Echoes of Attica

“Echoes of Attica” is a play that was written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising that ended with the massacre of dozens of unarmed incarcerated protestors by the New York State Police. The script is constructed with verbatim excerpts from declassified FBI files, court transcripts, the Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica, interviews with Attica survivors, and other documentary sources in the public domain. It was performed by a cast of formerly incarcerated actors at a variety of venues including the Yale Law School, the Columbia University Center for Justice, the Exodus Transitional Community in Harlem, and at the headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee’s Healing Justice Program in New York. The project was undertaken in consultation with Carlos Roche, a survivor of the Attica massacre, whose contributions to the work are documented in the Postscript to the play that examines Roche’s experience in the context of Michel Foucault’s description of prison as an “extermination machine,” a concept he developed after visiting Attica in the aftermath of the uprising, three years before the publication of his “Surveiller et Punir: Naisance de la Prison” (“Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison”).