Buddhist priest works with prisoners for production
‘Like an Animal in a Cage’ focuses on the toll solitary confinement takes
Tonen O’Connor’s life has been a mix of drama and dharma.
She worked in the theater for 40 years, more than half that time as the managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.
Then, after a visit to Japan in the mid-1990s, she left the footlights and Fresnel lanterns for a more inward sort of illumination. She was ordained a Zen Buddhist priest and, after many years of service, is now the resident priest emerita at the Milwaukee Zen Center.
Tonen’s most recent project is the production of “Like an Animal in a Cage.”
The piece is composed almost entirely of letters Tonen collected from six people who have endured what she considers to be the unconscionable debasement of extended and repeated solitary confinement in Wisconsin prisons.
People who do not need to have contact with the 23,000 or so men and women locked up in Wisconsin, Tonen says, seem to prefer to keep their sense of incarcerated life vague. It’s not just that ignorance is bliss, it’s that knowledge is discomforting and demands some sort of response.
Which is the point of “Like an Animal in a Cage.”
“It seemed important to not just write about it, march about it, but to let people hear from those who are experiencing it,” she says.
“We forget people in prison, but they’re all people, real people, and sometimes we need to hear their voices.”
Once in a while, a thing occurs and we are helplessly and profoundly changed.
That happened to Tonen in the late 1990s when she got an invitation to visit an inmate in Green Bay. At the time unable to drive, Tonen rode there on a free bus that picked up people from Milwaukee’s central city.
She was expecting the bus to be filled with wives and girlfriends. What she didn’t expect were all the children. She just hadn’t thought about it.
Two little girls, in particular, caught her eye. They were perfectly dressed, their hair carefully braided. Their mother seemed tentative, uncertain what to do, and Tonen figured this was the family’s first visit.
The prison felt chaotic, Tonen said. Overwhelming. When it was time to go, “we got back on the bus and the little girls were in a kind of state of shock. They had both wet their pants.” So Tonen’s prison ministry began. Over the next nearly two decades, Tonen expanded her visitations to 10 Wisconsin prisons. Her health — Tonen is 85 years old — precludes such outreach, though she still coordinates the Zen Center’s prison program, which serves 160 inmates statewide.
Late on a recent afternoon, Tonen and the cast of “Like an Animal in a Cage” got around a big table at Plymouth United Church of Christ for an initial read-through.
Some were former inmates, some were religious leaders and most were active in WISDOM, a statewide social justice organization.
Before the reading began, Tonen set out a challenge: “Whether we can get people to care enough about people they don’t know, who are just off there somewhere.”
It’s about compassion. It’s about creating a compassionate response.
“That’s going to be up to us,” she said.
If you go: “Like an Animal in a Cage” will be presented Tuesday, March 20th, beginning at 6 p.m. at Plymouth United Church of Christ, 2717 E. Hampshire St., Milwaukee.