09/10/2022
Friends and Colleagues,
One of the great joys in my life began in October 2013 when I had the first meeting with a group of men at the Pendleton Correctional Facility for Shakespeare at Pendleton. For several years prior, I had been a regularly visitor and volunteer for the Shakespeare Behind Bars in Lagrange, Kentucky, facilitated first by Curt Tofteland and then Matt Wallace. My volunteering at SBB primarily involved sharing with the men an “English professor’s take” on whatever play they were working on. Around 2010, I began to conduct a weeklong annual seminar for the Kentucky men. Though I haven’t previously had any professional acting or directing training, my frequent attendance at plays and many visits to SBB programs in Kentucky and Michigan made me think that working with a group of men, we could figure out how to do plays. So, with encouragement from the Kentucky men, I approached the prison officials at the Pendleton Correctional Facility in August 2013. Shakespeare at Pendleton had its first meeting on October 18, 2013. We discussed a vision for S@P and had a look at some speeches from The Merchant of Venice.
A few months later, in collaboration, the men and I decided that we would work on Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy Coriolanus. The men took to the play enthusiastically. We were amateurs, yes, but we were figuring out how to make a credible play from our own efforts. I have long been proud of the men participating then for figuring out, without much input from me, how to cut the play from a three-hour text to one that could be performed in 45-60 minutes. Also during this time, the men were featured in an online National Geographic article. (I’ll bet a lot of people have forgotten about this.) On Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 2015, we had the first ever performance of Coriolanus within a prison. A number of men gave fine and memorable performances. They also performed for a professional film actor and a crew filming his movie at the facility. If you should ever see the HBO movie The O.G. or the accompanying documentary It’s a Hard Truth, Ain’t It, you will see many of the men I’ve worked with.
Two years later, in May 2017, we had our second public performance, of all-male scenes from Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the Dogberry scenes, and the Bottom and the players scenes). This too was a fantastic thrill, and definitely a switch from the anger that permeates the text of Coriolanus. We had a lot of fun, and I’m persuaded that our little play had the funniest Dogberry in human history, played as a Black Baptist pastor. Believe it or not, that worked. We also had a lot of fun with the Midsummer scenes.
I think our best accomplishment came in August 2018. I had gotten hold of a cut text used by a professional theatre of the little-known tragedy Timon of Athens. This time we going to try to perform something we could consider as the complete play. And once again, we would be premiering a play in a prison. Getting this play done was a challenge. As we were approaching performance, the prison had repeated security lockdowns, stopping us from rehearsing for days and weeks. Finally, about three weeks before the performance occurred, we felt that we would have to recast the lead role and several major supporting roles because the cell block with the actors seemed to be in permanent lockdown.
Much to everyone’s surprise, that cellblock came off lockdown the day before the scheduled performance. What I witnessed was unbelievable: men working extra hard to learn major roles in three weeks, and then willingly relinquishing those roles for their comrades to return their original roles. I have often been proud of the men, but this was extra. And the men who had been kept from rehearsing were still able to perform a great show.
Another story from Timon: We also ran into a problem that with our set and props, we just couldn’t make Act 5 work as written. For my first time, I took on the task of editing and rewriting a Shakespeare scene, using only his words but rearranging and repositioning some action. I don’t know if any previous cast and “director” had ever ended Timon with a double-cross and massacre, but it certainly worked for us. This was my first time ever feeling like I was writing through what a playwright would have to do.
Our fourth show was called Monologues and Scenes (Spring 2019). I wanted the men to be introduced to a range of Shakespeare texts, so we had monologues and scenes from The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Richard II, As You Like It, Macbeth, The Tempest, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, Titus Andronicus, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We also had a dialogue from Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman and a monologue one of the men wrote for himself, based on MLK speeches. For a second half of this performance, the men performed Act 3 of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Looking back, it’s funny to me now just how awful the last rehearsal of the Our Town act was. And yet, when it came time to doing it, the men pulled through fully, really finding their own emotional connections with the play.
In the Fall of 2019, we had finally decided to do a complete performance of a Shakespeare play people had heard of: Julius Caesar. I was envisioning making the play a gang battle for local territorial supremacy. We were going to have politicking, graffiti, and street fights. I was really looking forward to what we were going to do with a piece of Masonite that could have constant changes of graffiti, rally notices, campaign flyers, etc.
Then COVID.
We had our last rehearsal on March 3, 2020, after I had been sick for several weeks before (quite possibly with undiagnosed COVID). It was a sudden and necessary shut-down.
Because of prison limitations and logistics, I lost contact with the Pendleton men. We didn’t have the resources to maintain effective communication remotely or online. At the same time, men who had been part of Shakespeare at Pendleton were transferring to other prisons, some had completed their sentences, and one or two had passed. Late last year, we had hoped to start resuming Shakespeare at Pendleton, and we did indeed meet for three sessions. Then Omicron hit, then there was an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, and the prison became short staffed.
There are dozens of more stories I could tell that would make a blogpost a book: having a role in a Mexican embassy visit, attending an Easter service, having lockdowns during our sessions, theatre games, pizza parties, and most of all, the frequent breakthroughs, the moments of insight, for me and for the men.
The staffing problem at the facility seems to be a long-term problem with no solution in sight. There is no date on the horizon for resuming Shakespeare at Pendleton. Therefore, after consulting with a number of people, I have decided to suspend Shakespeare at Pendleton, probably permanently. I have not yet figured out how to tell the men, though they are probably anticipating this. If in fact the prison reopens to programs within the next few months, I will go back, though we would likely resume only as a readers group. We cannot anticipate meeting regularly.
Because of all of this, I am no longer fundraising for Shakespeare at Pendleton (not that we had raised any funds since 2019.) Almost $1300 has been sitting in an account for the program, and in collaboration with the prison librarian, I am spending it all on library equipment and resources. I regarding this as the likely conclusion of Shakespeare at Pendleton.
Various people have been important to the program over the years: Wayne Scaife, Jeff King, Morgan Morton, Stacy Erickson-Pesetski, Curt Tofteland, Matt Wallace, Laura Bates, the Chaplain's office at Pendleton, the financial supporters and folks who bought the t-shirts, theatres who gave us their Shakespeare scripts and lent us some props. I am grateful to you all.
And most of all, to the men who gave me the privilege of creating plays together.
I am, of course, weeping.
