Two local productions — “The Exile Project” at the West Seattle High School Theater and “The Sweetest Swing in Baseball” at ArtsWest (WSB sponsor; more on TSSIB here) — are in their final weekend. As we mentioned when it opened, “Exile Project” is the creation of a team led by West Seattle’s Holly Eckert; its subject is so curiosity-piquing that we talked with her this week to find out more — and her comments are as thought-provoking as the subject:

Eckert says she’s “never been a choreographer who just made dance about dance” — her subjects have included everything from the history of the body to the impact of time perception on human psychology, to an exploration of math and how it affects the way we look at the world.

Her inspiration for “The Exile Project” came when she worked as a paralegal for the Public Defender’s Office. One of her responsibilities was to deliver messages to and from the jail, and she says, “The moment i walked into the jail and got more familiar with the prison industrial complex it became clear that was my subject. I really wanted to look at how the development of the prison-industrial complex into a private industry has impacted our justice system.”

By “prison-industrial complex” she explains she means the fact that our nation’s prison system has grown so large, it to some degree feeds itself and becomes a self-perpetuating system, with a vested interest in continuing to grow, particularly since privatization began to become more of a trend in the ’80s: “Because they’re a private industry,” Eckert notes, “their goal is obviously to spend as little money as they can on the prisoner, so they can make more money.” And it’s not just the prisons themselves that are part of the industry — she points to other businesses that work to build and serve prisons, from architecture firms to plumbing companies to food suppliers, and beyond.

A recent study showed that 1 of every 100 Americans is behind bars right now, and 1 of every 35 African-American men, which she calls “shocking … If you turn something like a prison system into a private enterprise where the goal is to make money, then there’s going to be more pressure to get people into prison … Then the prisoners themselves are used as cheap labor, paid 20 cents an hour (in some cases) for their labor, and the private industries using that labor are not small industries, they’re major companies.”

But that leaps ahead a bit. How about the story told by “The Exile Project” itself? “What I wanted to do was to tell the human story that connects us to this event, some of the amazing facts of what’s happening around us. It’s the story of a man who comes home from prison after fulfilling a long sentence and tries to remake a life for himself … what that effort is like for somebody, how is it that our system doesn’t support someone in transitioning out of the prison environment into the culture at large? It’s an incredibly dysfunctional environment, especially for people who have served long sentences. (When they get out) they are literally given forty bucks and a bus pass and told, good luck. Then we all look shocked at the 80 percent recidivism rate — but it makes all the sense in the world, any psychologist would say, that a person contained in an environment like that will not be successful out in the world at large.”

(Photo above shows Wendy Woolery and Gary Reed in a scene from “The Exile Project.”) Eckert continues, “Those people who get out are not given any kind of counseling or job training or any kind of support to make that transition, so many say, we’re set up to fail, and most of them do – but the problem is, the system is set up so it has a vested interest in their failure.”

Probably not something you spend a lot of time thinking about, unless someone in your family has spent time behind bars, or unless you work in the criminal-justice system. Eckert says, “It’s been interesting to watch people’s reaction — They’ll come up and say, ‘wow, great story, great music, great play, but I also learned a lot, I didn’t really realize this was going on.’ And that to me is what’s of interest in this topic, it’s not something we hear about very often, because it’s so masked, literally behind bars. People will say ‘I didn’t know this had reached this point … I’d never thought about it’.”

So what, you might say, we’re talking about people who committed crimes. Eckert is fully aware of that reaction too, and notes that you might consider that you have a vested interest in ex-inmates succeeding in life when they leave prison. “So often this situation is justified as ‘well, they deserve it’. That’s a debate we have to have inside our culture, WHAT do they deserve, and who is it benefiting to treat people like this – Often times they come back into the culture and they commit more violent crimes (because they didn’t get any help). Since sentences have gotten longer, if you look at the statistics, violent crime is increasing, so where has this paid off? The people who watch the play, it makes them think about those issues. The man who comes home with the forty dollars and the bus pass – where is he headed, that was my big question, what will eventually happen to this man?”

But don’t get Eckert wrong – this isn’t a dreary production. “It’s the story of a man’s experience and all sorts of emotional places that you go to, both happy and sad, you’ll learn something about what’s going on but also just see a very moving human story and get to enjoy that, with beautiful music and dancing and storytelling.”

The final two performances of “The Exile Project” at the WSHS Theater are tonight at 8 pm and tomorrow at 2 pm, with a conversation with the artists following the Sunday matinee. Find out more here.