From Anna Hirsch at the Baton Rouge Lagniappe:

The stage is bohemian basic—two standing house lights, a mic stand, some patterned cloth, and a lava lamp.  Behind the stage area tacked up to one of the wooden cabinets, a sign reads "This is a WordPlay safe space."  The scene is far from the Puritan New England landscape that Nathaniel Hawthorne evoked in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter.  Yet for the teens, standing up in front of a crowd of their peers—I imagine—breathing softly into the microphone, trying to gather their nerves and vocal chords into some kind of unified performance, Hester Prynne's pillory experience of public examination isn't actually that far off.

The December 2006 Fresh Heat open mic, like all WordPlay open mics, was bigger and better than the last, butfor the first time sans Anna West.  Another sign visible behind the teen performers commands the audience to "Respect the mic, Respect the audience, Respect the room."  West, director of WordPlay, whose voice typically offers a vocal reminder to "Respect the mic," was absent from the December reading due to sickness.   As director of WordPlay, West has worked hard to cultivate a coherent and consistent "safe space" for Baton Rouge youth to express themselves.  Luckily one bad cold was not enough to close down this venue of youth expression for even a single show.  Fresh Heat, the only youth spoken word open mic in Baton Rouge, has become a safe space indeed. 

Read the rest of the aricle here.

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