by Jesse Wegman, The New York Times, July 15, 2018
link: Cyrano Behind Bars
Cyrano de
Bergerac will be eligible for parole in 2022. For the time being, he is a
vision in Gallic effrontery, pinballing around the stage in the
gymnasium at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, N.Y.
The
production of Edmond Rostand’s canonical 19th-century comedy, which
enjoyed a well-attended two-day run early last month, was the work of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a 20-year-old
organization that operates in prisons across New York State. The
program introduces inmates to theater, dance, writing and other creative
arts in the hope of teaching them life skills and improving their
chances at success upon release.
Recent
productions have included “Our Town,” “On the Waterfront” and “Of Mice
and Men,” but the inmates at Fishkill, which sits just off the Hudson
River a two-hour drive north of New York City, were eager for a few
laughs. When they proposed “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the show’s director,
Charlie Scatamacchia, was skeptical. “I thought, yeah, that’s not gonna
happen,” he said. “It’s got multiple scene changes, costume changes.
It’s got sword fighting. I doubted my ability to direct them, and their
ability to pick up these skills in the time we had. I’ve never been
happier to be proved so wrong.”
Behind the title character’s plastered-on proboscis and feathered
chapeau is Rodney Spivey-Jones, a 35-year-old from Syracuse. Mr.
Spivey-Jones, who had never acted before, first auditioned for the role
of Le Bret, the play’s narrator. But Mr. Scatamacchia quickly realized
that he was a good fit to play the lead — one of the most verbose roles
in theater.
Mr. Spivey-Jones is no stranger to addressing a crowd — he helped form an inmate debate team at another prison that beat a team from Harvard in 2015.
Still, he had not given any thought to playing Cyrano and didn’t
understand how big the role was until he kept getting called back to
read for it. As a writer of verse himself, he quickly found his
affection for the soldier-poet with the “big-ass nose,” as the inmates’
lightly adapted script put it.
“I
think Cyrano, the character, and not just the character but the entire
play, it really speaks to how complicated we are as humans,” Mr.
Spivey-Jones said. “The range of emotion that Cyrano experiences when
he’s in front of an audience — he’s bigger than life.”
When
the show went up, Mr. Spivey-Jones realized that he had memorized not
only his own lines but every other character’s as well — a handy trick
when a castmate ran into trouble, and he could provide a cue on the
spot. “I didn’t realize that was something that I was doing until we
were performing that play in front of an audience,” he said.
A
bigger obstacle than memorization, it turned out, was getting swords
inside the prison. Corrections officials nixed various materials, like a
hard plastic foil. But a foam-core model that a friend of Mr.
Scatamacchia’s found at a shop in Paris did the trick. Mr. Scatamacchia
had arranged for a sword-fight choreographer to come in and train the
men, but when his paperwork was rejected, Mr. Scatamacchia had to relay
the lessons himself.
The cast of 13
men took the setbacks in stride, as people in prison learn to do with
most things. Along with a professional actress, Kate Kenney, who played
the role of Cyrano’s love interest, Roxane, the crew worked every week
through the winter and spring to get the show into shape.
“We
just sat in chairs and read the script,” said Mr. Scatamacchia, who is
63 and retired from the music-publishing industry. “‘What are you saying
here?’ ‘What does this mean?’ I encouraged them to rewrite their
dialogue in modern jargon. These guys are just talking to each other.”
Both performances — one for the inmates and another for about 100
outsiders — were well received, despite the periodic interruption of a
prison guard’s walkie-talkie. It wasn’t hard to imagine that some of the
men were being applauded for the first time in their lives.
The
program, which has about 400 alumni who were released from prison, is
popular among both inmates and New York’s prison administrators, who
have seen its philosophy pay off. Studies of prison-arts programs around the country, including R.T.A., have found that their participants are better behaved than other inmates, earned educational degrees
earlier and in some cases are less likely to wind up back behind bars
after release — all of which suggests that rehabilitation, which has
recently begun to regain traction as a penal philosophy after decades of
neglect, is a real and achievable goal.
R.T.A.’s
productions aren’t meant to carry any deeper meaning, but in the case
of “Cyrano” — about a man who must hide his true, uglier visage behind a
more attractive face — it was difficult not to think about the inmates’
own predicament. Ms. Kenney said she thought many of her castmates
“identified with the Cyrano character as someone who has so much to
offer, all these talents and gifts — this sensitive, unique human being,
but all people see when they look at him is his nose. A lot of them
feel all anyone sees when they look at them is ‘inmate.’ I think people
were seeing themselves in it.”
At the same
time, she and the rest of the R.T.A. team are regularly reminded of how
the outside world views their work. Mr. Spivey-Jones, for one, was
convicted of second-degree murder. Mr. Scatamacchia remembers one man
asking, “Do you spend as much time helping the families that were
[expletive] up by these guys as you do helping these guys?”
He
thinks about the question often, knowing there are people who have been
gravely harmed by many of the men he works with, and who “want these
men to rot inside for the rest of their lives.”
Mr.
Scatamacchia is sympathetic to that emotion, but he pushes back gently:
“I understand your pain and anger, but what’s to be gained by locking
someone up and letting them rot? Because most people get out, and if we
don’t invest time and energy into rehabilitating these people, they’re
going to come out worse than they went in.”
After
the second performance of “Cyrano” ended and the standing ovation died
down, corrections officers led the audience through the large front door
of the prison gym and back to the guards’ station, to be processed for
release to the parking lot. The actors waited, then returned to their
cells.
Jesse
Wegman is a member of The Times editorial board, where he has written
about the Supreme Court and national legal affairs since 2013.
@jessewegman
@jessewegman
