Shakespeare Inside

The Bard Behind Bars

Amy Scott-Douglass

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780826486998
• eBook ISBN: 9781441194800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare Inside goes behind the scenes to reveal Shakespeare at work in the most decisive institutional context of our time - in prisons. Based upon the author's experience of watching prison yard rehearsals and performances, and interviewing inmates, program directors, and wardens, Shakespeare Inside is not an objective, dispassionate account of how Shakespeare is bastardized by repressive institutions but offers a record of fiercely personal experiences. We hear ex-offender Mike Smith detail how playing Desdemona was vital to his rehabilitation; we sit in the audience of women inmates as they respond to the all-male Shakespeare Behind Bars touring production of Julius Caesar; and we listen to a chorus of unnamed voices explain how rewriting Hamlet helps them to survive solitary confinement. Shakespeare Inside probes any assumptions we might have about Shakespeare's performative function and asks what - if anything - is the proper place of Shakespeare in today's society.

Act 1

Shakespeare Behind Bars: Julius Caesar at

Luther Luckett Correctional Complex

It’s 18 May 2004 at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky. For many at Luckett, a medium-security men’s prison with an inmate population comprised primarily of rapists, drug offenders and murderers, it’s just another day in the big house. But for the members of Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB), who gradually file into the prison chapel, their meeting place, this is the day they’ve spent nine months preparing for: the premiere of their production of Julius Caesar.

Founded in 1995 by Artistic Director Curt Tofteland, SBB is an acting company in which inmates perform unaltered, full-length Shakespearean plays as they appear in the First Folio. Tofteland developed the program in order to offer inmates an outlet for artistic expression and as a tool for learning literacy and social skills such as tolerance and conflict resolution. At the same time, the program is meant to function as a safe forum in which violent offenders are able come to terms with their pasts – a process which frequently involves the inmates acknowledging crimes and abuses they themselves suffered in childhood as well as taking responsibility for their own violent acts as teenagers and adults – through the experiences of identification, role-playing and catharsis.

Unfortunately, the final dress rehearsal of Julius Caesar is getting off to a rocky start. Two of the show’s stars, Sammie Byron, who plays Brutus, and DeMond Bush, who plays Antony, announce that they may need to leave at any moment to participate in an outreach program for at-risk youth. On top of that, Ron Brown, who plays Cassius, hasn’t shown up yet. Rumor has it that he’s ‘still in the mess hall’ and expected to be late again. Regardless, Tofteland decides to run the scenes that involve most of the company, Caesar’s murder and Mark Antonys speech, and he responds to his actors with a mixture of defiance and humor.

‘Okay, we’re going to do the assassination,’ Curt barks out. ‘Leonard, you stand in for Ron. Come on, now! Where are my killers? I need my killers!’

‘That’s a loaded question,’ one of the inmates jokes back.

‘Yeah! Be careful who you’re calling a killer,’ says another, straightfaced.

The murder of Caesar, Tofteland reminds the group, is supposed to be performed in slow motion. The conspirators are supposed to breathe in and out heavily, as if they’re possessed. After a series of collective stabs, the men are supposed to hold up their wooden knives and release the attached red paper streamers, which are meant to represent the blood flowing from Caesar’s body. Following that, they’re supposed to put on red gloves to signify that they’ve washed their hands in Caesar’s blood.

‘You’re wolves. You’re a wolf pack. You’re on the hunt for blood,’ Curt tells them. But most of the men seem unable to pretend to be bloodthirsty wolves, let alone to get the red streamers to unfurl from their wooden knives at the right time.

‘Dammit,’ says one man, throwing his hands up in frustration. ‘Curt, I can’t get my stupid knife to work.’ Tofteland says, ‘That’s okay, Stone. Just hold your streamer in your other hand if you’re not coordinated enough. Find your own way to solve the problem. You don’t have to be like everyone else. Just do it to the best of your ability.’

And then Tofteland turns to the group. ‘Guys, listen up. The goal is not perfection. Shakespeare Behind Bars is about the journey. Stay in the moment. Work with what you have. Be truthful to your characters when you’re onstage. That’s all you need to do. Remember what Hamlet says, “Hold as ’tWere the mirror …󂀝’ Tofteland’s voice trails off. ‘What does Hamlet say?’ he prompts the men. Two or three of the inmates look down in the ground in concentration and whisper to themselves, ‘Hold as ’tWere the mirror up to nature.’

‘Just tell the truth,’ Curt instructs. ‘That’s all you need to do; just tell the truth.’

As the conspirators rehearse the assassination scene, other members of the group buzz around the chapel, busily rearranging the plastic chairs into rows on each of the four sides of the room to mark out their makeshift stage. Every now and then someone darts a glance at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘Who’s she?’ I hear one inmate ask.

‘I don’t know, man,’ says his friend, ‘But I’m glad she’s here.’

‘Curt told us she’s a Shakespeare professor,’ replies another member of the acting troupe.

‘Nah,’ says the first. ‘She looks too young to be a professor.’ I ignore the men’s whispers and try to pretend that I’m not nervous, but the truth is I’ve been so scared I haven’t been able to sleep for the past three nights. This is my first time in a prison. I walk around the room, snapping photos, as the men prepare the stage.

From the time I was in high school, my father has volunteered at the city jail several days a week, befriending the inmates, assisting them financially and providing odd jobs after their release to help them ‘get back on their feet.’ On at least one occasion, he hired an ex-offender to care for my family’s front lawn. I still have memories of my mother coming home from work and telling my father, ‘Gordon, that guy with the mower had better not be one of your jailbirds!’ and of my father and me driving by a man sitting on a country bridge with a paper grocery bag and my dad saying, ‘There’s my buddy Duane! Oh no, it looks like he’s off the wagon again.’ But if you had told me, back when I was a teenager, that I would be visiting a prison myself one day, I would have laughed at you. And I never in a million years would I have thought that I’d be going to prison to see, of all things, a Shakespeare play.

In fact, the notion of Shakespeare as a disciplinary and educational tool in secure settings is not a new one. According to Marianne Montgomery, playbills and newsletters at the Folger Shakespeare Library indicate that Shakespeare was performed in US prisons as far back as the American Civil War, and Niels Herold has found evidence from a travel narrative that Hamlet was performed by impressed seamen (that is to say, an incarcerated company of actors) on an English ship in 1607, in what just might be the first performance of secure-setting Shakespeare. Moreover, a number of Shakespearean actors have visited prisons and asylums including the nineteenth century actress Ellen Terry, who visited mental hospitals in preparation for her performance of Ophelia (Melville). Finally, imprisoned black Americans from Malcolm X to Don King have taught themselves Shakespeare during their incarcerations. ‘Jail was my school,’ King has said, of the four years he spent in prison for manslaughter. ’I read Aristotle and Homer. I got into Sigmund Freud. When I dealt with William Shakespeare, I got to know him very well as a man. I love Bill Shakespeare. He was some bad dude. Intellectually, I went into jail with a peashooter and came out armed with a nuclear bomb’ (Hauser).

While prison Shakespeare is not an entirely new phenomenon, the 1980s and 1990s were especially remarkable in that a significant number of prison Shakespeare programs were initiated by professors and theatre directors across the country. Just a few years before Curt Tofteland founded Shakespeare Behind Bars in Kentucky, Jean Trounstine established a theatre group at the Framingham Women’s Prison in Massachusetts. At around the same time, Agnes Wilcox created the Prison Performing Arts Project in Missouri – she now runs programs in both men’s and women’s prisons, as well as offering workshops for teenagers. And in Indiana, Laura Bates, who has been doing prison Shakespeare work for more than 25 years, developed a Shakespeare group for inmates in solitary confinement at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, called Shakespeare in the SHU. More recently, in 2005, Jonathan Shailor began the Shakespeare Project at Racine Correctional Institution in Wisconsin with a full-length production of King Lear.

These are only some of the secure-setting Shakespeare programs. There are others, in England, for instance, like Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor, organized in the 1980s by psychotherapist Murray Cox, dramatherapist Sue Jennings and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In addition to the Broadmoor troupe, the London Shakespeare Workout Prison Project, registered as an official charity in 2002, conducts workshops in Her Majesty’s Prisons Bedford, Feltham, Lewes, Lowdham Grange, The Mount and Woodhill. RSC voice coach Cicely Berry has been involved with prison Shakespeare since 1984 when she worked with Paul Schoolman on a Julius Caesar film adaptation at HMP Dartmoor (p. 199). Jessica Saunders, dramatherapist at HMP Holloway, England’s largest prison for women, and her theatre company have written and performed various Shakespeare spin-offs including a Hamlet adaptation entitled The Tragedy of Ophelia (p. 221). There are also Shakespeare programs in the US for at-risk youth and juvenile offenders, such as Will Power to Youth, which is put on by the Los Angeles Shakespeare Festival; Incarcerated Youth at Play, founded by the Actors’ Shakespeare Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Shakespeare in the Courts, run by Shakespeare and Company of Lennox, Massachusetts.

When it comes to mission objectives, many prison Shakespeare directors perceive their programs as being primarily educational, providing inmates with a venue for improving literacy and social skills, and cultivating artistic talent. Others regard Shakespeare as a spiritual force. Judge Paul Perachi, who founded the Shakespeare in the Courts program, believes that Shakespeare has a special kind of ‘inexplicable magic’ when it comes to Corrections. In his estimation of the power of Shakespeare’s verse to touch and transform criminals’ lives, Perachi is not alone. Indeed, many inmates themselves consider Shakespeare to be a moralizing force, and not just any moralizing force, but the best and sometimes the only option after other methods, including religion and institutional surveillance, have failed. Chris Johnston, a theatre director who often works in prisons, says that prison drama programs are successful because they ’set up a kind of parallel universe where experiences as profound as those of both the offender and the victim can be explored. Participants can begin to experience some kind of victim empathy because they recognize the intensity and compulsion of the drives which make them want to offend. By linking these different kinds of experiences within the same aesthetic spectrum we can start to reduce the sense which many offenders have which is that of operating alone, in a void where [their] actions make no difference in the social world’ (p. 134). According to Mark Rylance, who played Hamlet in the first RSC performance at Broadmoor, Any play if it is done well, and particularly a Shakespeare play, breaks down our conceptions of the limitations of human beings. You can change. You can be something different’ (p. 34).

Back at the Julius Caesar rehearsal, many of the men in the Shakespeare Behind Bars company seem to have become so adept at changing their lives that they’re having a hard time pretending (or remembering, in some cases) what it’s like to be a killer. After rehearsing Caesar’s assassination several times in a row, it’s still not working. By this time Ron Brown has arrived and stepped into his role of Cassius. When Tofteland reminds the actors that they need to dramatize their thought processes rather than just stab Caesar and walk back to their original marks as nothing has happened, Brown, who looks like the long lost twin of gangsta rapper Ja Rule, offers some unsolicited advice to his colleagues.

‘Excuse me. The problem is we know all this. Curt done said it, like, eight million times. It still depends on us; he’s not gonna be out there. And so you have to think, you know, you gotta pay attention to what’s going on. We’re acting. We’re portraying killing somebody, so we can’t back up like, “Okay, I know I’m supposed to move here.” You just stabbed somebody, several times, so you gotta try to think like that.’

And then Browns tone grows even more scolding. Someone has been messing with his props. How is he supposed to play Cassius if people are always snatching his gloves? ‘If the props and stuff in there ain’t yours, do not mess with it! Simple as that. Don’t mess with it.’

Across the room, Jerry Guenthner seconds Brown’s complaint. ‘Put your stuff where you want it. And if it ain’t yours, you ain’t put it there, don’t touch it! If I come out for this scene without my sword again, there’s gonna be hell to pay.’

Jerry Guenthner’s knickname Big G is well deserved. He’s about six feet, five inches tall and weighs 275 pounds. When he threatens the other actors, I don’t know whether to laugh or run for the door. In any case, I’m pretty sure that the prison production of Julius Caesar is on a one-way train to Disasterville. There’s no way they’ll be ready for this evening’s performance.

And then DeMond Bush enters the arena, cradling the body of Caesar in his arms as he walks about the stage. At first I’m impressed with his strength. I’ve never seen one man carry another man before, and DeMond does it with such gentleness and ease, as if the man he’s holding weighs no more than a child. DeMond kneels down on the ground, holding Caesar in a pietd pose before laying him on the ground and climbing into the pulpit. It’s actually a step ladder that DeMond ascends, but it might as well be a pulpit. I feel like I’ve been transported back in time, like the prison chapel has just become Dexter Avenue First Baptist Church, like I’m listening to Reverend King. ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen,’ DeMond announces with outstretched arms. I lend him my ears. DeMond is captivating, breathtaking, enchanting. The words may be Shakespeare’s but the rhythm and cadence are straight out of a black Baptist seminary. ‘Read the will!’ the men shout at DeMond. ‘Yeah, read the will!’ I want to say.

After the rehearsal, DeMond approaches me with a smile.

‘Is this your first time in prison?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. What gave it away?

‘Are you scared?’ he asks, empathetically.

‘No,’ I tell him, ‘No, Im okay.’ And I am.

That evening a miracle happens. No one forgets a single line. Stone unfurls his streamer in perfect time. Ron’s gloves are right where they should be. The chairs lining the walls are no longer empty; they’re filled with fellow inmates. Not a man in the house laughs when Hal Cobb, who plays Portia, embraces and caresses Sammie Byron. No one scoffs at the red streamers during the assassination scene. When DeMond displays Caesar’s bloody mantle, a white gauzy sheet with a dozen or so streamers attached, walking around and holding it in front of each audience member with tears of anger in his eyes, they look back at him with sorrow. The men jump to their feet at the end of the play, clapping and whistling enthusiastically.

During the talkback session after the show, the inmates in the audience tell the Shakespeare Behind Bars actors, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’

‘I want to commend you,’ says one man, ‘That was fantastic. I think I might need to get involved in your program.’ Another inmate, who looks to be in his 60s, stands and addresses the younger members of the group. ‘Since you’ve been in Shakespeare, I’ve seen you change. We’ve all seen you change. You’ve grown. And I’m proud of you.’ The Shakespeare Behind Bars actors tease a third man, pointing out that he’s never missed any of their performances. ‘You’re our biggest fan. We’re grateful for your support. But there’s no need to cry.’ they tell him. The man has tears streaming down his face. ‘Well, that’s real. That’s heartfelt,’ he smiles between his sniffles. ’I love you guys.’

The next evening, another performance of the play is staged in the Visitor’s Room for an audience that includes the men’s families and various teachers and theatre practitioners in the local area. Unlike the chapel, which feels warm and inviting, the Visitor’s Room, with its white concrete floors and cement block walls, resembles an undersized cafeteria in an old elementary school building. The signs taped to the doors and windows remind the inmates and their families that any displays of affection are strictly regulated. ‘Physical contact with an inmate shall be limited only to a brief hug and kiss at the beginning and conclusion of the visit,’ reads one poster. ‘Only infants (children under one year old) may be held by inmate. All other children must be seated or held by visiting parent or guardian,’ reads another. ‘You’re saying that if a man has a two-year-old son, for instance, he’s not allowed to hold him on his lap?’ I ask Karen Heath, the Shakespeare Behind Bars staff liaison. ‘Yep,’ Karen replies, ’those are the rules.’

‘But what if the child reaches out for his father to hold him?’ I ask.

‘The inmates have to tell their kids no; they can’t hold them,’ she insists. ‘Those are the rules.’

By the end of the second day, I’ve met several of the lead actors. As they come through the door that leads from the prison yard to the Visitors’ Room, they all say hello. DeMond approaches me with outstretched arms, Big G collects an embrace, and then an Shakespeare Behind Bars participant I have never met comes up and stands right in front of me. He says nothing. ‘Hi,’ I say, offering my hand. He politely shakes my hand. But he still stands in front of me. Finally he raises his arms up. I give him a quic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• General Editors’ Preface
• Act 1
• Act 2
• Intermission
• Act 3
• Act 4
• Act 5
• Epilogue
• Bibliography