One actor, many voices: Iowa City playwright looks at crime and redemption in ‘Killadelphia’

By Diana Nollen

When a crime wave turned Philadelphia into Killadelphia over the past decade, the city's Mural Arts project responded by looking for a playwright to give voice to the worst class of offenders, whose stories seldom are heard.

In 2008, they found Sean Christopher Lewis, a 2007 graduate of the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop, who was playwright-in-residence with Philadelphia's socially and politically based InterAct Theatre Company.

“From 2002 to 2006, the city averaged over 400 murders a year,” Lewis says. 

So in the summer of 2008, he began walking among the life inmates at Graterford Prison who worked for the Mural Arts beautification project, seeking their insight to form a 20-minute play to perform for the prison population.

“The painting project is one of the higher paying prison jobs, at a little more than 50 cents an hour,” says Lewis, who grew up about an hour north of New York City and now lives in Iowa City with his wife, Jennifer Fawcett. “Trust levels are high and behavior in general is better among lifers. They usually are the least dangerous in the prison because it's where they live. Since they can't ever get out, they have a routine. If anything (bad) happens, that routine gets messed up, so they try to make sure that doesn't happen.”

But as Lewis delved deeper into his subject, he felt the need to also reach out to victim advocates, crime victims, surviving relatives, crime scene bystanders, corrections officers, trauma physicians, politicians and others in the community to voice their perspective.

The result is “Killadelphia: Mixtape of a City,” an award-winning 70-minute docudrama in which Lewis portrays 20 characters as well as himself. Despite its stark theme, the show has “a lot of humor and a lot heart,” Lewis, 30, says by phone from Philadelphia in mid-February. He had been performing his one-man show there for five weeks. He's bringing it home to Riverside Theatre in Iowa City, from March 5 to 14.

“I saw ‘Killadelphia' last year when he presented it at CSPS,” says Jody Hovland of Iowa City, Riverside Theatre's artistic director. “I was literally on the forward edge of my seat for the entire performance. I found it absolutely riveting - a compelling collection of portrayals that offer a completely unique perspective on how we look at crime and criminals.

“Sean's skills as a solo performer taking on the multitude of characters is nothing short of breathtaking. Ron and I looked at each other and said we have to find a way to include this on our season next year.”

As with all his performances, Lewis will invite the Iowa City audiences to stay afterward for a discussion. The script has room to grow, and sometimes the comments he hears make their way onstage.

Lewis, who grew up about an hour north of New York City, discovered theater as an undergraduate at Binghamton University in upstate New York.

A wrestler, he says he “busted up my knee and my wrestling coach got me into a movement class to rehab it. The teacher said they were doing ‘Romeo and Juliet' and needed someone to carry Juliet off the stage at the end, but none of (the actors) were big enough. I fell for Lady Capulet, who was majorly into theater, so I became majorly into theater,” he says with a laugh. “The relationship didn't last but I'm still majorly into theater.”

He earned his MFA at Iowa, he went to a play festival in San Francisco, where he met Seth Rozin, co-founder of InterAct Theatre Company. Rozin invited Lewis to become playwright-in-residence. When Mural Arts asked InterAct for a playwright to interview their artists at Graterford Prison, Lewis stepped up.

He's been stepping up ever since.

His first steps into the prison realm were scary, he admits, especially since his only frame of reference came from film and television.

“It's strange to be walking through the hallways, hearing the sound of the gate closing behind me, getting a bracelet put on my wrist in case anything went wrong or they had to identify me,” he says. “And that was just getting inside. Ten thousand people are in the Philadelphia prison system and 7,000 of them are at Graterford. The common hallway was flooded with inmates, with nothing separating them from you. Also in the hallway are about 10 or 20 corrections officers with no weapons, because that would be too dangerous.

“It became even stranger by the time I left, because I felt safe there, then you remember where you were. I felt comfortable.”

He was only allowed a No. 2 pencil and a yellow legal pad to chronicle his interviews with the inmates.

He stepped outside his comfort zone when he stepped into the city to find more people to interview.

“I made some foolish decisions early on,” he says. “Philadelphia is broken down by neighborhoods. I'd just show up at a park and talk to people on the street. I learned quickly that was not the thing to do. I learned from the people I met, went back and did a more safe approach to it.”

By the fall of 2008, he was ready to refine his script and started contacting theaters he had worked with, in hopes of performing his show there. Beginning in January 2009, he was driving around the country performing and rewriting his piece.

The language and themes are rough at times, but because so many of the offenders he interviewed received their life sentences before age 20, he feels the show is not just for adults.

“I always have teachers say, can you bring this to my class,” he says, so he feels it's appropriate for middle school and high school students to attend with their parents and hear its message.

“The big goal for me is that we all know crime exists. We all know people who ‘have' and people who ‘don't have,' but we don't always hear from them,” he says. “When you hear from them, you really engage with it.”

A Feb. 15 show in Philadelphia “led to a big panel discussion between the mayor, district attorney and public safety director. It's an amazing honor to have a play lead to something like that,” Lewis says. “I'm constantly repeating that if you give people nothing, this is what they'll resort to. If they can't work, they'll resort to crime.”

FAST TAKEInformation: www.killadelphiaplay.com

What: “Killadelphia: Mixtape of a City”

Where: Riverside Theatre, 213 N. Gilbert St., Iowa City

When: March 5 through 14; 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; post-show discussions follow every performance

Tickets: $12 to $26 through the Riverside Theatre Box Office, (319) 338-7672 or www.riversidetheatre.org $12 student rush 20 minutes before each show at the door

Advisory: Contains adult language