"I was going insane in that room," says "Roach" Brown. A onetime street hustler convicted of
murder, he was talking about his solitary confinement after a 1968 riot at the Lorton Reformatory
near Washington, D.C. Brown lost track of time—first the date, then the day of the week, eventually
even night and day. "I used to talk to myself and laugh and cry," he remembers. "I wanted someone
to see me, to say they cared." Finally, one day, the sliding panel in his cell door clicked open, a hand
reached in with two packs of cigarettes plus a ration of candy, and a guard's voice said, "Merry
Christmas."
Somehow, starting from the absurd incongruity of that gesture, Rhozier Theopelius Brown Jr. began
his trip back to sanity. He scratched "Christmas in prison" in the dust under his bunk, and then he
began expanding the phrase into a poem. Released from solitary after seven months, he found the
poem growing into a play. He started scrounging materials for a stage set and recruiting prisoners as
actors. He and 18 other inmates were finally allowed to put on the play. "Most guys came to ridicule
us," says Brown. "If we had laid an egg, it would have meant a lot of embarrassment, because there's
no place to hide in a prison."
The play was a success, and since then, "The Inner Voices," as Brown's theater group is now known,
have made 463 trips outside the prison to perform various plays and participate in community
discussions. Last week the Public Broadcasting Service network showed an hour-long program about
one such encounter. It included excerpts from Brown's Christmas play; then, in a question period,
members of the audience incredulously asked the actors about the reality of such scenes as the casual
murder of a convict by three other prisoners.
Roach Brown insists that his play about how various prisoners react to Christmas is all too accurate.
