University Place

The Shakespeare Prison Project

[Susan Barribeau, Literary Collections Curator, University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries]

My name is Susan Barribeau. I’m a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the areas of English literature and special collections, rare books. I’m here to introduce Professor Jonathan Shailor, who is going to talk about the Shakespeare in Prison Project and his work at UW-Parkside.

Jonathan is the director of the certificate program in conflict analysis and resolution, the Center for Ethnic Studies, and the Shakespeare Prison Project. He’s a professor in the communication department at UW Parkside, and he has worked extensively with inmates at the Racine Correctional Institute – Institution.

Since 2004, nearly 800 prisoners lives have been touched by the Shakespeare Project. Some participate as actors, others production assistants, and many others as audience members.

In 2014-15, the Shakespeare Prison Project expanded from an eight-month to a 12-month course of study. After studying, rehearsing, and performing a Shakespeare play, prisoners now develop autobiographical performances inspired by their work with Shakespeare.

Performances of King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream most recently, in 2016, have been put into production there.

Jonathan is a facilitator of storytelling, performances in dialog for personal and community development. And his research interests involve performance as a vehicle for transformation in prisons, homeless shelters, and with at-risk youth.

I think that’s enough from me. With that, I’ll introduce Jonathan Shailor, author of – editor of Performing New Lives, his book. Thank you.

[applause]

[Jonathan Shailor, Professor, Communications Department, University of Wisconsin-Parkside]

Thank you very much.

Get my stuff here.

Thank you for coming. I’m a big fan of Madison. Although I live in Kenosha, my wife got her PhD in clinical psychology at UW-Madison. And Jean Feraca was a great fan and friend of the Shakespeare Prison Project. And she did a program on our Othello production, which is still available online if you want to take a listen to it. That’s the Here On Earth archives with Jean Feraca. But my name is Jonathan Shailor, and I’m the director of the Shakespeare Prison – Prison Project, and I want to tell you about it. I want to tell you about the book, Performing New Lives.

And so, where to begin?

I think maybe from the heart, to say something from there.

My love affair with Shakespeare began when I was a high school teaching intern, and I met a really gifted teacher named John Warthen at Amherst Regional High School in Massachusetts. It was a rough time during my life. I was a little disaffected, and I was looking for something. And I found something with Shakespeare and with my teaching career.

What I found was that Shakespeare’s texts spoke to my life in very direct ways. I found that the comradery, the community, built around studying Shakespeare’s texts was something very fulfilling.

And the very first play that we studied, not coincidentally, was the first play that we did at Racine Correctional Institution, King Lear. Because it had made such a deep impression on me, and it was the launch, as – as you might say, for the Shakespeare Prison Project.

How many of you are familiar with the play King Lear? Just to get a little read of my audience here. Okay.

About half.

Well, it’s a – a mature tragedy by William Shakespeare. It’s about an 80-something father who is going into retirement, a king, and he’s got three daughters. He’s got one daughter that he is especially fond of, his youngest daughter Cordelia. And dad is retiring, but he doesn’t really quite know himself. And so, we have a problem here, right at the outset of the play.

A king abdicating his position and not really leaving a legacy that is very whole or that people can really connect to. So, when he says – when he sets up his retirement party and talks to his daughters, he wants to play a little game with them because he’s not really feeling whole himself. He’s not really feeling secure and he wants to know that his daughters love him. So, he sets up the game where if they profess how much they love him, he will give them a generous portion of – of the kingdom, the retirement gift basically.

So, he does this for Goneril, for Regan, but his joy, his – his darling, his Cordelia, is the one that he really wants to hear the big love from. And he says to her: “And now, our joy, although our last, not least; to whose young love the vines of France and milk of Burgundy, strive to be interess’d; what can you say, to draw a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.” She says: “Nothing.” He says: “Nothing?” She says: “Nothing, my lord. ” He says: “How, how, Cordelia! Mend your speech a little, lest you may mar your fortunes.” She says: “Good, my lord, you have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties back as a right fit, obey you, love you, and most honor you.”

She goes on to say that why should she give her father all her love when she’s going to be getting married? And he says: “But goes thy heart with this?” And she says: “Yes. ” And he says: “So young and so untender?” She says: “So young, my lord, and true.” He says: “Let it be so. Thy truth, then, be thy dower. For, by the sacred radiance of the sun, the mysteries of Hecate and the night; by all the operation of the orbs from whom we do exist and cease to be, here I disclaim all my paternal care, propinquity and property of blood, and as a stranger to my heart hold thee, from this, forever!” He disowns her. And that – that -that launches a great tragedy. I think, perhaps, Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy right alongside Hamlet to kind of vie for first place, in my estimation.

So, why did this connect with me so strongly? Because it’s about a child who is a favored child, who is secure as long as that favored child has the confirmation of an overwhelming, overbearing parent. The universe will hold together as long as that relationship is okay. But that doesn’t leave much room for growth on the part of the child. And, also, the parent is horribly lost. So, it’s a really sad situation.

Well, for me, it was a profound opportunity to reflect on some dynamics in my own family life, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it connected in powerful ways with the prisoners that I worked with at Racine Correctional Institution.

Specifically, there was a young man named Steve.

And I wanted to tell you what he says about his experience working with the play.

A little bit of background: he writes that he’s been in trouble with the law since he was five years old. He was taken into the care of the state at age seven and a half. “My mother has said so many times that my life is a waste. I should never have been born. I should have been the for sure abortion.”

His crimes, which have ranged in severity, have included a fair amount of drug abuse. At the time I met him, he was nearing the end of his fourth incarceration. As was true for the other members of the cast, one of his opportunities for growth came in his developing relationship to his character.

The character is like a mask, and it makes, the character makes it safe for you to access things within yourself that may not be safe to – to express directly.

Early in the rehearsal process, I worked with Steve to help him access feelings appropriate to Cordelia’s emotional confrontation with her father in Act One, Scene One. “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. ” I asked Steve to think of an important relationship and situation in his own life where he did not feel properly seen, heard, or understood. Then I asked him to physically rearrange me, I was playing the role of Lear, and other actors in the scene so that our positions would better express his feelings about that real-life relationship and situation.

He did this without saying anything about his own personal stuff. He just looked at us. Parental figure. “You stand here. ” Sibling. “You stand there.” “This is what you should look like. This face.” “This is the gesture you should give. You should turn your back to me. ” We gave him time to do all this.

He remembered that it felt like, in his own words, “a 50/50 roll of the dice.” But given a moment and a few run-throughs, he says: “I – I just let what I feel daily inside, edge the surface. Tears of pain that swamp me from knowing that things are all messed up with my life.”

Speaking as Cordelia, he heaved his shoulders as he took in more oxygen, and his eyes, riveted on mine, filled with tears. Later he would reflect on this experience as the purest of emotional therapy. He said: “I am Cordelia. I am Cordelia in so many ways, and in being her, I am learning me.” So, it was an experience for him to access an earlier situation in his life that was obviously still with him as, if you – if you know anything about analytical psychology, as a complex. Meaning a pattern that is – that is born from one’s history and that has tremendous energy behind it and that still drives our lives in – in a certain way. And unless we acknowledge it and have awareness of it, it runs our lives. Okay?

To be clear, the Shakespeare Prison Project is not therapy, but it can be therapeutic. And it helps to – to have some of that vocabulary available in order to understand some of the dynamics.

Let me say a few words about the beginning of the project, and then I’ll hit, I think, a variety of topics that I – I hope you’ll be interested in, and then we can have a conversation.

So, in April of 2005, 17 prisoners at Racine Correctional Institution performed King Lear to an audience of 100 or so in the prison gym. Jamal, who played the role of Edmund, the bastard, stepped out from behind the curtain and paced across the stage. His sharply trimmed goatee pointing outward like an accusing finger. His burning gaze fixed on the audience. The first words out of his mouth were not lines from the play but a poem, his poem: “Secret fears are brought to life on stage. My life is in a rage, and to write my life, one page is not enough. But if I had one mic, I might be able to escape this cage.

So, I live vicariously through my nocturnal dreams. I can bring Shakespeare to life through my high beams. Reinvent Nietzsche and sell a leprechaun the color green. Get real with Kahlil to understand love. See me above, riding high on broken wings. I mean, I am not the first to have incurred the worst, but I have concurred with those who have opposed my life’s worth. Cried when I rode shotgun in the back of my own mind. Act One, Scene Five, on my own stage, in my very own play, Where night might not turn into day, Might not return to the essence. Capability is born from vulnerability were my hostility was vented. I have been hospitably canted. No disrespect intended, but I have been bent on hell ever since I sipped that first sip. I can’t speak because it’s this thing called pain that drips from my lips.

They label me violent because I stay bottled up and silent, and although my life is like a raging sea, my heart’s still soft like a violet. No life. No life is quiet. Stop complaining, you say, but I can’t because I’m trapped on the stage of life’s lies. And I ask you, Why brand they us with base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base? Base?” That’s how he started us off.

[laughter]

It was the best thing in the play.

[laughter]

This was the culmination of eight months of hard work. We met in the prison library most Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Sitting together in a circle of trust, sharing our hopes, fears, and dreams, fighting with each other, working through our conflicts, debating the meaning of the play, reflecting on its connection to our own lives, and rehearsing the play, of course.

I initiated this project at Racine Correctional Institution in Sturtevant, Wisconsin. It’s a medium security prison for men. Like most prisons, it’s terribly overcrowded. 50% over capacity. About 1,400 people in there when there should be about 1,000. Wisconsin, as you may know, over-incarcerates African Americans more than any other states in the nation. Same with Native Americans.

Also, Racine Correctional Institution has more than its share of – of sex offenders because it has sex offender programming there, whereas other facilities do not. So, about 30% of the population are sex offenders. So, inevitably, a fair number in – in my program also have that issue.

In 2004, I began the Shakespeare Prison Project. I had been teaching there for nine years as a volunteer. A series, of course, is under the rubric of a theater of empowerment. And this is an approach to personal development and communication skills, training, conflict resolution that combines dialog, written reflection, meditation, the study of Jungian archetypes and sociodrama. It all fits together.

[laughter]

Trust me. We can talk about that.

But all these elements have been woven into the Shakespeare Project in some way. But, of course, the primary focus there is the study and performance of a full Shakespeare play each year.

And Susan’s already mentioned the list. I’ll – Ill just repeat. King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This year we’re working on The Merchant of Venice. About three of them were ones that I chose for various reasons and three were chosen by the ensemble. The Merchant of Venice was chosen by the ensemble.

I took a hiatus from the project between 2008 and 2014 to spend time with my new son and to do some writing on the Shakespeare Project. And the book that’s featured here at the Wisconsin Book Festival, Performing New Lives, which I edited, and I contributed three chapters to, was developed during this time.

I was looking for a community. I wanted to know what other prison theater facilitators were doing. I had already met Agnes Wilcox, founder and artistic director of Prison Performing Arts in St. Louis, Missouri. Her production of Hamlet at Eastern Missouri Correctional Center had been featured on NPR’s This American Life. And I had connected with Curt Tofteland, founder and artistic director of Shakespeare Behind Bars. That documentary was just shown here.

This program was originally established in 1995 at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Kentucky.

Curt spent hours with me on the phone during my first year of directing the Wisconsin program, generously answering all my questions.

[laughter]

And offering his own perspectives and advice.

So, for example, I said: “You know, we’re going to have fights in King Lear. This is in a prison. How’s that going to go over? What did you do for weapons?” And he said: “Well, we used cardboard. ” And I thought: Well, maybe we could at least get a Toys-R-Us sword. So, actually,

[holds up toy sword]

this is the Toys-R-Us sword. This is the one I purchased and brought to the prison for the security director to take a look at. Everything has to pass muster. And he said: “Nope.” Didn’t really have to give a reason, but he might have said it looked a little to realistic or it was a little too pointy or something. So, we didn’t use that.

And then I found something online: Escrima sticks. They are martial arts practice weapons. PVC pipe encased in black foam rubber. I actually brought one of those. They could look pretty serious.

[holds up Escrima stick]

And.

[taps stick on head]

They don’t hurt, but they, you know, they can thwack, and the guys had a lot of fun with them. And I – I hired – I had some funds and I hired a professional fight director to come in, and we had some very convincing-looking fights.

[laughter]

And – and we used these Escrima sticks for four years in a row. They were a good standby weapon for us. Really, that worked.

But after I took a break, a hiatus, and came back, we had to negotiate coming in at a, hmm, less high profile, I guess you could say. We had been bringing in props from the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. I had a costumer in Massachusetts who was building full costumes and flying them in and fitting the inmates. And we were taking over the prison gym, and we were shutting down the visiting area one evening so that outsiders could come in to see the play. And this turned out to be a little stressful for the institution. Once the heady rush of the first four productions was over and I took that time off and they had a chance to think about what had just happened, we had to renegotiate my reentry. They did not want it to happen again the way it had happened, logistically, the first four years. So now our props look like this.

[holds up cardboard sword]
[laughter]

No more Escrima sticks. But the men build their – their swords and daggers out of cardboard. And that’s just fine. They’re actually quite good at – at constructing something pretty much out of nothing.

So, back to the book for a moment. Performing New Lives is a collection of essays by 14 directors of prison theater programs. Five of the programs focus specifically on Shakespeare. In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, there’s Laura Bates’ work at a super max facility in Indiana. She’s recently written a book called Shakespeare Saved My Life, which I highly recommend.

And there’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts, founded at Sing-Sing in 1996 and now in five New York state prisons. And in addition to the book, excuse me, in my introduction to the book, I discussed three themes common to all of these prison theater programs, and in my remaining time I’d like to visit these themes.

Here we go.

Illustrating them with some stories from the Shakespeare Project here in Wisconsin.

So, the first thing that I talk about in the – in the text that’s really important regarding prison theater programs is that it’s a place of sanctuary.

One of the bitter ironies of the U.S. prison system is that the emotions that cause people to end up in corrections: fear, detachment, hatred, anger, are often further fed by incarceration. Instead of a respite from these destructive feelings, prison tends to create a super collider for them.

Prison theater programs create sanctuaries where the distractions and the degradations of the normal prison context are temporarily set aside. A safe container is established where focus and discipline can be exercised in the service of artistic goals. A sense of ensemble or community can develop, offering both challenge and support to each of the participants. An environment very unlike the prison yard and – and many prison classrooms develops where creativity and compassion, self-exploration and experimentation, playfulness and risk-taking can flourish and bear fruit.

The second theme is that prison theater programs can be a crucible for transformation.

Prison theater programs are places of refuge where the imaginations, hopes, and humanity of the incarcerated can be more fully expressed. In this context, the transformation of identity becomes a real possibility. As inmates rehearse new realities, develop new skills, and explore a wide range of roles in a context of discipline, commitment, and teamwork. This process occurs over days, weeks, months, and sometimes years.

In their work with other prisoners, many of whom they would normally have nothing to do with on the yard, and in their face to face contact with various facilitators and artists from the community, inmates are challenged to develop new skill sets and to see themselves in new ways. In this communal setting, they have the opportunity to practice their eventual reentry into society. And in their performances, many of them before public audiences, they enact po-powerful and moving rituals of reintegration

We talk about kings, queens, magicians, and lovers, those archetypal roles that are in all of Shakespeare’s plays. And as I mentioned before, these are masks that the men can put on and use as a vehicle, a safe medium to explore a wide range of their own emotions, ideas, to – to kind of stretch and to – to investigate.

Often a man is drawn to play a particular role because it speaks to him in some way. A journey awaits him. And along the way, he comes to see, we all come to see, “That the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not. And our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.” This is from All’s Well That Ends Well, Act Four, Scene Three.

I want to tell you about Avery. He was in our production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A gorgeous Native American man. Huge, strapping guy, with black hair streaming down his back. Very intense. Very serious. No nonsense. And he showed up at our orientation. He said: “This is about critical thinking, right?” I said: “Well, it’s actually the Shakespeare Project. ” He said: “You put up posters about critical thinking.” I said: “Well, that’s incorporated.” He says: “How’s that?”

[laughter]

I said: “Well- well, just hang in here for a bit, and maybe you’ll see.”

And he did and at the end I’m thinking: I hope, this guy is so intense, I hope he stays. And at the end of the orientation, he said: “I’m going to check this out.” I said: “Good.”

And on a – on a whim, not really a whim, on intuition, I asked him to play the role of Titania and Hippolyta. Often those roles are doubled in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And he agreed. He said: “Mold me. ” He was ready for an experience. “Mold me.” Okay.

And he was just a fascinating man because he was such a combination of somebody who was so powerful and secure in himself, in – in some ways, and yet wanting to go through, just dive in and have some kind of personal transformation.

One – one rehearsal, when I had a chance to talk to him one on one, he told me that this was his first opportunity to learn anything about Shakespeare, and he was in his 40s. He told me that when he was in high school, in Milwaukee, he was removed from his afternoon classes, placed in study hall, which bored him, so he’d just leave school altogether. And as a sophomore he was transferred to an alternative school. It was in prison that he – he earned his G.E.D.

This experience of playing Titania was challenging for him because, as he put it, he needed to get in touch with his feminine side. He needed to learn how to be soft towards others. And he threw himself into it, and sometimes it was not easy. It took time. It took the whole eight months to get there, but he got there. And it was a joyous performance. A really tremendous performance.

He danced.

He laughed.

He played, he played Titania like kind of a biker chick [laughs]

who could turn from being very affectionate and seductive and – and nurturing to being really on your case, in a serious way.

So, if you know the – the – the speech: These are the forgeries of jealousy. He knocked that one out of the park.

[emphatically] “These are the forgeries of jealousy. And never, since the middle summer’s spring, met we on a hill, in dale, forest, or mead. By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, or in the beached margent of the sea, to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind. But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs, Which falling in the land have every pelting river made so proud that they have overborne their continents. Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound. And thorough this distemperature we see the seasons alter; the spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter change their wonted liveries, and the mazed world. By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.”

He was good.

He writes: “In my arrogance, I thought I was pretty balanced overall. You know, there’s a lot of importance placed on balance in my culture. We are a part of Nature. Be in balance with it. We are Nature. Purify and bring balance to it. Maintain that balance.

Well, I thought I was pretty balanced overall, but you and your system of teaching and Shakespeare exposed me to be otherwise. Our process illumined my flawed nature and where I’d need work. This is what I was seeking, though I didn’t know it at the time. I like to watch and learn, and I thought I was pretty open-minded, flexible, loose in Nature, but the project, and in particular my roles of Hippolyta and Titania, showed me I was not.

It came to light in one of the talking circles, my fear of being outside of my comfort zone. The physical contact. The feminine stuff. The project has made less rigid, softer, which I now know is a good thing. More whole as a human being.”

You know what I – I found over time was that the most valuable thing for the men, and I think this is still true, is that they find that the role that they’re playing speaks some truth to their own lives. And that they can get outside of themselves for a while and look at that truth from a safe vantage point.

Haisan Williams, for example, and I think we’ll end with this example, so we’ll have time for a discussion. He, like many inmates, had a – a child either right before, was born either right before he- he got into prison or right after. But, you know, was conceived, obviously, before.

And he – he loves his son. He loves his son so much. But, you know, he – he was in prison when his son was, before his son was born, when his son was on the way. And he had to see the baby mother, as he put it, who – who was much more than that, who was the love of his life, finally give up on him and find another man who was now with his son.

And it was just by accident. I wonder, are these really accidents? But it was just by accident that he was – he was an experienced performer with the Shakespeare Project by now, and I wanted him to demonstrate to the men how we used a particular process of breaking down a speech into speech measures. Key words, images, focal points, objectives, all kinds of things. And he could do it all and he could show it all and demonstrate it to everybody. So, he was going to do it, and the speech I gave to him, I gave to him because I thought generically it -it hit on some things about being in prison. I didn’t know it was going to speak to him so directly.

It’s Arcite’s speech from Act Two, Scene Three of Two Noble Kinsmen. Arcite is a former prisoner of war who’s just been released.

Now he’s been ordered to leave Athens upon pain of death. The problem is that he’s fallen in love with Emilia, an Athenian who his former friend and fellow prisoner, Palamon, also released but not banished, has sworn to woo. So, get this, Arcite and Palamon, cellmates. They meet Emilia because she stops by the prison. [laughs]

They both fall in love with her. They both, kind of, theyre both wooing her. But when they’re released, Palamon gets to stay in town where Emilia is, and Arcite has been banished. So, that’s a bad situation, right?

Well, as Haisan told us, he very much identified with Arcite because he was separated from his loved one. So, as he told us after he had demonstrated this speech, Palamon stood in for the man who was now taking care of his child. And Haisan was Arcite.

And the – the speech goes like this: “Banished the kingdom? ‘Tis a benefit, A mercy I must thank ’em for; but banished the free enjoying of that face I die for. Oh, ’twas a studied punishment. A death beyond imagination, such a vengeance that were I old and wicked, all my sins could never pluck upon me.

Palamon, thou hast the start now; thou shalt stay and see her bright eyes break each morning ‘gainst thy window and let in life into thee; thou shalt feed upon the sweetness of a noble beauty, that nature ne’er exceeded, nor ne’er shall. Good gods! What happiness has Palamon!”

I think it might have also been a little bit about his girlfriend. [laughs]

But this very quick overview of the Shakespeare Project and – and the book is something that I hope resonates for you and – and gives birth to some questions. So, why don’t we open it up for questions?

[applause]