ant colony of which he is a part. The guard is a good person, but he is part of a huge machinery of incarceration.

 

At the heart of this play is the truth that humans are dual creatures. We are both drones in a large colony, and individuals with stubbornness, souls and creative minds. Pedro, Gwen and Kaela are both blessed and cursed by the vividness of this truth. Unlike some people, they cannot just go along, vaguely unsatisfied and puzzled at their fate, as so many in our culture do. They are forced by the accident of that night of Pedro’s arrest to be people with independent minds and hearts, and to oppose the colony in which they have been born and into whose hands they have been delivered.

 

Angela, Pedro's attorney, played by Kimberly Gomez, is kept up at night by knowing her client is innocent. All the witnesses have recanted. Only inertia, rigidity and lack of care keep Pedro in this hellish situation. Angela does, indeed, come across to me like an angel. She keeps showing up, keeps providing encouragement, and like all good angels, learns and acknowledges the limits of her magic. In one of my favorite scenes in the play, Gwen visits Angela and begs her to help convince Pedro to lie to the parole board so that they will set him free as a “rehabilitated” prisoner, which they will never do if he truthfully maintains his innocence.

 

Kimberly Gomez’s Angela, played with sincere, earnest purity, says she cannot tell Pedro what to do, but told him to follow his heart. Practical Gwen, now hard-headed but not hard-hearted, knows Pedro must lie to rescue his family. We don’t watch the case unfold, so much as the emotions of those engulfed by it. We know that in this play, Pedro will have to win in court of confess guilt to a crime he did not commit if he is to ever be paroled. We watch not only the family, but the attorney as she agonizes over what to do, how to win and at what price. We are Angela—we are not in Pedro's shoes; we can only root from the sidelines. Still, we are not just Angela. We are the larger community, the army of ants that make up the colony. But we are not just ants. As we watch, we feel compelled to do something to avoid putting people in these situations.

 

After the play’s first few performances, Fernando Bermudez, who inspired the play, spoke. After another performance, Alan Dershowitz addressed the audience. Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly imprisoned for 16 years, on another night talked movingly and precisely about what needs to be done. While most plays simply tell a story, Pedro Castillo is Innocent, at its heart, calls on us to become involved. Simply becoming aware is a start. Legislation also needs to be passed to improve identification procedures and prosecutors need to create offices that focus on reviewing cases for possible errors, encouraging a more rigorous review of cases of innocent people who have been imprisoned. These “conviction integrity” units are being started up, but are still not the norm. This show is more than just entertainment; it is part of a movement.

 

Some of us can find ways to befriend and support innocent people in prison and recently exonerated and released people. We need to hold public officials, such DAs, judges, and the police, accountable when they violate the fundamental principle that all people are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and if that guilt proves false, convictions must be swiftly reversed.

 

I came away from “Pedro Castillo is Innocent” believing that the evil the Castillos endure is a microcosm of that endured by all 2.5 million prisoners in U.S. jails and prisons. The particularly agonizing pain of an innocent man imprisoned, is surrounded by the massive pain of many guilty people. Guilty or innocent, people’s time, energy and good nature are being immured—walled in, frozen, and incapable, for the most part, of being used well. Think about how sinister this is—a system that discourages meaningful activity and thins out social interaction to the nth degree. This is how we intend to heal society of crime?

 

This system is an efficient producer of evils, shockingly similar to the system of slavery that Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography: a vast system that deprives people of the value and meaning of their work, that callously breaks up families, and where people’s spirits are warped and desiccated in inhumane conditions. This play reminds us that crime and punishment is not simply an array of facts. It involves families as well as facts and mistakes that, when made, must be rectified as swiftly as possible. The problem with wrongful conviction, it seems, isn’t the conviction alone. It’s that it can take so long to exonerate.

 

The play, however, doesn’t only look at an innocent man in jail, but shows us a guilty inmate trapped after committing a horrific crime at a young age. Michael Carlin plays Santos, an inmate who honestly admits that he murdered his best friend out of sexual jealousy while in a drugged haze. Michael Carlin lets us into this man’s world, including his real remorse and bewilderment at how he could have committed this terrible crime.

 

A loving society would seize the moment with Santos and help him out of this hell into a responsible life, helping him make amends and growing past this disastrous mistake. Our society does something quite different. This play deals with an important subject matter. This is not an episode of “Law & Order,” nor does it seek to be. While our televisions are full of crime shows, Pedro Castillo is Innocent shows us part of the reality that is often ignored, the punishment that can go on for lifetimes, sometimes for people who have done nothing, but been erroneously convicted for a crime someone else committed.

 

Updated On: 2/26/16 at 11:21 PM