Newsletter JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025
‘You can rage on stage, you can pour your heart out, you can walk in someone else’s shoes’ Searching for Justice—featuring four formerly incarcerated actors—sells out its first major performance at Steppenwolf. by Dilpreet Raju This article was originally published in the Chicago Reader on January 23, 2025.
Can art deliver more than just catharsis for its performers and audience members? Could a play spur meaningful change toward state policy? Two nonprofits, Mud Theatre Project and Restore Justice, teamed up—and sold out Steppenwolf Theatre on Thursday, January 16—to ask those questions by marrying a stage performance with advocacy for a clearly defined cause and community. Searching for Justice explores warring ideologies about the American prison system adopted by a journalist who is also a professor, an Illinois state politician, and a conservative law professor; the trio is loosely connected from childhood in Chicago. Mud Theatre Project was born out of a prison theater group organized by Mud executive director Brian Beals while he was serving 35 years for a crime he did not commit. The group last held The cast of Searching for Justice from left to right: King Moosa, Darius “DF” Franklin, Darrion a stage performance in 2023, within Dixon Benson, Tekamia “Queen” Cannon, Toussaint Daniels. Photo by Tone Stockenstrom. Correctional Center. “I guarantee you there has never been a play at Steppenwolf with this many formerly incarcerated, or currently incarcerated, persons before,” Beals said. Searching for Justice was the ensemble’s first major production outside prison walls for a large audience (the Ensemble theater seats 400 people all around a center stage). The performance was followed by a short discussion between members of both nonprofits. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take for us to be completely healed, if ever,” Beals said during the discussion. While he is not in the play, Beals was always within earshot of rehearsal and was instrumental in its creation as a member of both nonprofits. The play features self-referential story beats and lines, including direct mentions of Restore Justice and indirectly using some of the actors’ own histories. In recent years, Restore Justice lobbied Illinois lawmakers to abolish life without parole for youth and grant more opportunities to younger people in prison for parole—which Illinois originally eliminated in 1978—though the ability to get a chance at parole is not available to those who had been sentenced before 2019. That’s why Searching for Justice focuses on retroactive sentencing reforms. A bill in the previous Illinois congressional session would have extended the possibility of parole for people convicted from 1978 through 2019, but it stalled shortly after introduction. 6337 S. WOODLAWN AVENUE CHICAGO IL 60637 CHICAGOTORTUREJUSTICE.ORG