An opaque immigration system. Complex legal proceedings in a second language. The prospect of being separated from her husband and two children.
These were all the things Elizabeth Keathley faced during her nearly decade-long saga in federal immigration court. Keathley is the central figure in The Justice Theater Project’s (JTP) latest production, The Courtroom: A Reenactment of One Woman’s Deportation Proceedings, which opens in Raleigh on Friday, October 2.
Keathley’s story began at the DMV, where she checked a box that illegally registered her to vote. Unaware of federal election law, Keathley—who is Filipina and was on a nonimmigrant K-3 visa—voted in the 2006 midterms, a mistake later revealed during a citizenship hearing, which then resulted in a Department of Homeland Security deportation order. Keathley’s trials lasted until 2014, escalating from the Chicago Immigration Court to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. The actual court transcripts from her hearings, which took place from 2004 to 2008, make up the script of The Courtroom, arranged by the actor and screenwriter Arian Moayed.
It’s a drama that feels timely, given increasing backlash to ICE raids and aggressive federal immigration policy. But this production, director Patrick Torres explained in an interview with the INDY, is more focused on understanding the system from the perspective of the people navigating it. In connection with that goal, the Raleigh-based company—which has a mission of producing shows to “create community dialogue and give voice to social concerns”—is offering two “Dive Deeper” events, on October 11 and 16, respectively, that explore topics like immigration and the election system and the psychological toll of bureaucracies.
The play, first produced in New York in 2019, was not, Torres said, created to “address some of the bigger, scarier things that are happening in the world right now to immigrants and people from different countries.”
“It distills the immigration system down into a very personal story. I think the frightening thing about this play is that there isn’t a villain,” Torres continued. “Everybody in this case is just doing their job and trying to do their job in good faith. To me, what makes the play really frightening rather than infuriating is that there is no one to blame and everyone to hear.”
Almost all of the cast of JTP’s production of The Courtroom have a personal connection to the play’s material. Shana Fisher, playing defense attorney Richard Hanus, is an attorney herself. Phillip Andrew Solano, playing Elizabeth Keathley’s husband John, is the son of an immigrant and has experienced the fear of a loved one at risk of deportation. Veniza Catlett, who plays Elizabeth Keathley, has biographical overlap that drew her to the role—like Keathley, she moved to the United States after meeting and marrying her partner, a citizen.
“[Elizabeth Keathley is] from Mindanao and I’m from Mindanao,” said Catlett. “During that time in the script as well, she has a toddler, and I also have a toddler.”
All of these personal connections create a rich well for the actors to pull from during their performance. Still, Torres emphasized that he is resistant to the idea of having actors lean too much on lived experience.
“I don’t want to ever put anybody in a dangerous spot where they’re using a traumatic memory to create an emotion onstage,” Torres said. “So we’re really focused on the text.”
In the case of The Courtroom, this focus on the text is very literal—during the live performance, actors hold the transcripts in their hands and read from them, a twist that comes from the play’s original 2019 staging. Having the actors read from the transcripts, rather than memorize the lines, serves as an audience cue.
“Because audiences are accustomed to seeing a memorized piece,” Torres explained, “To [see] those scripts in hand is just this constant reminder that this is actual text that was actually spoken in a real human being’s life.”
Breathing as a Tool for Feeling
Rather than their own experiences and memories, Torres instructed the JTP cast to rely on breathwork as an entry point to the text. Developed from ancient Indian performance theory, the technique Rasaboxes comes from the Sanskrit word “rasa,” meaning flavor or essence, and focuses on eight core emotions—surprise, love, fear, disgust, laughter, sadness, rage, and courage.
“If somebody is breathing the breath of true laughter, you don’t even have to know the context and all of a sudden you find yourself laughing along,” said Torres. “If somebody is having a true breath of grief, and you’re sitting with them, it is very difficult to not also feel grief and sadness for them and with them.”
After introducing the cast to the eight rasas at the beginning of the rehearsal process, Torres asked them to identify lines in the transcript that fall into those categories. Then, when delivering those lines, the actors embody a breath that aligns with the emotion.
In speaking to the cast about the rehearsal process, nearly every member emphasized the foundational importance of the breathwork.
“Your breathing is different for different feelings,” said Callie Hammond, who plays Judge Michael Stephen Kanne. “It’s not just an ‘I’m smiling so I’m happy’ kind of thing. Your emotions are actually in your body, in your breath, in your words.”
Solano shared a similar sentiment.
“The biggest thing from rehearsals that’s stuck with me is just how powerful the breath of a person can be,” he said. “So much emotion is in how someone is breathing, and how someone says something. Even the little pauses before things—you can really feel how they’re feeling and understand where they’re coming from without any words.”
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