Introducing The Phoenix Players Theatre Group in Auburn, New York - founded by prisoners, for prisoners, in 2009. For a complete history, and a rich array of resources, check out their website.

New programming - new resources - and a new website - from Wisconsin's Shakespeare Prison Project

The Shakespeare Prison Project

for more information contact Project Director Jonathan Shailor

jonathan.shailor@gmail.com

What the Arts Can Do: Engaging At-Risk Youth and the Justice System

How are the arts effective in correctional institutions and rehabilitation? And how can they act as a positive interceptor for at-risk youth before and after they may have entered the justice system? Join Director Meade Palidofsky and participant Angelica Garcia of Chicago's Storycatchers Theatre* as they share their process through performance and dialogue.

Philip Kennicott, Moderator
2014 Aspen Ideas Festival

*Storycatchers Theatre (founded 1984) is a youth development arts organization that prepares young people to make thoughtful life choices through the process of writing, producing, and performing original musical theatre inspired by personal stories. In November 2013, Storycatchers Theatre received a NATIONAL ARTS & HUMANITIES YOUTH PROGRAM AWARD from the President's Committee on the Arts & Humanities, in recognition of its work with detained and incarcerated youth.

PRISON BRIDGES: Healing Through Drama at San Quentin

Actors in the 2012 production of Hamlet at San Quentin discuss what they have learned through their work with the play (film by David Wayne White). ~ To see the video of the complete Hamlet production, and videos of other productions at San Quentin, click here:

MARIN SHAKESPEARE AT SAN QUENTIN

Why Shakespeare Belongs in Prison

 
Actors Ron Cephas Jones as Richard III, left, and Michael Crane, as Buckingham, perform "Richard III" at the Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, New York. (AP) 


Karen Swallow Prior, The Atlantic Monthly, 4-23-2014

It's his 450th birthday, and The Bard has never appealed to a wider or more diverse audience. American higher-ed English departments may be teaching him less than they used to, but the Internet and modern film and TV interpretations have helped democratize appreciation of his works around the world. That’s only fitting: In Shakespeare’s era, the royalty in attendance at his productions was joined by crowds of commoners called “groundlings” and “stinkards” who paid a penny to stand in the pit, sweltering in the heat, while even more milled about outside. 

n hold special significance: convicts. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of programs in prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers meant to introduce the accused to works found in the Folios and Quartos. While arts outreach efforts in correctional environments are nothing new, any diehard Shakespearean might recognize how his works appeal uniquely to the criminally accused, one of society’s most marginalized populations.

Laura Bates, author of Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary With the Bard, described teaching the plays in a super-max facility housing the most violent criminals in the system in an interview last year with NPR. The book’s title comes from the words of one inmate, convicted of murder as a teenager and placed in solitary confinement for years.

“The day that I came knocking on his cell door,” Bates explained, “his life had been so desperate, so bleak for so many years that he was literally at the point of suicide. And so in that sense by Shakespeare coming along, presenting something positive in his life for maybe the first time, giving him a new direction, it did literally keep him from taking his own life.”

Is such redemptive artistic power special to Shakespeare? To an extent, yes. The themes and characters of Shakespeare’s plays—overflowing with ambition, greed, love, deceit, betrayal, and revenge—naturally have particular resonance for criminal convicts.

“Shakespeare’s tragic figures are very much imprisoned by both their circumstances and their choices,” says Scott Hayes, an associate dean in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Liberty University and a seasoned Shakespearean actor and director. “Prisoners connect deeply with that sense of imprisonment. The consequences of choices made by Shakespeare’s characters are tremendous, and the prisoners truly understand and connect to the power our choices have to reap tragic consequences.”

Read the rest of the article here:  Why Shakespeare Belongs in Prison

Actors Gang Prison Project Meets with U.S. Attorney General

Actors Gang Artistic Director, Tim Robbins, and Director of Outreach, Sabra Williams were invited to Washington to meet with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The discussion revolved around how to make arts education part of a transformed and transformational approach to corrections.

Chris Hedges: The Play’s the Thing - Truthdig

I began teaching a class of 28 prisoners at a maximum-security prison in New Jersey during the first week of September. My last class meeting was Friday. The course revolved around plays by August Wilson, James Baldwin, John Herbert, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Miguel Piñero, Amiri Baraka and other playwrights who examine and give expression to the realities of America’s black underclass as well as the prison culture. We also read Michelle Alexander’s important book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Each week the students were required to write dramatic scenes based on their experiences in and out of prison. 
                                                                                                           ~ Chris Hedges, 12-15-13


Click here to read the full essay on Truthdig