In 2016, as our contribution to the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400 year legacy, the men of RTA and I staged Twelfth Night at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It was my fifth time directing this play; it was my fifth full production behind the walls. It was the first experience of Shakespeare for many of…
“I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable, I am an original. Life doesn’t discriminate Between the sinners and the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We rise and we fall and we break And we make our mistakes.” I work with…
In the first half of 2014, I directed Death of a Salesman at Fishkill Correctional Facility, under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. With my incarcerated assistant director, Johnny Hincapie, I wrote the following for the playbill: Willy Loman says, of his sons, “I got a couple of fearless characters,” to which his neighbor,…
I directed Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the men, with their female civilian counterparts, performed the play twice for the population of the facility and once for an invited civilian audience of ~225. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opened on Broadway on February 4, 1938 — this year, we celebrate the Pulitzer…
I just directed Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison. (If you’ve visited this site before, followed me on Twitter or possibly stumbled across my path on the subway, no doubt you already know this.) Even though the play was selected by their peers, several of the men in…
You can’t take an intermission at Sing Sing, and you cannot have a blackout. Well, this year, a blackout was not available to us because the lights never go out in the room where we presented the play and because the circuits in that space couldn’t handle the wattage of stage lighting. Also, there are…
I recently found myself lying on the prison floor, talking to George Gibbs about grief. [If you are new to my blog, you need to know that I am directing Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.] Thornton Wilder’s stage direction reads, “George sinks to his knees then falls full length at Emily’s feet.” My…
The individuals on the play selection committee all said that they wanted a comedy, or at least a story with some lighter moments in it. Over the course of several months, my colleagues and I made almost three dozen suggestions that fit the committee’s criteria, which include having a dozen or more roles for men…
In Acting II at Sing Sing this summer, we’ve been working on developing points of concentration, physical awareness and sense memory, discovering the dramatic action and building a character. In this regard, our class is much like Acting 201 just about anywhere. But we’re also looking for life skills, for mindful ways to interact with…
Last night, we had the first session of an Intro to Acting workshop at Sing Sing. It was supposed to be for the men new to our program, but in the event, we had a nice mix of veterans and newbies, 15 men in total. I was leading a Patsy Rodenburg physical warm-up; at one…
Last night, we put Claudius on trial. Miching mallecho If you’ve been reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m teaching a Shakespeare workshop at Sing Sing Correctional Facility this autumn, that the men were curious but deeply skeptical about Shakespeare when we began. A few weeks into the workshop,…
I’m sitting in a run-down classroom as the sun slowly sets on the other side of the Hudson River. The windows are threaded with metal, and there are metal grates on the outside of the glass. Every so often, a corrections officer walks past the door. Twelve men sit with me in a circle. We’ve…
On the verge of donut greatness How can I describe my experience directing Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts with men inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility? Thrilling, challenging, profoundly moving, frustrating, fun, exhilarating, playful, instructive, just like rehearsing any play with a dedicated company anywhere. Except that it isn’t. These men have all been convicted of serious…
I used to imagine that incarcerated actors would have no schedule conflicts. That they would be available to rehearse at any time. That they don’t have anything else to do. I was as wrong as I could be. I marvel at how busy the men who participate in Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) are: they…
Two weeks ago, I started a fight at Sing Sing. If you don’t know Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, there is a sprawling, protracted, chock-full-o-storytelling unarmed fight between two characters late in the second act. I was apprehensive about staging the fight because, in the playwright’s stage direction, “It goes through phases,” and while I have…
I have tasked my assistant director on Superior Donuts at Sing Sing with keeping a rehearsal journal; if we were working at a theatre outside the prison’s walls, he might be writing blog posts for the company’s website regarding the progress of rehearsals. He has started to find a nifty balance between a documentary voice…
I was surprised, schooled and humbled by casting Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, which I am directing under the auspices of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It was not unlike casting a grad school production in the sense that it wasn’t about casting the best man for each role, per se,…
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…