“The purpose of playing”: Working with Shakespeare in Sing Sing and Ghostlight

Two films this summer showcase, in ways both forceful and surprisingly amusing, how Shakespeare specifically and theater generally can be a source of healing and power. Ghostlight tells the story of a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet that helps a family cope with personal tragedy, while Sing Sing focuses on a group of incarcerated men participating in a theater-in-prison program that draws inspiration from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and Hamlet. Miraculously, both movies manage to avoid corny showbiz uplift by demonstrating that it’s not a successful production that can change your life, but the hard work and process of creating theater that can provide tools to more capably handle life’s challenges.

The Mueller family in Ghostlight — played by a real-life family of Chicago actors: Tara Mallen, Keith Kupferer, and Katherine Mallen Kupferer, their daughter — is disintegrating under the weight of their unprocessed feelings after their son and brother’s suicide. Teenage Daisy is suspended for acting out in school and shoving a teacher, while construction worker Dan, who we sense has always been a strong-but-silent type, has gone completely quiet, shutting down emotionally until he lashes out in a road-rage incident at work. A witness to that altercation invites Dan to participate in her group’s reading of Romeo and Juliet and, mostly out of fear of confessing to his wife he’s been laid off, he joins them.

What follows is the gradual and comical introduction of non-actor Dan into the earnestly enthusiastic world of theatrical rehearsals, and because it’s played in a humorous vein, we don’t mind the illogic of him not recognizing the theater games his wife teaches her elementary school students, or the fact that he’s somehow gone his whole life without knowing what happens in Romeo and Juliet. Roles get switched in rehearsal—talented teen Daisy joins the cast as Mercutio while her father ends up playing Romeo—and the way Dan blossoms in rehearsals is predictably (though wonderfully) moving. But what’s most powerful is how, in the words of one critic, Shakespeare’s “lines take on fresh meaning as father and daughter recite them,” giving Dan insight into his character and clues as to why his son might have killed himself, which allows him to temper his rage and begin to heal.

Acting is “supposed to be fake,” Daisy tells her father in Ghostlight, “but the feelings can feel real sometimes.” Sing Sing beautifully explores that same fuzzy border between pretend feelings onstage and exaggerated performative behavior in real life. Sing Sing focuses on John “Divine G” Whitfield, an incarcerated leader of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a real program that works with professional teaching artists to lead year-round workshops in theater, dance, music, creative writing, and visual arts. (Whitfield is played by Colman Domingo, but based on a real person who has a small cameo role near the beginning of the film.) Divine G recruits Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (a past RTA participant who plays a version of his formerly incarcerated self) to join their group after seeing him intimidate another man and then praising Maclin’s “performance.” Both men acknowledge the amount of performing they have to do to get ahead or conform to societal expectations, and one of the joys of Sing Sing is seeing the incarcerated men defy those expectations, revealing aspects of themselves they’ve either kept hidden or didn’t know they had.

Shakespeare pops up many times in Sing Sing and in some surprising places. The film starts with the metaphorical magic of theater illustrated by an RTA performance of the literal magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, before dropping the characters (and the audience) back into the harsh reality of prison life. When Divine G first asks Divine Eye why he’s interested in being part of RTA, Divine Eye explains that he happened to pick up a copy of King Lear and was struck by what he read:

“Some of the things the brother was saying in the book really resonated with me, man. I mean, the brother said, what did the brother say? He said, “When we are born, we cry because we’re born to a stage of fools.” And I said, “Yo, whoever wrote this, man, had to do a bid before,” you know?”

Neither Divine G nor the audience knows whether this is a true story or another “performance” by Divine Eye, which adds to the character’s mystery and appeal.

And though Sing Sing culminates in a performance by the RTA members, it’s refreshingly not a Shakespeare play. It’s an original musical called Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, written by RTA director Brent Buell (another actual person, who is played by Academy Award-nominee Paul Raci), which is filled with pirates, mummies, gladiators, Robin Hood, Freddy Krueger—and Hamlet. Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane is just another well-known pop culture icon dropped into this celebratory mash-up.

Divine G and Divine Eye also tentatively bond over shared histories of exploring the arts as children, interests they ended up not pursuing and in fact were encouraged to abandon. As Kate Powers, a senior teaching artist with RTA, told me on my Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast, “Our program isn’t about training these guys to be actors, our program is about giving them life skills,” and the proof of RTA’s ability to live up to the “Rehabilitation” in their name is in the numbers. As they boast on their website, “Over 60% of people return to prison within three years of release. Less than 3% of RTA members return to prison [emphasis theirs].” One of the wonders of Sing Sing is how well it dramatizes this idea without getting up on a soapbox and preaching about it; the film entertainingly and powerfully shows the men enduring the emotional pain but also enjoying the rewards of doing the work.

Regular readers of this blog will know of my love of movies that feel like plays, and Sing Sing delivers on this score as well. During the final credits, all the actors are identified by name and face, allowing us to see and applaud (if only to ourselves) who among the cast are playing aspects of themselves. Clips of actual RTA performances are also shown and I love any film where the actors, in a sense, take a bow like they get to do in the theater.

Creative journeys aren’t simple but the benefits can be huge. “Dad, the lines are the easy part,” Daisy tells her father in Ghostlight. “The hard part is the emotional journey, living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.” As someone who constantly turned to Shakespeare and artistic pursuits during the forced isolation of the politically-fraught pandemic years, I know how living truthfully in imaginary circumstances can help you do the same in real life.