Iowa City performance grows out of 1 man’s journey through incarceration

After tragedies spiked his adolescence, Mark Dotson, 51, spent nearly all his adult life in and out of prisons in seven states, including Iowa, for theft on the outside and fighting on the inside.

Art eventually became the light shining through the darkness of his mind and his existence.

“After 30 years of incarceration, I’m free,” the Mount Pleasant, Texas, native told The Gazette.

He now spends his time between Davenport and Iowa City, and is ready to paint a picture of his journey through words and art.

His solo show, “Undoing Time,” is coming to The James Theater in Iowa City from Friday through Sunday, March 24 to 26, 2023. Cost is $10.

Riverside Theatre co-founders Ron Clark and Jody Hovland of Iowa City have helped him turn his journal entries into a script, which Dotson will hold throughout his hourlong performance at Riverside’s former home, 213 N. Gilbert St. His artwork will hang in the lobby gallery and be projected onstage to create a multimedia event.

If you go

What: “Undoing Time,” a solo show starring Mark Dotson, based on his artwork and journals created during three decades of incarceration

Where: The James Theater, 213 N. Gilbert St., Iowa City

When: March 24 to 26; 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $10, thejamesic.com/

Talkbacks: Featuring Dotson on Friday and Saturday; Michelle Heinz of the Inside Out Reentry Community on Sunday

It’s being presented as part of Crooked Path Theatre’s season. Founders Patrick Du Laney and Christopher Okiishi of Iowa City describe it on social media as “a one-of-a -kind theatre experience from a unique and underserved voice.”

Tragedy strikes

Dotson’s life began to derail at age 9, when his parents divorced and left him in the care of his sister, just 4 1/2 years older.

“As soon as they were gone, a lot of bad people were coming around,” Dotson said.

Booze and drugs became part of his world at that early age.

He had some bright spots, playing trombone in band, being on the Homecoming Court, and raising and training horses.

But right after high school, on the day he was going to ask a girl he’d known since seventh grade to be his girlfriend, she was killed in a crash, breaking her neck when she was thrown from her truck. Her brother had died just a year before.

“I was going to tell her how much I cared for her and wanted to explore having a life with her,” Dotson said. None of his friends knew of his intentions, and he’s not sure she even knew.

Engulfed in pain, “it was so bad that it came to a point where I just couldn’t be there anymore,” he said.

On the day of her funeral, he tried to kill himself en route from the church to the cemetery, by ramming his mother’s car into some trees at 90 mph.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” he said.

And things worsened.

Criminal path

“My life as a criminal started about a year after my girlfriend died … as I was becoming a young adult, trying to see a future for myself,” he said.

“As soon as I saw a future, it became a nightmare, and I just didn’t have the tools to emotionally deal with such things. I tried, but after about a year and a half or so, I felt like I had to get out of there or I was going to end up committing suicide.

“So I was trying to find some way of coming up with the money to make that change.”

That’s when a friend told him he got $500 for some golf clubs he’d stolen at a country club.

“Being familiar with the country club and all the ins and outs of the sheds and locking mechanisms, I saw that as a means to an end,” Dotson said. “But it ended up being a means to a snowball effect that ended 30 years later.”

In 1995, he was out of prison for five months.

“I had a real good job in Dallas, but I was in the process of being turned into a criminal, I guess,” he said. And he began stealing trucks.

“When I first went to prison, I was young and they made me feel like there was hope. I would be able to figure out a job skill or something, and be able to go out armed with some sort of tools to recoup my life.

“And then when I got where I was going, it was war all the time — nothing that will benefit you at all,” he said of his life behind bars. “It was just young kids fighting all the time. So when I did get out for those five months, I was way worse.

“Before, I had a conscious. I felt like we’d steal golf clubs because people could afford it, rather than possibly doing harm to somebody that’s barely making it,” he said. “But after that, I was very cynical and I was probably one of the worst versions of myself I’ve ever been.

“Then Texas happened, and that worse version of me fit in very well there — being violent and just cruel. And then, throughout that time of realizing the reality of what I was living in, and especially coming to terms with the fact that what I thought was the justice system is a farce, and becoming disillusioned and very, very spiteful about things. …

“You can't put somebody in a situation where you're fighting like an animal pretty much every day, and then open a door and say, ‘Just go be normal now.’ It doesn't work that way.”

Finding a way out

Pulling himself up from such hardship didn’t happen overnight.

“It was just a very pivotal moment when this art exhibit was born,” he said. "It was a process that happened when I was locked down for 23 hours a day for years and years. There’s a part of me that just felt like I was suffocating if I didn't do some sort of expression to release myself, spiritually and emotionally.”

His art grew out of playing solitaire, keeping score on the back of his legal documents. He filled up page after page with numbers, to create a canvas that would offer something different. He started by using walls, prison bars, tears and clowns as the background for his drawings.

“But that just never sat right with me in the direction I want to go,” he said.

Then his mind turned to a memory that tormented him about someone he cared for.

“I never wanted to let go of that memory. …

"And I realized, ‘Wait a minute, I can use this art. This is my content.’ And then it just opened up this whole avenue in my mind of just this therapeutic way of being able to deal with this situation. It’s almost a new lease on life.”

He needed supplies. So he got some tagboard from the prison canteen, like the inmates would use to make cards for family and friends on the outside. Then his prison buddies started buying him colored pencils, and said, “Here you go, smarty-pants. Create. Put your money where your mouth is.”

Intimidated at first, one drawing led to another and another. He found “epiphanies” before starting on each one during his time in Mount Pleasant, where he was sent for breaking into a RadioShack in Coralville.

“Next thing I know, before I got out, I had 23 pieces,” he said.

From Mount Pleasant, he went to Fort Dodge at the start of the COVID lockdown, where he managed to avoid catching the virus. He was released in August 2020, and went to a supervised program at Hope House in Iowa City, where he’s stayed twice on his road to independent living. The other residents were some of the first to see his artwork and read his descriptions.

Their reactions gave him hope.

Sharing his story

He feels like he’s on a good path now, determined to stay that way. He has a daughter from an earlier release, and wants to tell her his story through art. She is his inspiration.

“There's plenty of days where I’m being tested, but because of my daughter, that’s why there’s no failing,” he said.

Four of his pieces were included in February’s “Art from the Inside Out” exhibition at Artifactory in Iowa City, a collection of pieces by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Dotson also has given readings at the Iowa City Public Library, which piqued Du Laney and Okiishi’s interest, but “Undoing Time” is Dotson’s first theatrical piece and his first time onstage.

Hovland and Clark learned of Dotson through their former graduate school mentor, Bruce Levitt, a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who also runs a theater program in Upstate New York. He and Dotson met in a Zoom meeting through the Justice Arts Coalition, a national resource for people creating art in and around the criminal legal system.

“He recognized Mark as a storyteller, as somebody who had particular skills,” Clark said, and when Levitt found out that Dotson was living in Iowa City, arranged for them to meet.

Clark and Hovland have been working with him since the summer of 2021, and have created a script highlighting six of Dotson’s stories.

They began by becoming friends, and then Dotson began sharing his journals about his life and the people he met in prison.

“It was Bruce's impulse and ours simultaneously, that we better find a way to help share these stories,” Clark said.

And Dotson is looking forward to sharing them through the notes Hovland transcribed and titled.

“Something I always take a lot of heart in,” Dotson said, “is just knowing all my pieces like the back of my hand, and knowing that there's people out there that are going through the same thing I am, and they don't have the tools to deal with it, either. Maybe they'll see something I did and say, ‘Man, if he can do it, I can do it.’

“Maybe that's all it'll take to keep somebody from killing themself or something.”

Related themes

Two other events in the Corridor also speak to incarceration themes.

ArtLinks

CEDAR RAPIDS — The public is invited to view and discuss works by incarcerated artists during a free ArtLinks event from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday, March 23, in Room 203 at the Coe College Dows Fine Arts Center, 1220 First Ave. NE.

After viewing and discussing the works, participants are invited to write short notes to one or more of the artists describing their responses to their artwork.

This ArtLinks event, the first of its kind in Cedar Rapids, is presented in partnership with the Justice Arts Coalition.

Host is Coe's Prison Learning Initiative, which offers hands-on experiences for campus and community members to learn about the impacts of incarceration and the carceral system.

For more information about ArtLinks, go to thejusticeartscoalition.org/artlinks/

The Mystery Hour with Jeff Houghton

IOWA CITY — Iowa City native, University of Iowa graduate and comedian Jeff Houghton is bringing his talk show, “The Mystery Hour,” to the Englert Theatre at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 24, 2023, as a fundraiser for the Inside Out Reentry Community, based in Iowa City.

The nonprofit organization assists people returning to Johnson County after incarceration. The program offers help with housing, employment, education, mental and behavioral health needs, and more. Inside Out also works with people in Iowa prisons to develop re-entry plans regardless of where they will live after release.

“The Mystery Hour” fundraiser will feature Houghton interviewing Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague and Inside Out staff and participants. Musical guest is James Tutson and the Rollback.

Tickets are $28 to $53 VIP, at the Englert Box Office, 221 E. Washington St., (319) 688-2653 or englert.org/events/

Houghton created “The Mystery Hour” in 2006 as a live show at an improv theater in Springfield, Mo., where he lives. The show jumped to television in 2012, and was syndicated on various FOX, ABC, NBC and CW affiliates around the country for 10 seasons. That ended in 2021 so Houghton could refocus on the show’s live version.

“We hope the night will both support and educate folks about Inside Out, and we hope that it will also just be really funny, and a great night out,” Houghton said.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com