Ex-inmate headed to Kennedy Center

By David Ress, Media General News Service
Published: July 25, 2008

RICHMOND — It’s a scene a lot of us know: A young man wearing what Grandma thinks just isn’t right for church.
Grandma’s grumps and sister’s threat to smack an upstart brother tickled out fond grins from the homeless men and women watching the skit as they waited for lunch and a foot-washing Friday at Centenary United Methodist Church.
They nodded, watching the familiar, as Shelton Land’s skit moved from Grandma’s complaints about his character’s wave-rag, to his smart-aleck assertion that God wouldn’t condemn him for the cap he wore, to her loss of temper and swat with a purse that knocked him to the floor.
It was the moment for the message. Even the card players paused.
Land spun the skit out of a play the former prison inmate wrote about change and redemption. On Labor Day weekend, the Prisons Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes arts and education behind bars, will stage scenes from the play at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Grandma is in it, and so is her upstart grandson. They cope with a crisis of tighter money, an 18-year-old’s need to choose between college or helping pay the bills, and a mom returning home from prison.
The play, “Road 2 Redempshun,” will also be staged in November in Richmond, Land said.
He uses proceeds from performances to fund a nonprofit he set up, called Land Mindz Inc., that tries to give people just released from prison the help he found he needed when he was released a few years ago after a seven-plus-year term for breaking-and-entering.
Land, 35, raced through a mass communications degree at Norfolk State University after his release and is now studying social work at Virginia Commonwealth University.
He feels called to send a message to others, like the group watching his skit in the basement of Centenary church, about faith and hope and change.
David Ress is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.