Starting Over at Sing Sing Correctional Facility
In early 2010, Jeff Glaser directed a production of Starting Over, written by a group of incarcerated men at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison just north of New York City. I partnered with Jeff as something more than an acting coach, something very like a co-director, but it was definitely Jeff’s production. The play is about the struggle to maintain family relationships while one is incarcerated for a long time. It is both thrilling and challenging to work with these men, most of whom have never seen a play before (except the ones in which they have performed at Sing Sing), and they are keen to investigate the text, to find a way to be truthful, to better understand themselves and their often tragic experiences through theatrical exploration.
RTA Sing Sing’s mantra
“Tell the truth. Tell the story. Be nice to each other.”
Jeff and I have struck up an unusual and exciting collaboration in our work with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility; we team-taught two directing workshops at Sing Sing in 2010, and I am directing Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts there now, with Jeff as very-nearly-but-not-quite co-director.
Latest Tweets
Families taking pictures outside Yale vaccination site. Laughter. I guess I am not the only emotional one here.
Sitting in the parking lot at a vaccination site while @DigitalWheelie gets his 1st dose. I could weep with relief.
Maybe don't give Joe Manchin the microphone as a reward for centering himself in this narrative?
Milkshakes. Ice cream. twitter.com/_SalmanAnwar/statu…
Please feel free to get right on that, Senator. twitter.com/kyrstensinema/stat…