Relative Captivity: The Playwright

“There are as lot of movies and books and TV shows about people in prison, but not about the people left behind,” observed playwright Margaret Thomas Kelso as her latest play, Relative Captivity, is about to receive its world premiere performance at HSU. “Their stories are pretty much untold.”

At least until now. Over more than a decade of research, she has heard many such stories. “I met with people who had family in prison--there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that people have to send money to prisoners so they can buy clothes and toiletries. I didn’t know that families have to travel 12, 18, twenty-some hours to visit family members in prison.”

"I talked to prison guards and people who had been in prison, but mostly I talked with family members." The stories told in Relative Captivity are real, though the characters are composites and otherwise altered.

Some of these conversations took place while she was teaching theatre at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where there are two prisons, just before she came to teach at HSU.

“I started researching it because I tend to write on subjects that people don’t talk much about. It was one of my projects during my sabbatical at HSU. But while there is a lot of sociological research on prisons, there’s very little on families.”

“I think there are reasons we don’t hear these stories. There’s shame about having a family member in prison. Even in neighborhoods where it’s not uncommon, there is still a lot of shame associated with it. There’s guilt—even when family members had nothing to do with the crime, especially children. There’s anger—at the prisoner, at the prison system, at themselves, at fate. And there’s fear—fear that something they say could make trouble for a family member still inside the prison.”