Author: Cluchey, Rick
Title: The Cage
Description: San Francisco, Barbwire Press, (1970). orig.wrappers. 20x13cm, 53 pp, Author's inscription on flyleaf: " Stay Out / 1970 / Rick Cluchey".. Minor rubbing & slight rear cover soil. VG. ¶ Drama by a San Quentin prisoner, participant in San Quentin Drama workshop,published by a prison literature press. [ "...Beckett has become very involved with this San Quentin group since the early 1960s when he heard what was happening in the big American jail. One of the convicts, Rick Cluchey, who was serving what might have been a life sentence for a kidnap and robbery but turned out to be only 11 years, persuaded the authorities to let the prisoners do Beckett plays and they performed them in a studio theatre in what used to be the prison's gallows room. The plays made such an impact on the prisoners, who immediately saw similarities between the imprisonment felt by Beckett's characters and themselves that they were repeated over and over. The word got out and got as far as Beckett in Europe. Nowadays, Cluchey and Beckett are friends, something that the convict in San Quentin would have thought impossible. Cluchey and his wife,Teresita Garcia Suro, have called their two young children after Beckett and his wife, Suzanne. Rick Cluchey knows nearly every word Beckett has written but, when he is in the position of actor with Beckett as director, he says he tries to forget everything he ever thought himself, tries to strip his mind and memory of actors' tricks and his own interpretation, and just wait like a blank sheet of paper for Beckett to tell him what to do...." - Maeve Binchey in 'Irish Times' May 1 980].

Keywords: American Literary History, Prisoners, Penology, Literary History, San Quentin, Drama, United States, ,