Note: This story was originally published by The Oregonian/Oregonlive.
Kristina Yurick is used to the feeling of waiting in the wings.
An adult in custody at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Yurick has spent a year at the minimum-security facility during her most recent incarceration, convicted of unlawful use of a weapon. With roughly nine months left of her sentence, she is eager to return to life outside.
This evening, she’s waiting offstage for her cue, ready to play a successful art therapist, the character she created based on a letter written to her future self.
“I used to never be able to see my future,” Yurick said. “Maybe that’s been part of my issue, because I’ve been here before.”
For a few evenings in May, Yurick and 10 other women at Coffee Creek had the opportunity to imagine their futures and live in them for the hourlong production of “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Cuffs,” performing for family, friends and their fellow adults in custody.
The show is set at a reunion of women who once shared a prison unit and participated in theater together. The story uses their real-life experiences to explore bullying, belonging and how they might remake their lives after prison.
Most of the 11 women in the production began with the Up A Creek Theatre program in September, working with facilitators, wife and husband duo Carla Grant and Don Kern. The nine-month program culminated in a run of shows in late May.
For Yurick, who has cycled through addiction and multiple sentences at the facility, something has shifted. For the first time, she can picture a life outside.
Setting the stage
The 11 women worked quickly to transform the mess hall into a staging area for an audience of family and friends. Hand-painted set pieces transformed the front of the room from a barren wall into an Oregon coast vacation home. Cafeteria chairs were placed together to form a couch. One woman’s handmade quilt laid over the chairs.
The cafeteria became a makeshift auditorium in the 30 minutes between the end of mealtime and doors opening to the audience. The women, with the help of volunteers and program facilitators each took a role: mopping, decorating the set, placing the audience chairs in neat rows.
“Everyone’s a little bit nervous,” said cast member Sophia Downing about the stress level leading up to opening night. “But once we have the show performed, it’s like it didn’t even happen.”
The women had no elaborate costumes, no microphones, no stage lighting, but performing at Coffee Creek was a chance to be creative, to connect, and for many, to try something they never had before.
Willow, played by Yurick, and Louise, played by Downing, opened the production. Yurick’s art therapist character shares her joyful disposition and outgoing personality. Both Yurick and her character aspire to be on the “Today” show. And while only her character Willow has achieved that goal, Yurick is certain of her future.
“I’m not going to change the world,” she said, “but I’m definitely going to cultivate happiness and enrich people’s lives through creativity.”
Downing drew from her current job to shape the character of Louise. She works in marketing and sales at Oregon Corrections Enterprises, commuting between Coffee Creek and Salem, leaving the facility at 6:30 a.m. and returning around 2 p.m. on workdays — a routine that gave character Louise her identity as a social media manager and influencer.
But the character is more than a reflection of where Downing is. She sees Louise as a window into where she could go.
“You’re exploring who you are, or what you can be, or what you can do,” Downing said. “If I acted like this, then maybe I can do this. So, that’s what keeps me coming back.”
That kind of thinking didn’t always come naturally to her. “I used to be in trouble a lot when I was younger,” she said. “When I was incarcerated the first time, I did a lot of time in the hole, I was always in trouble, I had an attitude and I would yell and break things.”
Downing, who is serving her second incarceration, this time on first degree manslaughter and second degree assault convictions, said this time has been different. She takes part in more of Coffee Creek’s programs, including mental health counseling and gardening. Grant and Kern said Downing has also been a consistent presence in Up A Creek Theatre, fully engaging in the program’s exercises and stepping into a leadership role during her third show. She credits the change in her behavior to programming, maturity and her own dedication to improve.
Up A Creek Theatre
Grant and Kern took over Up A Creek Theatre in 2014, a program of the nonprofit Open Hearts Open Minds, dedicated to fostering art in Oregon prisons. Grant and Kern say the arts cultivate self-respect, resiliency and personal empowerment among adults in custody.
“Ostensibly we’re there to produce theater with them,” Kern said. “But really, we’re there to give them opportunities to grow as people and to have positive, prosocial activities to do with each other.”
Downing is one of the few cast members who has participated in multiple shows over the years. The program faces considerable turnover as women are transferred in and out of Coffee Creek.
This year, Grant and Kern chose to stage a full production, experimenting with a full narrative arc to give the show more depth.
“Usually, we have skits and stories and songs that we just kind of weave together with a theme,” Grant said. “This year, Don took all those disparate parts and worked it into a full piece.”
The show was created collaboratively by all the women in the cast. Like Yurick, each based their characters on letters to their future selves. Together, they worked out themes and plot points. Dialogue, songs and entire scenes were written by the women, who submitted their ideas to Kern.
Porsha Weaver, participating in her second show with Up A Creek Theatre, used one of her poems for the narrative. Titled “10 Things I Noticed,” her poem grew out of a writing exercise among cast members during the early stages of production.
The poem recounts Weaver’s observations, some trivial, others more philosophical, such as “the past is a place to learn from, not to live in.” Weaver has been at Coffee Creek just under two years, convicted of attempting to commit a class A felony, second degree arson and attempting to commit a class A misdemeanor. Weaver’s character, Marie, reads the poem to the other women during the fictionalized reunion.
“I’m a poet, and I’m the peacemaker,” Weaver said. “I’m kind of like myself. I’m always full of peace and full of joy.”
Rising conflict
Navigating interpersonal conflicts and hostility, which many incarcerated women face, is at the heart of the show.
“There’s been a lot of bullying at Coffee Creek recently,” Grant said. “I would say more so than normal.”
Coffee Creek officials say they take reports of bullying seriously and hold individuals accountable.
The show addresses the uptick head-on. As the characters reunite in the play, tensions quickly arise between two of them, Pamm and Lynn, who frequently clash during the show’s present reunion and past incarceration.
“We were kind of curious about our human tendency to bully each other and this idea of belonging,” Grant said. “What does it mean to belong? What are the feelings that are conjured when you belong?”
Lynn, the show’s resident boundary-pusher, was drawn straight from the population around her. Confident to a fault, Lynn is a character many of the women recognize in themselves.
Elizabeth Osterhout knows the type well. A newer participant in the program, she plays a young version of Louise during flashback sequences. Osterhout has been at Coffee Creek only a few months, convicted of unlawful use of a weapon and attempting to commit a class B felony.
“Lynn is the outcast character,” Osterhout said. “She’s the quirky, weird one that everybody holds at arm’s length.”
On stage, Lynn’s attempts to bond with the other women tend to backfire. She orders vegan pizza for everyone without asking, borrows a housemate’s toothbrush to polish rocks and sees nothing wrong with letting the pizza delivery worker sleep over.
The other women talk down to her and gossip about her, especially Pamm, who doesn’t hide her annoyance or spare Lynn’s feelings.
As the exclusion builds, so does the pressure behind it, until Lynn finally unleashes the anger, hurt and frustration she’s been carrying. Osterhout, who wrote part of the scene, drew from her own experiences to give Lynn’s explosion its emotional weight. The outburst airs out the complex emotions of someone being bullied, Osterhout said, including feelings of anger, frustration, depression and thoughts of self-harm.
“It’s that turning point for the characters,” Osterhout said. “The rest of the characters realize exactly what they’d been doing wrong to the victim.”
The final bow
Through flashbacks and candid conversations in the play, the women learned to be more compassionate and less judgmental.
In the final act, each woman delivered a short soliloquy drawn from her own life. They reflected on bullying, exclusion, the weight words can carry and the strength it takes to move through pain. Their confessions blurred the line between theater and reality.
By the final bow, many in the audience were in tears. The evening closed with real-life reunions, as well as family members, friends, loved ones and formerly incarcerated women finding the performers they had come to see. For many, it was the first time watching someone they loved be vulnerable on a stage.
Downing’s mom, sister and nephews were there, evoking memories of her past childhood performances.
“It reminds me of when I was little,” Downing said, “making my mom proud, seeing her smile.”
Expressing vulnerability on stage, she said, has given her the courage to express her emotions freely.
“I have more empathy, more connection, more patience,” Downing said. “It’s brought me out of myself. … I feel connected with other people.”
That vulnerability doesn’t come easily in a prison.
The theater program begins with ensemble building exercises, using vulnerability as the foundation for trust. In one exercise, the women take turns making expressive faces, sounds and poses, mirroring each other and pushing past self‑consciousness and the fear of looking silly. Some are playful games, while others are more intense, such as holding sustained eye contact with another person. Over time, those exercises build real connections between the women.
“We kind of act goofy,” Downing said. “We all have to do it, so it’s just getting out of your comfort zone.”
The experience has created lifelong impacts on many of the women in custody and those who have since moved on. Denise Bare, who was previously incarcerated at Coffee Creek, now works as the communications director at Open Hearts Open Minds. Bare frequently volunteers with the women in custody.
“They get to learn, they get to become confident, they get to have faith in themselves, and they get to have hope,” Bare said. “I can’t express to you how important having hope is.”
Most important, Bare said, the program brings humanity into the prison system. It was something she felt firsthand over the three years she participated in shows at Coffee Creek.
“Prison is not a great place to make friends, that was my first thought,” Bare said. “But there comes a time when you are in that dark place, where your walls are high and then you come into a space where people bring humanity back to you and you get to breathe again.”
That feeling is not lost among the women still in custody. For Weaver, the program opened her up to experiences and connections that have changed the way she sees herself. Like many other women, Weaver was guarded when she joined Up A Creek Theatre.
“I was afraid of everything, afraid of my own shadow,” she said. “This opened me up to let people in.”
Through ensemble exercises, sharing personal narratives and performing alongside women she might never have spoken to otherwise, Weaver came away with lessons she never expected to find in prison.
“Prison’s taught me a lot,” she said. “How to live without drugs and alcohol, how to live with people … it’s taught me how to trust again, and how to trust myself, and learn new things.”
Weaver’s growth in the program has been nothing short of transformational, Grant and Kern said.
“I appreciate the strength and the bravery and the openness,” Kern said. “In spite of so much stacked against her, she’s growing and thriving and genuinely changing the trajectory of her life in a positive way.”
The program has been the light of her world, said Weaver, who is six months from release. After a two-year incarceration, she’s eager to go home.
“I’m more aware that we could change,” Weaver said. “That we could change and be healthy and be happy … that we don’t have to live full of hurt.”