When Patrick Keating was 19 he was presented with two options: rehab or three years in federal prison.

Standing in front of a judge and facing armed robbery charges, Keating said, "Your honour, I don't need rehab."

This wasn't Keating's first run-in with the law, but it might have been the most pivotal.

Forty-five years later, Keating is performing this moment, and other painful and joyful ones that followed, in front of more than 500 people in Moncton's Capitol Theatre as part of the Atlantic tour of his one-man autobiographical show Inside/Out: A Prison Memoir.

The Montreal-born artist said he started using drugs when he was 12 years old, eventually getting addicted to heroin and committing three armed robberies. The last time he left prison, he was pushing 30.

When Patrick Keating was 19 he was presented with two options: Rehab, or three years in federal prison. Standing in front of a judge and facing armed robbery charges Keating said “Your honour, I don’t need rehab.” 1:46

It was during his last stint in a jail in British Columbia that he sat through his first theatre class. At that time, he'd never seen a play before.

"I was reluctant. … Inside you keep everything quite close and you don't let anybody in, and theatre is all about letting people in," he said.

"It was quite difficult because you maintain a certain mask. And interestingly enough, the course was a [clowning course] and so the mask was there and sort of allowed me to get behind that."

Challenging a misconception

Keating, now 64, said he hopes this piece will make people think twice about generalizing about what an ex-con looks like.

"Most people's experience with that is either films or TV, and it's the stereotypical large, mean-looking, tattooed, you know, male. And I'm not."

These misconceptions make people "reluctant to engage with them because they believe they are very scary," he said.

And for Keating, the best way to battle the stereotype and its effects is to put a human face on the idea of a convicted criminal.

Patrick Keating has spent 10 years of his life in and out of federal prisons. It took him 20 years on the outside to put his experience of crime, jail and redemption into a one-man show. (Hadeel Ibrahim/CBC)

"If you show people that everybody inside is somebody's father, somebody's brother, somebody's mother, somebody's daughter then you would have done a good job," he said. "So I try and do that."

'Pay what you will'

Kim Rayworth, managing director of the Capitol Theatre, said she wanted to book Inside/Out because she knew it was relatable.

"I think no matter what an individual's experience may be that they can identify with making choices and the consequences that can flow from those choices," she said.

"At the end of the day, if you persevere and you choose to work hard there can be some better days ahead."

That's why she said the theatre chose to let people pay what they believe the play deserves at the end of the performance. She said the goal is to remove the financial barrier of attaching a ticket price to the performance.

The inspiration

The instructor for Keating's first theatre class showed up in full clown gear, and Keating tried not to laugh for as long as he could.

"Because it was a clown piece and he had come into the classroom in full clown and I was like 'What is this? I'm not going for this. … Go ahead, make me laugh. I am not doing it.' And eventually he put a smile on my face."

Years later, when Keating heard the instructor died, he decided to write this piece in memory of him.

"I thought that since he had given me so much it was about time that I gave back," he said.

Keating said he's now older and "hopefully" wiser, but he's still searching for the same thing he's been searching for since he was a child: a community.

"I had believed that I had found a community [in crime] and was quite safe in that. And it took me quite a while to find another community and to leave that one behind."