She used the present tense, though her husband, who was in jail for six years, is now out on probation. “It’s not all over,” she explained. “I consider probation part of the prison system that affects families, often in horrific ways.” And it is the entire prison system that Ms. Kreiter targets as an artist-activist.

Her work, she said, always begins with an issue, the plight of women in the garment trade, for instance. Then she finds an outdoor site ( like fire escape s in the garment district) that connects with her theme. This time, the issue was clear — she was living it — but she decided that rather than being strictly site-specific, she wanted a set that was transportable so that she might address a national problem across the nation. When she met with the designer Sean Riley, the first thing they discussed was chairs.

Ms. Kreiter recalled that when she and her son first visited her husband in jail, “the chairs were fixed side by side — it was hard for us to talk to each other.” The guards also demanded that everyone sit with both feet on the ground. “I would constantly get yelled at for folding my legs up,” she said, “which is like a dancer thing.”

The chairs became a metaphor for “how prison works for nobody,” she said, for a system that traumatizes through both rigidity and instability. On the “Wait Room” set, metal chairs and scaffolding shaped like a guard tower are bolted onto that Tilt-a-Whirl surface, as unstable as a ship in a storm. The performers are subject to all kinds of forces. “The metaphors of the piece are in the engineering,” she said.