Voices Unbarred

For Lori Pitts, her involvement in Voices Unbarred started slowly and unrelated to prison.

Pitts knew she loved theatre from a young age, but she wasn't convinced of its utility in the real world.

"When I went to college, it was kind of like, Yeah, I love theatre, but like, I don't see how that would like help people," Pitts said. "And that was such an important thing to me."

So she turned to medicine. But something didn't feel right about that, Pitts said.

Then, Pitts was introduced to Theatre of the Oppressed, a style of devised theatre centered around communication and personal discovery, and everything changed.

"It just felt like a calling. It was... everything aligned," Pitts said. "So when I graduated, that's when I was like, how do I do more theatre of the oppressed in the world?"

The answer turned out to be facilitating the devising process in prisons, where stories of oppression are horribly common.

Theatre is powerful, Pitts said, and she wanted incarcerated individuals to experience this power.

It was from this mission Voices Unbarred was born.

Reyna Berry