Noelle Ghoussaini
Julia Steele Allen (right) based her performance piece on letters exchanged with Sara “Mariposa” Fonseca.
It was the tweezers that sealed her fate. Authorities at the California Institution for Women, near Los Angeles, deemed the item a “class-A weapon” and sentenced their possessor, inmate Sara “Mariposa” Fonseca, to 15 months in solitary confinement.
As often happens to prisoners in solitary — locked down in tiny cells for at least 23 hours a day — this sentence was extended due to subsequent infractions. After more than two years of extreme isolation, Mariposa ended up in the prison psych unit, where she remains, likely until her 2018 release.
Something else came from her ordeal: a work of art.
Mariposa and the Saint is based on letters between Mariposa, nicknamed for her butterfly tattoo, and Julia Steele Allen, a New York-based actor and activist. The 45-minute play stars Allen and one other actor, a masked corrections officer; it’s followed by a discussion featuring advocates and former prisoners. There are five planned Wisconsin performances, including two in Madison sponsored by Wisdom and the Prison Ministry Project.
The Wisconsin stops are part of an eight-state tour that began last September. To date, the play, which earned a positive notice in The New Yorker, has been performed about four dozen times.
In Wisconsin and elsewhere, the shattering reality of solitary confinement is receiving long-overdue scrutiny. It’s an environment, faced by about 80,000 U.S. prisoners, that invites madness, self-mutilation and suicide, all financed with tax dollars.
“I never ever thought I would find myself crippled by a concrete box,” the character Mariposa says at one point. “I never thought of myself as weak before, but here I was losing my ability to breathe, shaking, sweating, heart pounding out of my chest. Weak.”
The saint in the play’s title, Allen explains, is an entity Mariposa creates in her mind. “You split your spirit to maintain your sanity,” Mariposa says, adding that the self that she splits into is “the person I strive to be.”
For the rest of us, just caring about the people we pay to lock in tiny cages would be a worthy aspiration.
Mariposa and the Saint will be performed at the Goodman Community Center on Sunday, April 24, at 7 p.m., and at the First Congregational Church of Christ on Tuesday, April 26, at 7 p.m. Both shows are free, but donations are encouraged.
