Is there no one in town aware of social injustice?
Part of the compact we make when we go to the theatre is to shut out
the outside world and completely immerse ourselves in the world
displayed before us by artists, by actors. We can't shut out our own
thoughts of course, our memories and associations, but our gaze is
directed, what we see and hear is planned to evoke a desired response.
It is impossible to achieve that focus when your theatre is the
visitors room at Sing Sing Prison on a hot spring evening, which is
where I was on Friday night, seeing Thornton Wilder's
Our Town performed by a cast of inmates of the maximum security facility, under the aegis of the not-for-profit
Rehabilitation Through the Arts.
I was one of a couple of hundred outsiders invited to see the
production, which had already been performed twice for the general
prison population, and my anticipation was as great as any I've had
before going to the theatre.
Every child born into this world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being.
It is impossible to contemplate a visit to Sing Sing without riffling
through all of the associations it brings to mind. Coming from a upper
middle class family, I don't know people who've gone to prison; serious
crime has never touched my life or the lives of my immediate community.
Crime and prison are something I read about in the newspaper, or see
served up as entertainment.
Dragnet. Law and Order. "Book him, Danno."
The Birdman of Alcatraz. Our Country's Good. The Shawshank Redemption. Oz. "Anything you can say will be used against you."
Escape
From Alcatraz. Short Eyes. Cool Hand Luke. The Green Mile. Not About
Nightingales. Dead Man Walking. Helter Skelter. The Executioner's Song. Even Nick Nolte in
Weeds, a fictionalized account of the San Quentin Drama Workshop.
From the moment I passed the first chain link fence and a complacent
guard who merely said, "Here for the play?," I was relatively at ease.
As I waited in an under-air-conditioned visitor's trailer packed with
attendees, I marveled as others in the awaiting audience, attired as if
for a Sunday matinee at any theatre, grumbled about the heat, while I
was wondering what the prisoners might be experiencing on that 90+
degree afternoon. I was sweating profusely, but silently.
Live people don't understand, do they? They're sort of shut up in little boxes, aren't they?
We began to be taken into the security area in groups of about 25. We
emptied our pockets, took off shoes and belts, just as at the airport,
although there was but a single line moving slowly through a dingy room
adorned with signs and memos of assorted warning that may have been up
for 30 years or more (one cautioned against bringing in "alcholic"
beverages, a typo of indeterminate age). Then, in groups of six, we
passed through one true prison gate - on which stood, incongruously,
more than a dozen two-inch Muppet figures. As that gate closed, another
heavy door, only six or seven feet beyond it, was opened, and we entered
the visitors room, our theatre.
* * *
Save for signs about proper behavior, vastly less than in the
security area, it felt as if I was entering the cafeteria of a
particularly large junior high school. There were guards, some on
platforms, some on the floor, but I saw only a few. Having entered on
the narrow, northern side of a long rectangle, the room seemed vast, but
it was filling with people and it had been set up as a makeshift
theatre. Chairs (all numbered for some purpose other than theatre
seating) were arranged in a shallow three-quarter thrust, facing the
eastern wall, where two levels of risers had been installed. Behind the
risers, dark green fabric obscured what I assumed were more signs about
proper decorum in the visitors room; the same fabric draped a collection
of vending machines on the south wall. Were these standard issue, I
wondered, or were they scenery, evoking the green hills of Grover's
Corners? A collection of inmate art (another initiative of
Rehabilitation Through the Arts) was on display, and refreshments were
being served. Only by looking west was there a clear reminder of where
we were: windows revealed spools of razor wire and fencing, beyond which
was "the yard" flanked by what were presumably cell blocks. Beyond that
were the tracks for the train lines that had brought me to Ossining,
and beyond them, the Hudson River.
The ceiling was low, hung with fluorescent strips. There were no
theatrical lights, but a small sound area sat in what might have been,
in other circumstances, the stage right wings; there was a mixing board
and an electric keyboard and familiar cabling ran out from there into
the playing space. A pre-show announcement told us that these
productions are usually done in the prison auditorium, which was under
renovation this year; it was the first time since the theatre initiative
began in 1996 that it hadn't been available, and the setting was the
simplest ever used (although perfectly appropriate for the famously
spare
Our Town.
There isn't much culture; but maybe this is the kind of
place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasure of a kind here: we
like the sun comin' up over the mountain in the morning, and we notice a
good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we
watch the change of the seasons; yes everybody knows about them.
I was surprised to find inmates, both those in obvious period costume
and those in prison drab, freely mingling with the invited audience,
greeting many who they seemed to know. They were shaking hands and even
embracing visitors, contrary to every fictional depiction in which
contact between prisoners and guests was forbidden. I had been told that
the cast's families were not permitted to attend; I assume the
obviously pre-existing relationships were because the audience (almost
entirely white and over 50) were in some way affiliated with RTA or
other prison outreach programs.
Kate Powers,
the show's director and one of my friends from Twitter, introduced me
first to her stage manager (the actual stage manager, not the character
of the Stage Manager from the play), then to a large man in overalls who
I was told would play Howie Newsome the milkman, then to a younger man
who would play George Gibbs. The last spoke of Kate's "unique style of
directing," so I asked whether he'd been in other plays. Only one, he
replied, prompting me to wonder what was so unique that someone with
presumably little frame of reference would find it so unusual.
Having arrived at the prison just after 5 pm and having been
processed through security by about 5:40, it was just over an hour
before we were called to our seats, as the last guests were cleared
through.
* * *
Now you know! That's what it is to be alive. To move about
in a cloud of ignorance to go up and down trampling on the feelings of
those. . . of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had
a million years. To always be at the mercy of one self-centered
passion, or another.
Had I wished to, I suspect I could have learned a great deal more
about the circumstances of the production from Kate. She had posted the
occasional comment to Twitter, or to Facebook, about a challenge (one
inmate struggled with an umbrella, unfamiliar with the mechanism) or
about an acting breakthrough, or an emotional one. She did an
interview with journalist Jonathan Mandell.
But I left it at that. I may well wish to understand the logistics and
stories behind putting on a play in such an environment, but this night I
simply wanted to react, to the setting and to the production, as I
would in most theatergoing experiences.
Seated behind me was Peter Kramer, a local reporter who had seen the
production two nights earlier, sitting with the general population; he
has
written previously about the prison's theatre program. To my immediate right was a woman who had appeared in RTA's production of
West Side Story
(three actresses had been brought in for this production as well, to
play Emily, Mr. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs). To her right was a veteran of the
RTA theatre program, a former inmate, who now worked on the outside,
counseling others, a man clearly well known to all there.
I guess we're all hunting like everybody else for a way the
diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome
can sink to the bottom. But it ain't easy to find. Meanwhile, we do all
we can to help those that can't themselves and those that we can we
leave alone.
Had I learned the backstories of the actors, they surely wouldn't
have resembled a Playbill bio. I might have been able to find out their
crimes, the length of their terms, whether this was their first
incarceration. Perhaps I should have. But I was not there to judge them,
since they had already been judged; I was not there to second-guess the
judicial system or the penal system, flawed as it may be. Most of what I
know about jurisprudence and incarceration, as I've said, is via
fiction. Reality is vastly more complex, but I am not sufficiently
versed in the subject to explore that. Theatre is what I do, and what I
can, respond to.
* * *
No differently than attending a student production, it would be
unfair to write anything resembling a review. The casting pool is
limited, as is any prior experience. While we know the stories of Rick
Cluchey or Charles S. Dutton, former prison inmates who ultimately
became acclaimed professional actors, future acting careers surely
wasn't the point of the show. It was about the teamwork, the self-esteem
building that surely we all know if we've ever been in a show, a music
group or (I imagine) a sports team.
What I can tell you is that Wilder's play came through loud and
clear. There were some minor alterations: George's kid sister became a
kid brother; Grover's Corners was re-situated in New York along the
Hudson River, there's a mosque up the hill in town these days, and the
religious affiliations of the community include a sizable share of
Muslims. Historically accurate interpolations for Wilder's drama set at
the turn of the century? No. Perfectly in keeping with the
meta-theatrics that power the play? Absolutely.
Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal,
and something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever
lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be
surprised how people are always losing hold of it.
There was no bashfulness in the cast, but no showboating either. No
one peered out and waved to those they knew in the audience. No one
flubbed lines, or goofed around. Every word, every action came through
loud and clear, enough so that the play worked its sad magic on me once
again. As I know more and more people who live in that cemetery among
its conversing residents, I find the play increasingly moving, almost
painfully so. When Emily spoke of loving George "forever and ever," my
knowledge of what was to come brought me deep sorrow. No matter that I
was in prison, watching amateur actors with backgrounds that might have
evoked pity or fear. I was in Grover's Corners once again.
The outside world intruded upon the production in one way that
wouldn't have been possible in the cloistered environs of an auditorium.
With the performance commencing at 6:50 and coming down,
intermissionless, at about 8:50, the wall of west-facing windows
provided a natural illumination that, at first, overrode the
institutional lighting. The actors were lit up by blazing light during
the time movie-makers call "magic hour" when the sun approaches the
horizon, casting a particularly rich, orange glow. As the play
progressed, Grover's Corners shifted from daylight to magic hour and
then, by act three, as darkness took over the prison yard, the train
tracks, and the river, the inner light became only the unvaried white of
fluorescent bulbs. Nature had receded leaving only the cold
surroundings of the visitors room, brighter than a wet funeral
afternoon, but harsh in its own way, and surely as unforgiving.
Beyond nature's magic, Kate Powers achieved her own
coup de theatre, less instantly startling than the one employed by David Cromer in his rightly hailed
Our Town,
but one organic to the venue and this cast, and deeply, quietly
powerful. As act two bled directly into act three, as the wedding
seating was shifted to become the gravestones, nine men, inmates,
dressed in green work shirts, green work pants and heavy boots (the
other actors wore costumes that were a rough approximation of the play's
original period), made their way in slow motion up to the top riser.
There they proceeded to seat themselves in one long row and stare out at
us, unmoving, for the entire act. These were of course, within the
context of the play, more gravestones, more of the deceased. But as
these nine men sat and stared out, unspeaking, I could not help but see
them as prisoners and actors all at once, locked away for crimes I knew
nothing of, for how long I did not know. Were their lives over, as in
the play? Was the play itself their escape, or even a sign of their
eventual redemption? Their stares gave away nothing. No threat, no
sadness. No heaven, no hell. Perhaps those in the audience with deep
faith saw hope, perhaps those who believe only in this life saw nothing
but emptiness. I saw Wilder by way of Beckett, I saw beauty and the
abyss, and I saw superb theatre.
They stay here while the earth part of 'em burns away and burns out; and all that time they slowly get indifferent.
* * *
It's worth pointing out that Sing Sing is one of five prisons where
Rehabilitation Through the Arts works, and that there are prison arts
programs in many places around the world, and have been for many years. I
have read about them often, and shared their stories with others
through social media. Nothing I've written should suggest that this
experience is singular or unique - it is simply the first time it ceased
to be an abstract idea for me, and became reality.
I'm going to be grappling with the experience of seeing
Our Town
at Sing Sing for some time, I expect, because I have to process so much
more than I do when simply seeing a professional production. I probably
have to learn more as well. Even if I see another theatre production in
a prison, it cannot possibly have the same impact as this one did, this
first foray, ever so slightly, ever so briefly, behind prison walls,
into a human drama far greater than any work of fiction can encompass.
But as someone who attends theatre relentlessly, and who at times
despairs for it, this was one of those evenings that reminds me why
theatre is my life's work, and more than simply make-believe.
If you haven't realized it at this point, the italicized sections that punctuate this essay are all dialogue from
Our Town
itself. They stood out in bold relief when they were spoken on Friday
night. Even though they weren't emphasized or called out in any way,
they took me away from the play in startling flashes with meaning beyond
what even Wilder might have imagined, given the setting, and the
speakers. Even by accident or coincidence, great works reveal the world
to us in new ways each time we encounter them, even - or perhaps most
especially - behind bars.
My, wasn't life awful - and wonderful.
~~~~~~~~
The author of this article is Howard Sherman, arts consultant and theatre pundit.
The art reproduced above is by Sing Sing inmate Robert Pollack
