Episode Details

In 2020, the authorities at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (better known as Angola, for the former plantation on which it stands) shut down a play in the middle of a performance. What happened in that audience of incarcerated men that got guards so concerned? That’s the subject of “Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices From a Plantation Prison," an MTV documentary directed and edited by Cinque Northern (My Name is Pauli Murray) and produced by Catherine Gund. Award-winning actress and writer Liza Jessie Peterson (HBO’s Def Poetry, Ava Duvernay’s 13th), whose one-woman show was shut down that day, and Norris Henderson, a former inmate who'd worked with her to bring the show, join Laura to reflect on the intersection of art and politics, incarceration and economics, and the work of VOTE, the criminal justice reform group Henderson founded upon his release. What difference can a play make? Watch and see.

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