Sept. 23: Reflections of Our Lives Through Dance

BENNINGTON, VERMONT -- A screening by Susan Slotnick of her documentary, "Reflections of Our Lives Through Dance," about her prison dance program. A discussion will follow. Slotnick, a two-time CNN Heroes nominee and once named Huffington Post’s Greatest Woman of the Day in honor of Woman’s History Month, has taught modern dance to incarcerated men and boys for 13 years, under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through The Arts. Slotnick has also taught modern dance to the homeless, people living with AIDS, and breast cancer survivors. The screening will begin at 7 p.m. on Sept. 23 at Bennington College’s VAPA Kinoteca.

This notice was originally published in the Bennington Banner:
http://www.benningtonbanner.com/news/ci_24127288/e-week-sept-19 

See also this 2011 article on Slotnick's work in The Huffington Post:

Teaching the Power of Dance Behind Bars 

Shakespeare in Prisons Conference, Nov. 15-16, 2013

Shakespeare at Notre Dame is pleased to announce the Shakespeare in Prisons Conference hosted by the University of Notre Dame on Friday, November 15, and Saturday, November 16, 2013.

Featuring keynote addresses and film screenings by Curt Tofteland (founding director of Shakespeare Behind Bars) and Tom Magill (founder of the Educational Shakespeare Center and director of the Irish film Mickey B ), the conference aims to bring together artists and educators engaged in transformational arts programs using Shakespeare in prisons across the USA (and the world) for an exploration and study of the effects such programming has on prison populations. The goal is to promote a collaborative learning forum where participants will be exposed to a diverse array of programs that all strive for a common result: the habilitation of the inmate’s mind, heart, body, and spirit.

Departing from the traditional academic conference structure, the Shakespeare in Prisons conference will focus on the craft and experiences of the practitioner—while allowing ample time for one-on-one networking and collaboration.

In addition to the keynotes and film screenings (and Q&A’s), attendees are invited to participate in workshops that explore innovative methodologies, as well as panel discussions that are designed to stimulate discussion about practitioner experiences and best practices within the industrial prison complex.

Registration is $25 and includes a dinner/reception on Friday night, lunch and dinner on Saturday, and admission to all workshops and film screenings. Online registration begins on Monday, June 10 via www.conferences.nd.edu . More information regarding the conference schedule, lodging information, and the availability of a limited number of bursaries to help with attendee expenses will be made available on June 10. In the meantime, please contact Scott Jackson at scottjackson@nd.edu  for more information.

We hope that you will join us for this unique gathering of like-minded individuals.

All the very best–

Scott Jackson, Peter Holland, and Curt Tofteland


About the speakers and host:

Curt L. Tofteland  is the founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) program. SBB has twelve programs in Kentucky and Michigan. He currently facilitates the adult Shakespeare Behind Bars/Michigan program at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility in Muskegon Heights and SBB’s first co-gender, court-ordered, juvenile Shakespeare Behind/Beyond Bars programs at the Ottawa County Juvenile Detention Center and the Juvenile Justice Institute. From 1995-2008, he facilitated the SBB/KY program at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, producing and directing fourteen Shakespeare productions. His 2003 SBB/KY production of The Tempest  was chronicled by Philomath Films, producing the documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars , which premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and went on to be screened at 40+ film festivals worldwide, winning eleven awards. He is a national and international speaker, having lectured at over forty colleges and universities across the United States and at TEDx Berkeley, TEDxEast (NYC), and TEDx Macatowa. For his work as a Prison Arts Practitioner he was awarded fellowships from the Fulbright and Petra Foundations, as well as a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bellarmine University. He is a founding member and past president of the Shakespeare Theatre Association, an international service organization for theatres that produce the works of William Shakespeare. He is a published essayist and poet, currently authoring the book, Behind the Bard-Wire: Reflection, Responsibility, Redemption, & Forgiveness…The Transformative Power of Art, Theatre, and Shakespeare.  From 1989-2008, he served as producing artistic director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, producing fifty Shakespeare productions, directing twenty-five, and acting in eight. A trailer for Shakespeare Behind Bars  can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2kr5wV_AiQ More information on Curt’s work can be found at http://www.shakespearebehindbars.org/

Tom Magill  is an ex-prisoner who transformed his life through arts education while in prison for violence. While incarcerated he met his enemy—and his enemy became his teacher. On release he earned a B.A. (Hons) in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Birmingham and an M.A. in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is an award-winning filmmaker, drama facilitator, actor, writer, director, and producer. He specializes in utilizing Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” methodology and the works of William Shakespeare in transforming community and prison settings. After training with Michael Bogdanov, he became his and Augusto Boal’s personal representative in Northern Ireland. In 1999 he founded the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC) to develop drama and film with prisoners and ex-prisoners. ESC is an award-winning arts education charity, empowering marginalized people to find their voice and tell their stories through film. In 2007 he directed Mickey B , an award-winning feature film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth  cast with prisoners from Maghaberry maximum-security prison. For his film direction he has received the 2011 Justice in the Community Award (from the Northern Ireland Department of Justice), the 2008 Roger Graef Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film at the Koestler Awards (for Mickey B ), the Arthur Koestler Award for Prison Drama in 2004 and 2006 (for Inside Job  and The Big Question , respectively), and the Impetus Human Rights Award in 2005, 2006, and 2007 (for Bridging the Divide ). He has presented his film work in Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Nigeria, South Korea, and the United States. More information on Tom’s work can be found at http://esc-film.com/ A trailer of Mickey B  can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFKMIswx5VY

Peter Holland  holds the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies and is the Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. He is one of the central figures in performance-oriented Shakespeare criticism, served as Director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon before coming to Notre Dame in 2002. He is editor of Shakespeare Survey  as well as a number of other series. Among his books are English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s  and a major study of Restoration drama The Ornament of Action . He has also edited many Shakespeare plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream  for the Oxford Shakespeare series. In 2007, he completed publication of a five volume series of collections of essays entitled Rethinking British Theatre History . In 2007-08, he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. He was elected an honorary fellow at Trinity Hall, his alma mater and one of the 31 colleges that comprise the University of Cambridge. His Arden edition of Coriolanus  was released in early 2013.

Shakespeare at Notre Dame  is a program that recognizes the centrality of the study of Shakespeare in humanistic pedagogy at the University of Notre Dame. The creation of the “Shakespeare Initiative” in 2001 sought to broaden the Shakespeare offerings on campus and establish the permanence of this new tradition for an audience of students, faculty, the South Bend community at-large, and a national and international audience. To that end, the current programs and future prospects that comprise Shakespeare at Notre Dame have created a regional center for Shakespearean scholarship, production, educational outreach, and academic research by enmeshing programs as far-reaching and diverse as Actors From The London Stage, the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, visiting guest artists and lecturers, touring productions, and new media library collections; ensuring Notre Dame’s status as a nationally visible—and the Midwest’s pre-eminent—venue for Shakespeare Studies. Find out more at http://shakespeare.nd.edu/

Drama for Cannibals by Malcolm Harris

Prisons and Shakespeare go hand in hand, but who’s learning what when Hamlet is an inmate?

THE NEW INQUIRY,  Vol. 19

The organizations that put on Shakespeare plays in prisons claim the sort of distinctions that suggest they’re part of a crowded field. They’re either “the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit” or “the oldest North American Shakespeare program contained within the walls of a medium security adult male prison performing exclusively the works of William Shakespeare.” There’s Shakespeare in Prison, The Shakespeare Prison Project, and Shakespeare Behind Bars. This American Life devoted a whole acoustic-guitar-scored episode to a prison production of Hamlet’s Act V. In Italy, Caesar Must Die, the newest film from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, takes it a step further with a scripted movie about a performance of Julius Caesar with an all-convict cast acting under their own names. In the Times Literary Supplement Peter Stothard wondered which play in the English-Arabic collection at Guantánamo Bay is most popular. Where there are bars, there’s the Bard. What is it about Shakespeare that’s able to carve out this exceptional space in criminal justice?


The programs promise impressive, albeit abstract, results. One organization claims their program is “extremely effective in empowering inmates to think creatively, re-examine decisions they’ve made, get more in touch with their emotions, and develop life skills such as confidence in creative thinking and speaking in front of an audience.” Another is premised on the idea that “human beings are inherently good, and that although convicted criminals have committed heinous crimes against other human beings, this inherent goodness still lives deep within them and must be called forth.” Shakespeare’s plays enable a confrontation with our individual humanity, with existential choices, with honor and murder and revenge. Taking part in a performance is framed as rehabilitative practice rather than a humane way to pass time under inhumane conditions. There’s a pattern here, and the actors aren’t the only ones following a well-read script. If Shakespeare isn’t officially part of the American justice system, his work is at least an accessory to the crime.

All of these efforts to help Shakespeare speak to prisoners reach outside audiences in more or less the same form. An important step is to frame the production as an opportunity for the inmates, one which they always seize with enthusiasm and gratitude. Criminals without any other qualifiers — especially in maximum security, where a disproportionate number of the performance stories take place — are generally depicted as menacing orange crime machines. A convict who’s excited about Shakespeare, the audience imagines, might be worth rehabilitating. And just as important, the inmates have to be participating of their own free will because that’s the only way the redemption story works. America wants to see penitent self-improvers, not dancing marionettes.

But there’s a big difference between consent and compliance. In a heavily controlled environment like the prison, it’s hard to talk honestly about voluntary participation. After all, no one wants to be in a prison production of Shakespeare. The New York Times in their feature about a performance at Rikers and This American Life both mention that actors in productions they covered have previous experience, but there’s no analysis as to why Hollywood extra and felon might be overlapping categories. Of course there are actors in prison. The plays they choose are small-scale dramas suited to the security concerns of the hosting institutions. The tragedies aren’t ensemble numbers; they don’t have roles for anyone who might want to join, like a school play does. That authorities can fill an audition with people who prefer being in Hamlet in prison to just being in prison isn’t much evidence of anything except perhaps incarceration levels. Certainly not the indomitable human spirit.
The assumption that the redemption narrative belies is that prisoners are stupid, or rather that they possess uncultivated intellects. Shakespeare, as a traditional barometer of analytical ability, calls forth and translates the prisoner’s raw talent into recognizable skill. The director plays the role of teacher/coach who believes in the convicts’ worth and goodness when no one else will. And when prisoners do connect with the material — as they inevitably do; there are no stories of Shakespeare prison project failures — the outsider’s faith is vindicated.

Laura Bates, author of the memoir Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard, provides a good example of the formula. Though Bates didn’t direct Shakespeare, she taught him in a literature class in prisons in Chicago and Indiana. The lessons are much the same. In an excerpt published at The Huffington Post, she tells the story of Larry Newton, the maximum-security inmate whose salvation provides the title. At first Newton frightens Bates, but when he responds enthusiastically to her try-out essay prompt, she admits him to the class to watch with satisfaction as he becomes her star pupil. In a tragic final act, despite his accomplishments, Bates reveals that Newton will spend the rest of his life in prison. It’s a simple story, and it’s the one at the core of all these representations, but it’s also premised on the idea that NPR listeners understand what they want to hear from prisoners better than prisoners do.

When Bates says of Newton’s work, “Not bad for a fifth-grade drop-out,” she under-rates the capabilities of elementary schoolers. This isn’t to critique his analysis, but even an 11-year-old knows when they’re being given an answer in the form of a question. To screen participants, Bates gave them a soliloquy from Richard II that begins, “I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world. And, for because the world is populous and here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it.” She then poses the seemingly open-ended “What do you understand from the excerpt?” It’s a high-stakes test for a prisoner in solitary. Though there’s a range of acceptable answers implied, it’s clear what the instructor wants him to say. The prisoners have to fulfill their role in the story by identifying with the Shakespearean protagonist.

The syllogism goes like this: If Shakespeare speaks to universal humanity, and Shakespeare speaks to a prisoner, then the prisoner is human after all. The non-incarcerated can rest easier knowing bad guys get rehabilitated and punished. But this instruction isn’t just a performance for viewers at home, it is educational. What exactly do jailers want their captives to learn?

Wrestling with questions of choice and responsibility, of betrayal and remorse — in the official American curriculum this is called existential thought. But Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth aren’t everymen. It isn’t simply enrichment to dress up a society’s captive marginalized as kings and princes and have them rehearse tragedy. Even if it’s more fashionable to do post-colonial readings of Shakespeare than write him off as emblematic of Western hegemony, the use of treacherous Nordic royals as exemplars of human interiority is suspect.

In a 1928 radio discussion, playwright Bertolt Brecht went off on this Shakespearean hero and his tragic narrative:

Shakespeare pushes the great individuals out of their human relationships (family, state) out onto the heath, into complete isolation, where he must pretend to be great in his decline … Future times will call this kind of drama a drama for cannibals and they’ll say that the human being was eaten as Richard III, with pleasure at the beginning and with pity at the end, but he was always eaten up.

This dramatic arc doesn’t belong to humanity writ large. It belongs to a particular personality, born of very particular circumstances, and is generalized to whole populations because it’s convenient for an enriched few. When we talk about ideology and propaganda, we should suspect our contemporary media, but also our cultural touchstones. No one has a consciousness more archetypically false than a prisoner who believes he’s free. What did Larry Newton realize that so impressed Laura Bates? “I had control of my life. I could be anybody I wanted to be,” he writes for her.

At the heart of both the Shakespearean tragedy and the story the American justice system tells about itself is a bad choice. Prisoners, it’s nice to think, are people who have made mistakes and are facing the consequences. But this national bedtime story is contradicted on the front page of the paper every day. An alien observer looking at the US prison population would never guess its organizing principle is justice. Rather, the penal system is index and engine of social marginalization, with the groups who most frighten the people who run it — young black men, trans women — facing the highest incarceration rates. Adam Gopnik is right when he calls the American mass incarceration “a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” American prisons are central to defining and maintaining the host of unequal, intersecting relations that make up the national fabric, all while literally acting out tales of human universality in Early Modern English.

If the carceral system is the country’s fundamental fact, then its fundamental logic is that of cuffs, bars, and guns. No readings or performances are going to change that, but they can change the way we see it from the outside. Without a story about 2,266,800 bad choices, America is just a country that keeps its underclasses in cages. Shakespeare’s drama for cannibals lends a sense of noble inevitability to a prison system that’s not only historically and globally specific, but exceptional. It’s fitting theatre for a society that eats its own.

But solitary confinement within the Shakespearean character is not the only way to be alive. While held at the immigration detention center on Ellis Island, Trinidadian Marxist CLR James wrote a book on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and what he termed the “authoritarian personality” in the form of Ahab. He was not content to linger on this ill-fated type, whom he likens to a handful of Shakespearean dramatic protagonists. In Mariners, Renegades And Castaways James contrasts the captain with the ground to his figure: the crew. While Ahab is “either in a state of grim reserve, tragic gloom, or hopeless silence, overwhelmed by his isolation,” the anonymous crew is united by their virtuosic free association. Together they’re able to accomplish what is without hyperbole a superhuman task. Where other critics have read Melville’s descriptions of whaling as dull or even non-narrative, James sees in them the sublime harmony of unalienated human endeavor.James emphasizes that Ahab’s crew would have been paid a share of the take rather than a salary. They’re not übermenschen overcome by “problems which cannot be answered, but which the tortured personality in its misery must continue to ask;” they’re free laborers whose concerns are at hand.
The full importance of this comparison isn’t evident until the final chapter, when the book takes an autobiographical turn. In a very different story about prison education, James describes where he did his writing and his observations about his fellow detainees. He knows that to the warden and policymakers they’re “just a body of isolated individuals seeking charity,” but he sees more:

     These men, taken as a whole, know the contemporary world and know it better than many
     world-    famous foreign correspondents. They discuss among themselves their attitudes to the
     United States, their attitudes to World War III, to Russia, to totalitarianism, to democracy, to
     national independence … With a devastating simplicity they sum up regimes. I have heard a man
     say in five minutes all that needed to be said about one of the most controversial regimes in the
     world today. He ended, ‘I know. I have lived and worked there.’

It’s easier to guard a million Hamlets than a thousand prisoners like these. No wonder authorities would rather expose inmates to stories of individual agency from the dead and foreign than encourage them to form social analyses based on their common experiences. American culture as a whole has little use for narratives about the intelligence and sophistication of self-organized people acting in concert. When film studies professors need a good example of this phenomenon, they’re forced to reach for the Soviets. In a detention environment, this kind of thinking can be downright dangerous; everyone knows what prisoners do when they self-organize. 

In the past month, two of America’s most prominent prison institutions have been rocked by hunger strikes with a discipline that could make any professional organizer in the country blush. In California, a demonstration across prisons compelled tens of thousands of inmates to refuse meals and work. At time of writing, three weeks in, 1000 prisoners continue to make the only choice they’re given, at enormous personal cost. And in the detention center at Guantánamo, hunger strikes have brought authorities to brutally force-feed detainees intravenously. Authorities move the leaders to increasingly isolated cells; if the prisoners can’t be trapped inside their own heads, then they’ll be caged in boxes not much larger. Any outside-pacifier who thinks they have something to teach these people about responsibility or consequences is grotesquely mistaken.

There is genius in every prison. Not just because, as Stephen Jay Gould has suggested, it’s a near statistical certainty that there are individuals with truly exceptional intellects languishing behind bars. Not because societies tend to lock up adventurous minds, or because we have seen evidence in the brilliance of convicts from Thomas Moore to Emma Goldman to Malcolm X. There is genius in every prison because there is genius wherever people, never alone, make a world for themselves. In the Shakespeare-in-prison stories, the inmates, like Richard III, are eaten “with pleasure at the beginning and with pity at the end,” but always eaten, and always alone. The Bard’s tragedies are solitary confinement for the mind. America would rather teach its prisoners that man is most human in isolation than learn from them that the opposite is true.

Shakespeare Beyond Bars: Megale Taylor

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY: Judy Dworin Performance Project Seeks a New Managing Director

Judy Dworin Performance Project seeks a Managing Director to oversee the programmatic operations and future development of this very active mid-sized arts non-profit.

The Managing Director’s role includes but is not limited to oversight of the logistics that support implementation of programmatic activities; public relations and marketing including writing press releases, e-newsletter content, website updates; event, program and residency coordination; general personnel oversight; first point of contact and knowledgeable public face for the organization; grants research, coordination and writing; fundraising including individual, corporate and foundation development; Board relations; strategic planning; and community relations. The Managing Director works closely with and under the direction of the Executive/Artistic Director, partners with the Administrative Director and Associate Artistic Director, and supervises the Programming Associate, interns and volunteers.

An ideal candidate will have at least 5 years experience in the arts non-profit field, and possess the passion, dedication and organizational skills to fulfill JDPP’s mission and programming. Superior social, communication, written and verbal skills are key, as well as the ability to work both independently and collaboratively, to multi-task, and self-initiate. Proficiency in using Mac OSX, Microsoft Office Suite, Internet navigation and searching, computer troubleshooting and basic office hardware maintenance are essential.

This position is full-time at 40 hours per week with a salary commensurate with experience. There are no benefits. Applications are being accepted immediately, until the position is filled. The ideal starting date is on or before July 1st. Please submit a cover letter, resume or CV, and 3 professional references to carla@judydworin.org.

JDPP is an equal opportunity employer.

HUFFINGTON POST: Address: Sing Sing Prison, Grover's Corners NY, The Mind of God - by Howard Sherman

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

See the original posting on The Huffington Post

"Our Town" at Sing Sing Correctional Facility - A Very Personal Review by Brent Buell

Last night's performance of "Our Town" inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility was heartfelt, sincere, deeply moving--and ultimately consummately professional. For me, it was an emotionally charged opportunity to see the men I worked with for so long as a theater volunteer in that maximum security prison. Under the excellent direction of Kate Powers, this play--so easily mocked or caricatured--was truthful and made Wilder's deepest points with seeming effortlessness.

Try as I might to be completely objective, my take on the evening was also extremely personal. The lead actor, a prisoner like all the male performers, was someone I taught in his very first introduction to acting class about four or five years ago. He had no theatrical experience and little knowledge of the theater when he began. Last night, in the role of George, he was a seasoned professional playing the young man convincingly--sweet without a touch of cloying, innocent without a touch of mockery--so in love with Emily that his final scene in the graveyard had me wiping away tears. That was enhanced by the fine performance of Kate Kenney, the female volunteer who played the role of Emily with equal charm and believability.

The Stage Manager was performed masterfully--and I mean that absolutely--by the man I had the pleasure of directing in the role of George in "Of Mice and Men." (I would like to name every cast member, but need to follow facility protocols). He "took the stage" so effortlessly, with such disarming ease, that when the Metro North train rumbled by outside (it runs right through Sing Sing) and he included the "train that runs over there--from north to south" in his opening monologue--the reality was fully integrated into the theatrical event.

The program that produced the event is Rehabilitation Through the Arts. Founded by Katherine Vockins in 1996, RTA has been the means of introducing hundreds of men to theater, music and art, and thus been a toe-hold for them to expand their world views. With recidivism nationally at 67% within three years, men who participate in RTA have lowered that grizzly statistic to less than 10%.

I am so happy that I got to reunite with many of the men I taught--and with whom I've forged lifelong friendships. I am so proud of each of them because when someone works to become a better person--as they so clearly have done--and then uses art to pass on the means of improvement, they are part of making the world a better place. I salute them all--my brothers who have made beauty while in hell.

--Brent Buell