Eight girls in juvenile detention, four days and a play that changes lives
The Harris County Leadership Academy, set in the lonely outskirts of Katy, is surrounded by a rattling security gate and topped with coiled wire. Guards monitor every movement on closed-circuit TV. Dorm rooms contain thin cots that are piled in a corner during the day and communal showers shielded only by a low wall.
A poster in an entryway, just past two steel-reinforced doors that lock shut with a heavy thud, reads: “What matters is not where you have been, but where you are going.”
In this place, where an infraction can land residents in an isolation room for several hours and sentences run an average of four months, any change in routine is welcome — and these teenagers are about to get a distraction so anticipated that one girl has been counting down to the date marked on her calendar.
They spot a woman standing in the center of the room. She is whippet thin, wearing black leggings and a purple tie-dyed tunic, her red hair twisted into dreadlocks that fall past the small of her back.
“Hello, hello, hello!” shouts Eileen, 17, rushing to wrap the visitor in a tight embrace.
“Miss Gypsy!” hoot Sara and Diane, as they, too, dash to greet Birgit Walker, the arts educator everyone knows as Gypsy.
Donna, 14, maintains her unhurried stroll, but a slight smile plays on the corner of her mouth, a sign of the eagerness slipping past her adolescent shrug.
It’s a Thursday evening in mid-June, time for a monthly session of the Children’s Prison Arts Project, a nonprofit founded by Walker to bring visual and performing arts to kids in three Harris County juvenile-detention centers.
For the next four nights, the young offenders doing time for everything from probation violation to assault will be more than their sentences, more than their troubled upbringings, more than their mistakes.
Under Walker’s strict yet affectionate tutelage, they will become playwrights and directors, actors and artists. The stars of their own stories.
The girls have to memorize lines of a short play tackling a social issue such as sex trafficking, drug abuse or teen pregnancy, create their own scenes, work out staging, learn the basics of acting — and on the final evening, perform in front of other residents.
All in the space of four days.
It’s an anxiety-producing prospect. What if they forget their lines? What if the other kids laugh? Or get triggered by the subject matter? Once, Walker recalls, an audience member reacted by slapping one of the actors.
Sometimes, the girls get in their own way. Donna was kicked out of the last production for cursing. Diane, a 16-year-old who dreams of going to Harvard and is set to be released within a month, aims for perfection but can give up too easily.
Then there is 17-year-old Cindy, petite, soft-spoken and a study in skepticism. In these first moments, she regards Walker from a careful distance, her expression a mixture of bemusement and doubt.
The other girls sign up for Miss Gypsy’s program to hone speaking skills, earn points for good behavior, practice performing in front of others, tame anger issues or simply to escape the confinement of cramped units for a few hours.
Cindy thought it might be a way to conquer shyness so acute that she won’t eat in front of others. Suddenly, she is not so sure.