Gifted director and founder of Prison Performing Arts, director Agnes Wilcox is a tireless advocate for the creative and personal potential of men, women, and children in prison. Working with a company of former prisoners and formerly homeless veterans, she brought together Staging Old Masters in a frantic month and a half.

I interviewed Agnes the Monday after opening night—her first evening off, she told me, in weeks. Here’s the first part of our conversation.

The key idea behind your organization, Prison Performing Arts, is the transformational possibilities of art. What is it like to approach that goal with these Old Masters paintings as a framework?

I’d never done theater with visual art as a base, and it’s been terrific. It expands the work incredibly. Facing Old Masters, the actors feel a kind of obligation: if these works are irreplaceable, historical, big-deal paintings, then we all need to buckle down and see what we can see. Our opportunities to learn from [Pulitzer director] Matthias Waschek and [Senior Curator] Francesca Herndon-Consagra, and from [dance educator] Cecil Slaughter, in creating a movement piece around The Presentation at the Temple, were very, very important. Now that I’ve been taught, by our experts and by the actors, what these paintings can mean, I love looking at them.

These Old Masters also serve as a unifying object, not just because we knew we’d be performing at the Pulitzer Foundation with these works, but also because of the personal relationships with paintings which the actors have—relationships the audience won’t even know about. I had not drawn the personal connections to the paintings these actors had. The conversion of St. Paul, and the actors’ reactions to it, and what Constantine experienced, and what Sebastian experienced. On our first day at the Pulitzer, one actor looked at St. Sebastian and said, “Man, I know just how he feels.” Every day, some actor said something absolutely extraordinary.

After having worked with actors who are incarcerated, any surprises in working with this group of formerly homeless or recently-released men and women?

Until now, I’ve only worked with recently-released men and women who have worked with me while they were in. So they were already my students—they were just in town, instead of out of town!

But the discovery I made yesterday, and it appalled me, is how many of the men in Staging Old Masters live in shelters. Everything I’ve ever heard about the shelters has been their noise, the chaos, the stealing, the assaults. I don’t think I could make it to rehearsal if I lived in a shelter, much less memorize my lines. I’ve not worked with a homeless person before. But the joy of not knowing is that everybody’s treated the same. I mean: you learn your lines, you do your job, I’m cool.

How is working with this group different from working with a broader population of amateur actors?

It’s thrilling to work with people who are willing to discover. There’s a rawness to the actors who are working with us at the Pulitzer, and the actors I work with on the inside; theater is the perfect vehicle for them to express themselves. These performers expose themselves to the audience—they might as well be taking off their clothes—and that’s why we’re getting the response we’ve had.

I’ve been blown away by our audiences. At one performance, an actor had two sisters and a niece in the audience. When this actor told his story, which was a true story—my God. His whole family had tears rolling down their faces, because he was able to speak the truth. He was rewarded for speaking the truth, and he was set free. It’s heaven.

(Stay tuned for more of this interview in a few days!)