Prose and cons: theatrical encounters with students and prisoners in Ma'asiyahu, Israel

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This article details how a unique educational project conducted through Tel Aviv University's Community Theatre program tackled the complex dynamics of the prison-political system over nine months in 2005–2006. The program focused on theatrical facilitations between mainly female students and male prisoners—two more or less homogenous groups that represent polarized social sub-cultures. Drawing on the work of Martin Buber, Carl Rogers, and Augusto Boal, the prison theatre project proposed that theatrical encounters between these two polarized groups allows for deeper knowledge of oneself and one's subject position in relation to society. This activist therapeutic theatre model differs from most Boal-based Theatre of the Oppressed practices that tend to work mostly with isolated oppressed groups. The Tel Aviv program also differs from other prison theatre projects in Israel by moving from a model of individual transformation towards the examination of social structures, and in involving students as equal partners in the group process. The students represent the ‘normative society’ to which the prisoners will return. Thus, the prisoners rehearse being in ethical, rather than ‘normative’, relation to this society, working out ways of being—and being with one another—rather than merely adhering to externally determined guidelines for behaviour.