Joint Effort is embarking on a new theatre project. We will be working with Nicola Cavendish (actor/playwright) to do a performative reading of Pamela Mala Sinha’s play, ‘Happy Place.’

Community Theatre Project (CTP) brings together formerly incarcerated folx from the prison for ‘women’ with non-incarcerated Joint Effort community members and professional actors. Playwright, actor and director, Nicola Cavendish will guide participants in a reading of the play, ‘Happy Place’, by Pamela Mala Sinha. The final project will be presented to a select audience of Joint Effort community members and theatre people.

The CTP will create a safer, supportive space for expression. We will engage with the characters in the play from our lived experience of incarceration (from both inside and out), and build theatre skills: reading, acting, interpreting.

About the play: Pamela Mala Sinha’s play explores the lives of seven women aged 23 to 60 who are residents of an in-patient care facility: a microcosm for the world outside its walls. What is it to live inside the suffering of these women…addressing the idea that we are not so different from each other, though our circumstances may be? Each woman must try to find a way to fit into a world that can’t respond to or redress a pain that is ‘un-see-able”. But they are also the ones who can teach one another how to live with what happened to them as no one else ever could. Even if they can’t always do it for themselves.

The CTP’s engagement with this play connects two sites of confinement: a patient care facility and the prison. Both are locations within the carceral continuum of institutions which hold and ‘treat’ those confined within. The carceral continuum is a network of institutions in which relations of domination, corruption and violence underly claims of ‘care,’ and ‘rehabilitation.’ The carceral continuum is a socio-economic strategy to manage poor and disabled people, understood to impact peoples who are disproportionately Indigenous, Black, POC, queer and/or gendered.