Red Door Project’s ‘Evolve’ show designed to evoke self-awareness, curiosity

The mission of Portland’s August Wilson Red Door Project is to “use the power of narrative art to bridge divides.” Its show “Evolve” does that by presenting scenes and monologues based on the real life experiences of Black Americans, police officers and others in the justice system. But it’s not just powerful stories on stage. The performances are interspersed with pauses throughout with opportunities for the audience to participate in guided reflection and sharing, based on their reactions to what they’re seeing and hearing.

“Evolve” has been presented to general audiences and police departments, including Lake Oswego, Beaverton and West Linn. The next shows are at Beaverton’s Reser Center, Feb. 23-24. We’re joined by Red Door Project Artistic Director and Co-Founder Kevin Jones and Interim Portland Police Chief Bob Day, who has been integrally involved with this project for many years.

Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The mission of Portland’s August Wilson Red Door Project is to use “the power of narrative art to bridge divides.” Its show “Evolve” does that by presenting scenes and monologues based on the real life experiences of Black Americans, police officers and other people in the justice system. Those performances are interspersed with pauses that provide opportunities for audience members to participate and those audience members are not just the general public. “Evolve” has also been presented to entire police departments in Lake Oswego and other cities. I’m joined now by Kevin Jones.

He’s the Artistic Director of the Red Door Project and the Co-Founder of “Evolve” and Interim Portland Police Chief Bob Day who has been involved with this project for many years now. Welcome back to both of you.

Kevin Jones: Thank you.

Bob Day: Thank you. Good to be here.

Miller: I should say ‘welcome back’ because we talked about this with the two of you five and a half years ago, which seems like such a long time ago in terms of this society and especially in terms of the kinds of societal conversations about policing and race in this country. So it’s great to have you both back. Kevin Jones first, can you just remind us how this project that’s now called “Evolve” started?

Jones: Sure. Ok, I’ll give you the sort of the Cliff’s Notes version. So, we brought a show into Portland called “Hands Up” which was seven Black playwrights depicting their story or their experience with police profiling. We said we were going to just tour that show for six shows. We did around the city of Portland. On the sixth show, we had a Portland funder who was excited about the show and asked us if we wanted to continue the show. And we said, ‘sure.’ And we met with him and about five other funders who rallied around the program and said that we want to help produce ten more shows.

And so that 10 turned into 75 shows. We wound up presenting the show all over the state of Oregon, went up into Washington. And then one day, two things happened. One is a police officer came – his name was Mike Krebs – and he said ‘this show changed my life’ and or ‘changed my thinking,’ – I won’t say changed my life – changed my thinking. And I want every police officer to see this show. And Mike and I met, we talked for a while and he said, ‘you need to talk to Bob Day.’

So Bob and I met, and I’ll let Bob tell his side of the story. But from that meeting, which was life changing for me and organizationally changing for the Red Door, we decided to interview police officers in the same way that these Black playwrights had written these stories for “Hands up.” We decided we wanted to do this for law enforcement. So we went out and met with police officers around the country. We hired playwrights and we produced “Cop Out”, which was a very successful show. Because of the conversations, we recognized and because we realized that we were impacting young people – we were actually affecting the way they thought about law enforcement – that we needed to bring the nuance. And so we brought both “Hands Up” and “Cop Out” together and put that on the stage and gave the audience an opportunity to really wrestle with the nuance that comes out of those conflicting stories.

Miller: Bob Day, we talked about this so long ago and I hope you don’t mind if I ask you this again, but can you just remind us what that first meeting with Kevin was like.

Day: Sure, I was the captain of the training division and Kevin and Lesli came in and sat down and I opened the conversation with, “If you’re coming in here to tell me cops are a bunch of racists, you can leave.” I always like to say probably not my finest community policing moment, but this was 2016. So we were right on the heels of Ferguson, Michael Brown in ‘14, of course, a lot of other high profile incidents and I was kind of done at that point with the conversation. And I’ll never forget it. Kevin looked at me and he leaned across the table and he said, “Tell me more about that.” And those three words changed my life because it opened up a door and created an opportunity for learning and curiosity that I’d never experienced before, particularly from a Black man around this topic of law enforcement.

Miller: What was it about those words, “tell me more”? I mean, it’s a big thing to say that it changed your life with three words. Why?

Day: It demonstrated to me the power of curiosity. It showed me that we can see past our differences and sincerely try to find understanding, not necessarily agreement, but Kevin could have gone so many different directions with that. And yet he was willing to ask a question, to hear my story, to recognize that I do have a story to tell whether we’re in agreement about the accuracy or the truth of that or the justification or the facts is irrelevant. I have a story to tell. Kevin has a story to tell and we need to create space for those stories to be heard. And that’s what’s the beauty of the “Evolve” project.

Miller: Kevin, why call this “Evolve” now?

Jones: Oh, that’s a good question. You want a short answer to that, I’m sure. [Laughter]

Miller: Short to medium.

Jones: So the question is, what is “Evolve”? And so from the Red Door perspective, “Evolve” for human beings, anyway, is to be willing to change your beliefs. I’ll keep it really simple. Look at yourself and look at who you are, your beliefs, your biases, your ideals, your behaviors, your values and change them. And that is essentially what happened to me, it happened to Lesli Monis who is the co-founder and my partner. As we went on our journey with “Hands up” and then “Cop Out” is we recognized that we are holding on to stories about our sense of oppression, our sense of right and wrong, and those stories form our behaviors. And before anything can change, we have to change the story.

And so that was what the “Evolve,” the monologues from both the police and from the Black community, created for people. That sense of dissonance that we feel as an audience as we wrestle with these two rights that are conflicting. What it forces us to do is to change our beliefs. We have to accept the fact that there is no clean, clear, right, wrong on either side. So what do we do with that? So we hopefully, if we’re ready – have to be ready –  we will then move to the next place where our palate for what we experience, what we hold to be true, is broader, is wider. We get more accepting, we can allow more into our reality as opposed to just the right or the wrong or the Black or the white or the Black and the police or so on and so forth, which simplifies things.

Miller: Let’s listen to a part of a monologue from the show. We’re going to hear Julana Torres. This is a monologue that was written by Shepsu Aakhu.

See, people think it’s just cops, trigger-happy cops, pop anybody we don’t like. But here’s what it really is. You bring me and my gun in ‘cause it’s a situation you can’t handle. And sometimes that’s the right call. Burglary, feel free to call me. Homicide, sexual assault, auto accident, I got you. But let me tell you, I get calls for all kinds of things that I am not trained or prepared to manage for you. You don’t like the skin color of the people walking down your block. Maybe you don’t like their low hanging pants or their hoodies. When you bring me and my gun in to play enforcer for your own insecurities, bigotry, bias, petty bull****. Every time you do that, you are introducing a gun into the situation. It’s a hard enough job without having to play enforcer to every emotionally-stunted, passive,

aggressive, socially impotent *** who calls on me because their feelings are hurt or because they’re too intimidated to speak up for themselves. We come in the door assessing the threat, and until we are satisfied that there is no threat, our gun is always an option. Ask yourself this question. Is there anything going on here that an armed response is going to make better? And if the answer is no, don’t call the police. Talk to each other.

Bob Day, you and I have talked in the past, not just about “Evolve”, but about training and the Portland Police Bureau, about implicit bias training that is now required for all officers. You’ve done other things, too. You’ve done dialogues with different community members from different groups, walkarounds to talk about some of these same issues, I think. What’s different? Maybe I should say, is there something different about “Evolve” about this sort of entertainment, sort of very mission-driven event?

Day: Yeah. There’s a couple of things that are unique about the “Evolve” experience. One is just the use of art to generate this conversation. I’m not a big arts guy so I’ve had to learn this, but I recognize that you can do things and say things on stage that you can’t say in an everyday conversation. If you’re watching a movie and you see somebody get killed, you don’t feel the need to intervene, but it evokes a response. It evokes a feeling in front of us. We did a training out in Lake Oswego as mentioned, and at one point one of the participants said, ‘you know, I wasn’t really thinking this was having much of an impact, but I looked down at my apple watch and it said my heart rate was 130 beats a minute.’ So you cannot not observe this and not have a response.

Miller: That was a police officer who didn’t realize how it was hitting them until they saw a biofeedback machine saying by the way your body is in overdrive right now.

Day: And so I don’t think that’s uncommon, right? As Kevin mentioned, we’re talking about our beliefs and when those beliefs are challenged, sometimes we don’t even recognize that our dissonance, our resistance, our protection is just showing up naturally. It’s a gift that our brain gives us. It’s like you’re being threatened, I’m taking care of you. And what “Evolve” does is it puts it all out there and says the things that we normally don’t say to one another. It’s very edgy. I mean, as you just heard. Very challenging both to law enforcement, and to community ‒ to all of us to get past the traditional blocks that prevent us from having the deeper conversation to move forward.

Miller: How does that translate to somebody who’s on patrol, to somebody who is talking to the officers that they are commanding? How does this actually filter down to daily policing or decision making?

Day: Yeah, well, first of all, it creates options, right? It creates options for the officers. Oftentimes, we are called upon ‒ much like that monologue ‒ to situations that are tense, unsettling, there’s conflict. And we’re problem solvers by nature. That’s what we’re being asked to do. And sometimes these problems seem unsolvable and yet by being able to have that own self-awareness, that own learning as Kevin mentioned about our own belief system, it really starts inside us. We tend to want everything to be about the other person. It’s really about us. So we’re trying to help our officers understand what’s happening in them, how they’re responding. And then they can be more curious, and then they can ask more questions, and then they have more choices to handle the situation.

Miller: Kevin Jones, who has seen this work at this point? Can you give us a sense for the variety of people who have seen it?

Jones: Yeah. And again, thanks to Bob and our partnership, we’ve been able to get in front of the, gosh, judges, the State Supreme Court Justices. We presented our work for 350 judges in the statewide conference that happens once a year. We’ve produced monologues. We’re sponsored by the National Center for State Courts, which is the administrative arm for the State Supreme Court judges throughout the country. We’ve produced three monologues for them, judge monologues that we also feature in our work. We’ve presented it to the District Attorney in Yolo County in California. We’ve been approached by the San Joaquin County, Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, law enforcement. What we did the first time we did “Evolve” was that we presented to ninety law enforcement and criminal justice professionals as well as community based-organizational leaders. And thanks to Bob, it was a closed event. It’s what really kicked things off. Ninety people had the most amazing conversation about how do we fix these problems and how do we bridge this divide between community and criminal justice? We went to the Alaska State Supreme Court. We went to South Dakota, to Las Vegas.

Miller: That’s a long list of people who are somehow, in one way or another, tied to the criminal justice system.

Jones: Yes.

Miller: At the policing end or the judicial side.

Jones: And the federal.

Miller: But what about community members, in particular Black community members?

Jones: Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting question. For example, every organization in every community we work with, we say – for example, we went down to Monterey recently – we won’t work with any organization or any governmental agency if they have not shown us that they are partnering with the community. So they need to and we will meet with them ‒ NAACP presidents or executive directors. With Monterey it was the Farmers Association. So that’s the purpose of this work. The purpose of the work is not just to sit in a private room so you can discuss your issues and concerns amongst yourself about criminal justice.

Miller: It’s not police training.

Jones: No, not at all. It is police training, actually, but that’s not the point.

Miller: It can’t be police officers alone.

Jones: Righ. It’s training as it relates to how you engage with your community members.

Miller: You’re trying now to expand this ‒ to take this nation more nationwide, I should say. But how do you measure, how do you think about the effectiveness of this? How do you know that you’re making a meaningful impact?

Jones: Well, we want to actually collect some real life hard data from the academic world, because most of what we get is anecdotal. We get a lot of letters. We get a lot of feedback from people. For example, the district attorney in Yolo County who used to be the president of the California District Attorneys Association said ‘I want all 58 district attorneys in California to see this. This thing can change the way we think about community engagement.’ Things we hear like, ‘as an officer for the courts, I am constantly feeling the pressure to find a way to bridge my point of view over to the other side, to provide empathy or whatever. But at the same time, I don’t want to just lose my own values, my own beliefs by doing that. I need something that helps me hold on to what I hold to be true in my values and this is something that does that.’ So yeah, we get a lot of that. We have a lot of testimonials from people and that’s what we use to sell the program.

Miller: I want to play one more clip. This is from another monologue from the production. This one was written by Andrea Stolowitz, performed by Victoria Alvarez-Chacon.

He asked to see my ID. It’s in my gym bag on the floor of the passenger seat. He looks nervously at the bag, tightens his grip on his gun. The car is registered to me. Run the plates if you don’t want me to go into that bag. He stares at me harder. ‘You know something about police work?’ I smile. Always the damn smile. ‘Yes, sir, Officer. I do know something about police work.’ ‘You people. Always so worried about your rights being violated, you try to learn the rules about being a cop. As soon as you all learn the rules, we’re going to change ‘em. This is a war. You’re not going to win it.’ He’s telling me to step out of the car. I’m smiling like my grandmother said I should. Look straight ahead and as calmly as I can tell him ‘I’m a cop.’ He doesn’t relax. In fact, this has made him angry. His face is getting red. ‘Oh yeah. Want to tell me your badge number.’ I shouldn’t have to tell this guy anything. I wait. He grips his gun. ‘Tell me your f****** badge number. And if I find out you’re lying, I’ll beat the Black right off of you.’

Bob Day, this show has been presented, as I noted, to some entire police departments like in Lake Oswego. Not, if I understand correctly, not to all the rank and file officers in Portland. Would you be interested in doing something like that for the PPB?

Jones: Sure, I’m absolutely interested in trying to continue to share these concepts and ideas. It’s a bigger lift, bigger agency, more demand, but certainly something I’m interested in looking into.

Miller: Bob Day and Kevin Jones, thanks very much.

Jones: Thank you. February 23rd and 24th at The Reser theater.

Miller: Sorry, I forgot to mention that. I’m glad you did that. Kevin Jones is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the August Wilson Red Door Project which has created “Evolve.” Bob Day is the Interim Police Chief of the Portland Police Bureau.

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