The 2025-26 season at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts not only marks the Quick Center’s 35th anniversary, but also the 10-year anniversary of the Global Theatre: Performance Series.
Theatre That Changes Our World
Commercial theatre producer Cheryl Wiesenfeld has produced the series from the beginning—bringing mission-centered theatre to the Quick Center stage at a time when the medium was not typically part of the traditional season.
“The chosen theme—or mission, if you will—is theatre that changes our world,” said Wiesenfeld. “I’m interested in social topics presented in a way that encourages conversation and opens people’s minds.”
Topics over the past decade have included immigration, suicide, loneliness, and more. “Our goal in year 10 was to take a microscope and focus in on a topic that could use more introspection,” she shared. The play that rose to the occasion? Hell Has an Exit: Finding Freedom Behind Bars, written by Ron Jenkins—a Yale and Wesleyan University professor who frequently works with incarcerated individuals. The work is based on interviews with a formerly incarcerated mother and daughter, Debra Taylor and BL Shirelle, featuring music written and performed by Shirelle.
In the words of the show’s team, Hell Has an Exit is a play “fueled by the mutual love and support that enables a mother-daughter drug-dealing team to build new post-prison lives as a preacher and a poet. It is a story of personal and spiritual transformation that is framed by rap poetry, Gospel music, Bible quotes, and Dante’s journey from Inferno to Paradise.”
A Legacy of Freedom Through Music
Hell Has an Exit, which was performed on Feb. 6 in the Quick Center’s Wien Experimental Theatre, is a continuation of a story begun several years ago. In 2023, the Global Theatre: Performance Series produced Surviving Troubled Waters: From Prison to Freedom through Music, which told the stories of Shirelle and Naomi Wilson, incarcerated for a total of 37 years in Pennsylvania. They shared a close connection in prison through their music, and they formed a bond like that of a mother and daughter.
In Hell Has an Exit, the story now focuses on the actual mother-daughter relationship of Shirelle and her mother, Debra Taylor—both of whom had a difficult beginning with drug use and incarceration—and how their complicated relationship has evolved over time. Taylor is now the pastor of her church with an ever-expanding membership and Shirelle is an accomplished musician, producer, and songwriter. The performance uses an artistic lens to explore the lessons learned from their stories.
“I feel like I threw a little rock into the water 10 years ago,” Wiesenfeld recalled. “We have built up an audience over the past 10 years, and people are interested in the work, which is a lovely thing. More professors and students are interested in social advocacy work than when we started—though maybe 10 years ago we were just all in our own silos—and I’m honored that we’ve been part of leading that.”
