The Red Door Project's "Evolve" show highlights different perspectives, based on real life experience of police officers, Black Americans and other involved in the justice system.
Courtesy of the Red Door Project
The mission of the Portland nonprofit, the Red Door Project, is to use “the power of narrative art to bridge divides.” Its show “Evolve Experience” 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 — to become aware of their own reactions to the stories presented, and share those reactions with each other. The monologues have also been presented to police departments in Lake Oswego, West Linn, Beaverton and in other cities and states.
Back in 2016, the Red Door Project began by telling the stories of African Americans’ experience with police. At the time, a Portland police officer arranged a meeting between Kevin Jones, artistic director of the Red Door Project, and the captain of the training division at Portland Police Bureau, Bob Day. Day, who is now the interim chief of the bureau, hadn’t seen the shows and told Jones, “If you’re coming in here to tell me cops are a bunch of racists, you can leave.”
Kevin Jones of the Red Door Project and interim Portland Police Chief Bob Day at OPB before a show called "Evolve," about people's experience with race, policing and the justice system.
Allison Frost / OPB
“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,” said Day. “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.”
Jones says it was out of that meeting that the organization decided to tell the story of police officers as well.
“We hired playwrights and we produced ‘Cop Out’ which was a very successful show,” said Jones. “Because of the conversations, we realized that we were impacting young people. We were actually affecting the way they thought about law enforcement and that we needed to bring nuance. And so we brought both ‘Hands Up’ and ‘Cop Out’ together and put that on the stage.”
The Red Door Project has taken its ever-evolving show to general audiences and special presentations for law enforcement, judges and others in the justice system in Oregon, Washington, California, Alaska, Nevada and South Dakota.
“As we went on our journey … 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,” said Jones. “And so that was what the “Evolve” 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.”
Actors La’Tevin Alexander and Julana Torres are pictured as part of the Red Door Project's "Evolve" show. "Evolve" highlights different perspectives, based on real life experience of police officers, Black Americans and others involved in the justice system.
Courtesy of the Red Door Project
Day says law enforcement officers get a variety of different kinds of training, which include discussions of implicit bias. But he says “Evolve” is unique in that it uses art to start conversations that might be difficult to start any other way. For police officers who are called on to solve problems, taking a moment to identify their own reactions, can make a huge difference.
“Sometimes these problems seem unsolvable and yet,” said Day, “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.”
The next two shows are Feb. 23 and 24 at Beaverton’s Reser Center.
Day and Jones joined “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller on Friday, Feb. 16, and you can listen to the whole conversation, by pressing the play arrow above.