The Exile Project makes its debut in Seattle, Washington on Friday and Saturday nights, March 7, 8, 14, 15, 2008 at 8pm and Sunday afternoons, March 9 & 16, 2008 at 2pm. It will be performed at The Theater, located in West Seattle High School, 3000 California Avenue SW. Tickets will be priced at $15.00 general seating and $12.00 for students and seniors. At all performances there will also be a pay-what-you-can option. See the information page for all other performance details.


The Exile Project is an exciting, new musical theater performance that explores an important topic of our times -- the growing, prison industrial complex. Choreographer/director, Holly Eckert, and composer, Amy Denio, along with many other Seattle artists, team up to explore this timely topic through a well-known classical form -- musical theater. Blending music, dance and dialogue, their play tells the story of one man's efforts to build a life after prison, and through that story, explores many important moral questions that all countries and individuals face around the topic of imprisonment such as: "What is forgiveness?" "What is justice?" and "What role does compassion and forgiveness play inside a justice system?"


Marcus leaves his prison cell after completing a 20-year prison sentence. Having nowhere else to go he returns to his mother Chloe's small home in Renton, Washington. With a toothbrush, $40.00 cash and a bus pass comprising the whole of his personal wealth, Marcus returns home like most former prisoners - without hope. Raised as his brother, Marcus's cousin Tony has also returned home from New York where an injury put an end to his career as a dancer. Both men seek refuge in their mother's home as they try to rebuild an identity and a life for themselves. However, a betrayal from 20-years before makes reconnection between the two men very difficult. Because of these hard feelings, Marcus refuses to share the one bedroom the men shared in their youth; instead he decides to sleep on the couch. He soon becomes interested in the two paintings created by his mother and hanging on the wall behind the couch. Interested in genealogy, Chloe took as her subject two dynamic individuals from her family tree: Reverend Logan, an abolitionist preacher and Lorraine Newberry, a jazz singer from 1950's jazz scene in Seattle. These paintings soon penetrate Marcus's subconscious. Crawling off the canvas, they visit him in his dreams, speaking through dance and song. Depicting times in history when people remained so imprisoned by cultural assumptions they justified the institutions of enslavement and segregation, the paintings have much to tell Marcus about the dangers of building prisons around both bodies and minds. They play an integral role in his journey to define and discover forgiveness for himself and others, and to find a future worth living.