Article 5
Isabelle Assante
Llumina Press
ISBN: 9781595267085
Fiction, Play, Drama, Political
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

Article 5 categorically states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”
-The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

When you hear on the evening news or a sound bite on the radio of an execution or someone receiving the death penalty, the first instinct is to say, “Glad that wasn’t me.” And then you think to yourself, “Probably deserved it.”  You dismiss it as an afterthought and wait for the weatherman’s forecast, or you tighten our hands on the steering wheel, curse traffic and change the station to something with a beat and coast back into the flow of the speed-lane of your life.

Now imagine being part of an audience at a theater.  You wait, casting furtive glances at the stage in front of you.  The voices around you become a collective of buzzes from the hive, undistinguishable.  Your cell-phone bill is due and you have to get up early in the morning for work, so there won’t be any drinks after the show.  You wonder if your insurance covers a filling you broke while taking a bite out a chocolate chip muffin, you probably shouldn’t have eaten any way.  You’re excited, because next week the new James Patterson suspense novel comes out.  Your brain is a cacophonic orchestra piece of tomorrows and future next days composed by John Cage.

But then:  Lights come up on stage on a figure sitting in a chair facing you.  He speaks to YOU:

INMATE 1
“My mother taught me to take up for myself when people bullied me or talked shit to me.  She told me to take no shit from no one, and she didn’t care who it was--man or women she said:
(Take’s his mother’s voice)
If people are %&&^ with you, then jump their ass.  Don’t ask your brother to do it for you.  You’ve gotta do it yourself.  It don’t make no difference if you’re a man or a woman.  You’ve got to fight for yourself; don’t expect someone else to do it for you.  You go on and straight beat the shit outta them.  If you ever com home crying ‘cause somebody jumped on you, I’m gonna whip your ass.
(pause)
I heard my mother talk this shit since I was four, but I couldn’t bring it into play until I was older, in my teens.  So when she started to get on my case about drugs, school, and stuff, it actually dawned on me to do what she said.
(pause)
Don’t call me no whooz, don’t call me no sissy, and don’t you %$% with my friends.  She crossed the line.  She was drunk and she gave the eye to my friend Jake.  Jumped on him like a *%*% ho.  Then she yelled at me and called me names in front of my friends, so I gave her what she wanted.  I hit her as hard as I could, man.
(pause)
She never woke up.
(pause)
Alice.  Her name was Alice.  She was thirty-nine years old.”

The lights go down on the first scene of Isabelle Assante’s new play, Article 5 and you will never look at life the same way again.

Article 5, the published play from Llumina Press, consists of Isabelle Assante’s
own English translation as well as her original French edition (Assante has had some difficulty with an incomplete unofficial edition that was published in Canada without her approval.) The approved volume contains both French and English texts of the cast of characters and technical list. 

Assante based her play on her experiences while exchanging letter with a death-row prisoner and the title was taken from Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The play is one act, divided into eleven scenes, approximately thirty-nine pages.  It supports 14 cast members.

Article 5, performed live as a play about the death penalty as an in-your-face experience is given.  As a written piece, the experience is not diminished, the reader can peruse the play at their leisure; a chance to think and mull over Article 5 in the safety of familiarity, creating a powerful, poignant impact that may stay with them longer than a theatrical experience.

The death penalty is a subject that one finds difficult to be for or against.  Some may argue that the death penalty deters crime, but a study conducted for the United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention in 1988, concluded that “this research has failed to provide scientific support that executions have a greater effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no positive support to the deterrent hypothesis”. 

Assante does not ask the reader or audience to choose, she only shows and dramatizes the facts.  Her characters are career criminals, some minorities, ignorant and illiterate, terrified as they wait for the inevitable.  She also showcases the death penalty from the chaplain’s point of view and the prison guards, the victim’s families, the executed and those that wait on death row and their families.  She gives a voice to the executioner. She intermingles, specific executions, names as well as dates and where they were executed, how long they served on death row and their crimes with dramatizations and soliloquies. 
Article 5 asks questions like, should murder, premeditated, or an act of rage be answered by the law with the same violent response, within the realms of the so-called justice system?  How fair or humane is our justice system?  Does the fear of the death penalty deter homicide?  Article 5 offers no answers, instead, though the dramatic arts it puts the responsibility and moral ambiguity of a decision into our hands.