Back in January of 2014, Oakland’s Gritty City Repertory Youth Theatre created its first original theater piece, “Caught Up,” a collage of vignettes and monologues about mass incarceration. That was performer Robert Paige’s first show with Gritty City Rep, which describes itself as “Oakland’s rigorous, pre-professional theatrical training program for youth of color.”

Two months later, then 18-year-old Paige was arrested for robbery and incarcerated for 2½ years. After his release, he joined back up with Gritty City, playing roles such as Banquo and Puck (from Shakespeare) and building sets for the company. Now he and Gritty City founder and executive artistic director Lindsay Krumbein have collaborated on a radically revised version of “Caught Up” informed by Paige’s experiences in the penal system.

“We sat down with the script and we went through it scene by scene,” Krumbein says. “We ended up keeping about a third of it and getting rid of about two thirds that we thought we could do better, either something similar but more current, or something similar but more local.”

During his incarceration, Paige went from Santa Rita to San Quentin and then to Susanville, far upstate. Finally he became an inmate firefighter, fighting wildfires in Tuolumne County, dangerous work for which he was paid $2 a day, or a dollar an hour during actual fires.

Through it all, he and Krumbein were constant contact.

“We had a little book club,” Paige says.

“I feel like we got a million times closer while he was gone and built a lot of trust,” Krumbein adds.

The new version of the show includes actual excerpts from their letters to each other.

“When I proposed this letters idea, I wasn’t sure if that would feel too personal,” Krumbein says. “And he was like, ‘No, we should definitely do that! And we should put it in the playbill that they’re real!’”

The first “Caught Up” came out of necessity. Gritty City was all set to do a different play at downtown Oakland’s newly constructed Flight Deck, but two weeks before rehearsals were supposed to start they got word that the venue wouldn’t be ready to open in time. So they had to shelve the original play and come up with another show to perform in the replacement venue.

“I have worked in schools for many years in a community hugely impacted by mass incarceration and by the prison industrial complex, and I had been percolating on doing an original piece around prisons,” Krumbein says. “But I had never written a play before, so I called Tom Bruett, and we spent one crazy eight-hour day saying, OK, what could this be? At the end of that day we had a rough shape for a play. He went off and wrote some stuff, and I went off and wrote some stuff, and I went and found a bunch of verbatim pieces off the internet and pieces from books that I turned into scenes. And literally three weeks, boom, we had a show.”

In the original “Caught Up,” Paige played a community organizer, and now he’s one himself.

“I work with Californians for Justice, and we work around racial and educational justice, mostly with high schoolers of color, located throughout California but especially here in Oakland,” he says.

“It feels like a lot of times we want to keep this very antiquated model of what an inmate is, or someone who has been an inmate,” Krumbein says. “And it’s just so false, because the reasons that people go to prison are so varied, and so many of them are so unfair and skewed and biased, and people can be so many things. We do wonderful things and we make mistakes, and we learn and we don’t learn, and that’s across the board, and we need to sit with those complexities instead of trying to just put entire groups of people into boxes, literally and figuratively.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘CAUGHT UP’

By Lindsay Krumbein, Robert Paige and Tom Bruett, presented by Gritty City Repertory Youth Theatre

Through: Dec. 15

Where: The Flight Deck, 1540 Broadway, Oakland

Tickets: $5-$50; www.grittycityrep.org