Letters from Attica

From prisoners to travellers, people have endured or enjoyed solitude of many sorts. They have resorted to writing letters as a means of communication with their closests. Sam Melville has done so from the Attica high-security prison, which he entered after bombing several governmental and cooperate buildings in 1969 in protest of the Vietnam War. At Attica, he played a key role in empowering and uniting the divided camps and races of inmates in the struggle for justice and human treatment, ultimately leading to the prominent 1971 Attica prison uprising. He would be shot and killed by police during the uprising.

While outside, Sam repeatedly expressed his disappointment by others and he preferably acted alone. Once in prison, after an initial phase of isolation and despair, he soon became close to several black and Latino leaders. As his relationship with other inmates grew, his perception of what was possible at Attica changed. One day before his death, during the Attica Riots, while standing in a line of men with arms linked, he said to a negotiator: "whatever happens, tell everyone that people here are as together as I once hoped they could be on the outside."

The text used in "Letters of Attica" is solely a re-composition of fragments of Sam's letters written between 1969 and 1971 in prison.

Press:

The work shows what it means when members of a group, and by extension a society, are divided. How difficult thoughts and desires then find their way out. How trust and secrecy suddenly play a role again.

(Pieter T’Jonck in pzazz)

Thus the spectator, placed forcelessly in the actor's position, absorbs a condition of urgency and protection of the word: with the seriousness of a child's play hears and repeats the fragments of a discourse of freedom and claim, resistance and solidarity.

(Sabrina Fasanella in Teatro e Critica)

The staging of a simultaneously intimate and socially shared space of interpersonal collaboration, one in which the performative speaking that accompanies the relationship with the other, makes for an element of unpredictability, despite the imposed language. It is not so much the reference to the character of Sam Melville that gives Letters from Attica a political charge, but the reflective nature of this contingency.

(Rudi Laermans in Etcetera)