November 10, 2022 • 28 mins
Host Barry Edelstein takes us into California’s Centinela State Prison for a one-of-a-kind production of Shakespeare’s English history plays performed by incarcerated individuals. What makes Shakespeare a force of transformation and transcendence behind bars?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. What is honor a word? What is the net
word honor? Who had he'd died? Where that he feel it? No?
Those are lines from Shakespeare's play Henry the fourth Part one.
(00:36):
It's Sir John Falstaff speaking the scoundrel who's as outrageous
as he is oversized. He's on the battlefield honor, bound
to fight for king and country, but he'd love to
get out of it. So he gives the whole idea
of honor a cross examination and decides it's not for him.
(00:57):
Therefore on none of it. I'm Barry Edelstein, artistic director
of the Old Globe in San Diego, one of our
country's great Shakespeare theaters. And this is where there's a
will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and Pushkin industries. Oh yeah,
the Douglas Fatable, all those Where are those colleges? Adm
(01:20):
imbow I will see d by bye in bow down,
in bow me today. I give you lead to powder
me and eat me too tomorrow. The man playing Falstaff
is named Omar, and he's not a professional actor. He's
incarcerated at Sentinella State Prison in the southern California Desert.
(01:40):
He and a dozen other men are part of a
program called Reflecting Shakespeare run by the Old Globe. Over
the course of about eighteen weeks, they study Shakespeare, rehearse
scenes from his plays, delve into their themes, and then
prepare a performance to share with others in the prison.
And as this work continues, Shakespeare goes from being a
(02:02):
famous author they may not know much about, to something
else entirely, a friend, a lifeline, a mentor, a spiritual guide.
Sounds I'm afraid it is gun powder Percy, though he'd
be dead. How if he should counterpeat two we writs
(02:24):
by my thing, I proved he would be the better counterfeit.
I've been working on Shakespeare for decades as a stage director,
a producer, a teacher. I'm used to finding him in
the theater and the library and the classroom. But Shakespeare
has this tricky habit of showing up in all sorts
of other places too, places where his writing so powerful
(02:47):
and beautiful somehow touches people even more profoundly than it
does on the stage, places like a maximum security prison
in the middle of a remote southwestern desert. But here's
the question, what on earth is Shakespeare doing here? And
what is it about? Him and his writing that makes
it mean so much in a place like this, what nod,
(03:12):
how this world is given to light. The Old Globe
is hardly the first theater company to bring Shakespeare to
incarcerated populations. There have been prison Shakespeare programs for decades
(03:35):
now all over the world, so many that there's even
a regular International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference. I spoke at
it in twenty eighteen and I met practitioners from the UK,
New Zealand, the Czech Republic, India, all of them doing
the kind of work happening in San Diego. I went
to Sentinella last summer for the culmination of our Reflecting
(03:57):
Shakespeare program. There's a balcony behind us, and there's an
armed guard patrolling up there, and in the front row
are some of the men who are incarcerated here on
yard day, and they're wearing their blues from the California
(04:19):
Department of Correction and Rehabilitation. I got to see Omar
and the others present their final performance in the prison gym,
and that sound in the background that's the actors getting ready,
doing a little exercise where they sort of trade energy
around the circle and it forms an ensemble it forms
(04:40):
a company out of these individual guys. After the warmups,
I got a chance to speak with Omar, the man
who's playing Falstaff. He's charismatic and enthusiastic, and according to
his teachers, he's a natural leader, and he'd take Shakespeare seriously.
I'll talk about Shakespeare to my wife, right, talk with Shakespeare,
this and that. Yeah, you know in next surprise, what
(05:01):
do they think? They think? What do you? What do
you be? It's my wife is nice. Why do you
keep going? Right? Because the thing I'm taking to the
Shakespeare taking time wave murder. Right, So just why you
keep going? I said, because it's an opportunity for me
to show my emotion up and down twenty six twenty
seven years. I get up a smile every day even
(05:22):
though I'm in prison, because I get to come to
programs that are unique like this, and it takes me
outside of prison. It does. This isn't the first time
you've been in touch with Shakespeare, right, You've had some
past experience with it, not only in here, only in prison.
Probably would have never even checked into Shakespeare. But for
reflecting Shakespeare, it comes so naturally you. It's fantastic. We
(05:46):
got great teachers, and they give you the license to
just experiment and try open up, you know, don't be
afraid to raise your voice and make your thoughts known.
Erica Phillips is one of those teachers. The program is
a theater based program that uses Shakespeare as a launch
point for creative and reflective writing. And it's a process
(06:11):
that is intended to build connectedness, decreased social isolation, build
some confident skills, and also build a community of artists.
Erica's the Old Globe's Arts Engagement programs manager, and she
developed Reflecting Shakespeare with program associate James Pillar. Yeah, it's
a program about offering the opportunity to step out of
(06:36):
your comfort zone, whatever that might be, I think. Erica
and James work at a number of correctional facilities in
the San Diego area, including Sentinella. When you're incarcerated Sentinella,
very typically you've committed a violent crime. It's very possible
that you've committed murder. It's also possible that you've been
involved with some sort of drugs crime, and there are
(06:56):
many people incarcerated because of the three strikes law. At Sentinella,
Erica and James have been working with the men on
a piece they call Becoming King Today. What you're going
to see is actually an in house mashup of three plays.
We're looking at Henry four Part one, Henry four Part two,
and Henry five in order to follow the story a
(07:21):
young prince who was in line to become the next king.
There's a lot of questions about whether he had it
in him to do so, so we're gonna watch his
growth for rightfak what d ye raised me said and
makes me sitting envy, then my lord number Lass should
be the father of a blessed son while looking at
(07:42):
the propraise of him see the righteous honors theame Brown,
I'm a young here preparing for a final performance like this.
One begins early with the very basics. The group meets
once a week. The work starts with theater games, and
then Erica James and the other teaching artists start to
introduce Shakespeare's text a line at a time, and we're
(08:05):
saying like, if you don't know the word, our approach
is gonna be just like go for a load and proud.
You know we're gonna break it down later, and this
is just a chance. So yeah, there's a lot of
everyone getting just to speak that language out loud and
getting used to hearing your own voice doing it, setting
up a space or the opportunity where you might be
(08:25):
able to go, oh, I know what this is, and
I understand why this is right, and I can say
it as somebody else. And then the next thing is
we all stand up in the circle and your next
step is to say that line to the person across
the circles. And now we're connecting to someone further away, which,
of course it lends into stage technique. And you might
be saying that line to someone you never speak to
(08:47):
out on the yard for a whole ton of reasons.
You may not know them. You may be because of
some of the politics in that place, you can't talk
to that person. So that's where we starts. That might
be day one, when this opportunity came. I was like, well, sure,
why not? Why not try it? Because I'm not used
to speaking in front of crowds. That's John Quill, he's
(09:10):
in reflecting Shakespeare for the first time. Yeah, I described
Jean Quill as a He's about six feet tall, he's
got long dreads that usually ties back. He's smiling a
lot actually, so he's got really sparkly eyes, and he's
got a kind of bouncy effortvescent energy. Just feels like
he's gonna lift off. So I was like, well, what
I want to learn is to get out of my
(09:31):
comfort zone, you know what I mean? Even if it
was the fact that they said, we have to do
it for the whole yard, Okay, I want to be
comfortable speaking in front of that many people. As the
weeks go by, this strange and complex language from four
hundred years ago starts to sound less alien. Soon the
men in the program relate to it in the same
(09:51):
way that professional actors do. How can I say his
weird wayward words? That's unique because I like to figure
out other ways of speaking and things like that. In
Shakespeare brings that out and you can see the emotion
in the words. It may not be a sidebar that says,
oh well, at this time you should cry, but the
(10:12):
way that things are set up, you can tell, okay,
I have to put a motion into this part, or
I don't put motion into this part. So that was
a beautiful thing. I loved it. I loved them. God say,
my gray, how my royal, how God save you my
three board, my key, my job, I saved you my
(10:32):
heart or no no, no big fall, too deep, prayers
where there's a will, We'll be back after a short break.
I vanish thee on pain of death, not to come near,
(10:56):
or persons by ten miles. There's some magical things that
happens when dealing with a text like Shakespeare that feels
like it has nothing to do with you. As you
unpack what is going on the scene, what's going on
with this character, and everyone's figuring it it out, people
are going, oh, I get that, but that's like this,
and become so safe to talk about whatever that issue is,
(11:18):
whatever's going on with that person, because you're not talking
about yourself. It's this other thing, my lord, my lord.
The most striking thing about my day at Santinella, and
the scenes that moved me most in this performance of
Becoming King were the scenes that Shakespeare didn't actually write.
(11:39):
Eric and James name this program Reflecting Shakespeare because it
asks the participants to lift out key themes in the
passages they're performing and then to reflect on the ways
that these themes connect to their own lives. Here's an example.
Midway through the show, there's a scene from Henry the
Fourth when King Henry lays into his son Prince Hal
(12:01):
about what a disappointment he's been. The young man promises
his father that he'll change, gets his father with an
under So what the promise either you have given to
someone where someone is given to you that has never
been broken cast Let's say this first line altogether. Here
we go. I hold onto this promise like the rarest
(12:24):
of jets. After that scene, six men stood and they
took positions around the circular space that was taped out
on the floor. Six tough men who have been convicted
of some serious things, who've been incarcerated in some cases
for decades, and they talked about promises and change, and
(12:50):
they're mothers. My mother made me a promise that she
will always stay in my heart whenever I go. She
is one woman that never lade me wrong in life.
I remember my mom telling me at an early age
she would always have my back no matter what still
to do name my mom has never broke this promise.
(13:10):
My mama showed up for me in ways I couldn't
even imagine. Jeans getting ready to understand that the most
broken person can be guided enough. It's enough change takes courage.
Why not doubt? Cheers rolled down my cheeks, my heart
jus for joy. Loyal to a fault or slave to
a ghost? We want rolled the same streets coast to coast,
(13:37):
now across rule. Doubt is in the age? Who will
follow who? When the light changes? Duke you care? Is
it progress we seek or destruction under our feet? Reflections
like these are peppered throughout the show. The men's writing
(13:58):
is revealing personal, and it's surprising to hear, especially in
this brutal place. But Shakespeare transcends the environment and touches
something inside these men. The magic of being Shakespeare is
Shakespeare writes on genuine humanity, so there's always the possibility
(14:18):
of a connection in there. But the other magic of
Shakespeare is it's hard. It's a puzzle, but because it's
so distant, no one thinks they're talking about themselves. It's
the trick so that by the time we get to
figuring out what's going on this scene, it's so distant
that we can pose a writing prompt that's so personal.
(14:39):
Here's John Quill again, Shakespeare. It has a way of
throwing you into the actual vote. So while you're acting
you're figuring out, well, how does this connect to my life?
How can I connect this part to my life? What
have I been through in this part of my life
that that reflects with this who we have here? Did
not tell me that that man was dead. I did.
(15:01):
I saw him reathless and bringing on the ground art
now a life. So my story is u It's a
strange one, that's a scary I spoke with him by zoom,
so apologies for the sound of his audio, but I
wanted to talk with him because he's a graduate of
Reflecting Shakespeare. He's been involved with the justice system since
(15:22):
nineteen eighty four. He was a teenage gang member in
Los Angeles. In twenty twenty two, after twenty seven years
incarcerated in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the
last seven of which were served at Sentinella, he was released.
He's just been hired as a teaching artist at the
Old Globe, and he planned to return to Sentinella, not
(15:43):
as an inmate, but as a Shakespeare teacher, so that
he can share with the men still inside the kind
of personal transformation he experienced. If you're talking about Shakespeare,
which you're really talking about as a human condition, and
that gives an individual opportunity to talk about, Hey, this
is the thing I've never been able to express about
(16:05):
how I live, about the things that happened to me.
And look in this story and you can see me there.
People were able to see that. You connect with that immediately.
A Scary had a job at Sentinella. He worked as
a recreation clerk in the prison gym. One day he
watched a class of reflecting Shakespeare, and he remembered some
(16:28):
Shakespeare he'd learned in school. So he spoke some I
broke into to be not to be? That is the
question whether it's is noble in the minds of men
to suffer the outrage, stings and agrows of misfortune, or
to bear arms against him by opposing end them. When
I did that, they've known that I had known something
(16:49):
about Shakespeare. I asked a Scary if there was a
specific play that made an impression on him that started
to change him into a different person. So Henry the
Fourth that play. It connected with me in a real way,
because I consider Harry to be a man of destiny.
(17:10):
In his to Henry the Fourth plays, Shakespeare tells the
story of a young man who undergoes a gigantic change.
Prince Hal or Harry, reforms his ways, he redeems himself,
and he transforms into a king Henry the Fifth, a visionary,
a leader, a hero. In connecting with a fictional transformation,
(17:31):
Ascari had one of his own. Something had to happen
to him first, the goal through all of that nonsense
and tom foolery when he was a child and when
he was young and rebelling against his father, there are
people who are destined to do something other than be mediocre.
That play really resignated with me was that was about
(17:53):
that particular condition, about how you have to go through things,
and I would just reflect about the things that I
had to go through to become who I was. So
Prince hal is a guy nobody expects anything of him, right,
everybody knows he's going to be the king. But he's
hanging out with Falstaff, he's hanging out in this are,
he's getting involved in all sorts of stuff that a
prince shouldn't be doing. And his father tells him he's
(18:16):
no good and that he's never going to amount to anything.
He's going to embarrass the whole family and the whole monarchy,
and yet he turns it around right, right. He grew
into this man of extreme courage, and he did what
he had to do the say of the country, and
even when he was advised to do otherwise, he had
(18:38):
to make the difficulty decisions to go and do what
needed to be done. And that really resonated with me,
because it's true in my own life that that's kind
of the trajectory I took. Do you know of other
men who went through the Shakespeare program that had as
deep a transformation as you did. I don't know many
(18:58):
who didn't. Honestly, I don't know many people who went
from Shakespeare from class one to the end of the
play who weren't changed by that experience. It's impossible not
to be. It's just impossible not to be. But it's
not simply Shakespeare. That's the secret sauce. Shakespeare is the
(19:20):
lynch pain. It's you know, it's the Cornerstone's the thing
upon which you must build this other thing. But what
happens in the room is people get to examine their
humanity in ways that they were never able to. There's
nothing there now that will permit you to examine your humanity,
like looking at Shakespeare and then talking about it from
(19:42):
a personal perspective, like who are you? Who is the
Othello in your life? Who is the hamdling in your life? People?
If you give people an opportunity to tell you what
they know, they will. And you've given a man in
prison the opportunity to show you who he is where
it's safe to do so, and he will show you.
(20:04):
But in doing that he learns something about himself. He
will see himself sometimes for the first time in his
whole life. He'll see himself for who he really is,
and make a decision about it or not that's who
he wants to be going forward. We few, we happy
(20:34):
few We banned the brothers, for he today that shares
his blood with me shall be my brother and tentlemen
in England now and then shall think themselves to curse
they were not here, and hold their manhoods teeth while
any speech the thought put us upon Saint Christine's day.
(21:14):
I have been studying how I may compare this prison
where I live unto the world. That's Shakespeare's King Richard
the Second. He's imprisoned and awaiting his death. At the
end of the play, he has this absolutely gorgeous speech.
He conceives the inside of his cell as a mirror
(21:35):
image of the world outside. Shakespeare uses prison as a
metaphor in a few of his plays. Hamlet is one.
He suggests that the finite space of a cell can
be paradoxically infinite once the liberating powers of the mind
set to work. I love this as a way of
(21:56):
thinking about Shakespeare. In prison programs like this one, in
these bleak, airless places, Shakespeare becomes a conduit to something
open ended. Here's Omar again. It's an expliration not just
of the language, but of yourself, right, Because if you
can't see yourself in Shakespeare, something's wrong with you. I've
(22:18):
seen Shakespeare in theaters all over the world, but in
this place, unlike at the Royal Shakespeare Company or the
Old Globe, Shakespeare's words aren't really the main event here.
It's not so much about Shakespeare as Shakespeare, but instead
Shakespeare as a vehicle for a whole range of other things.
(22:41):
That's actually one of the beautiful things about this program, right,
because you see a person come in and he's clammed up, right,
and he has that he still has that mask on
from the prison. And then once he's here, maybe once
or twice, you see the clam opening in the pearl
begin to show itself. Right in this beare gymnasium, Shakespeare's
(23:05):
a connector. He brings together artists from a fessional theater,
staff members from a state bureaucracy, armed guards, and men
serving time for some very violent acts, all of us
laughing together at Shakespeare. In this isolated institution. Shakespeare's a healer,
(23:27):
helping men to make change, men whose lives have been
suffused with trauma, helping them see that there are other
ways for their emotional lives to work. Shakespeare points them
toward essential human experiences that they can grasp as their own.
Inside this stark, cinder block bluntness, Shakespeare expresses softness, gentleness, loveliness.
(23:55):
Expression like this is fraught in prison, even forbidden. But
Shakespeare gives these men a new language to speak things
that they feel but don't know how to say. A
voice from half a world and half a millennium away
becomes theirs. An idiom that could not be more remote
from the one spoken here becomes their native tongue, and
(24:20):
I kind of boggle at it. You'll see people that
you may not have talked to because of racial differences
or prison politics. They'll stay, Hey, how you doing today? Yeah?
Why did you? Did you study that? Could you? And
then you have a true cromaraderie that transcends prison. You
can't help but change being in Shakespeare. There's no way
(24:40):
that you can be the same person. Impossible, It's literally impossible.
Sentinela State Prison is its own world. On the one hand,
it's kind of plane blank. On the other there's an
extremity to it, all those gates and locks and fences
and guards and guns. The men inside have that feeling
(25:04):
about them too, John quill Omar. They're ordinary and extraordinary
at the same time. Prison is beyond the normal. Somehow,
it's intense, heightened. Maybe that's why it's such a natural
place for Shakespeare. Shakespeare wasn't about time. He was about people,
(25:28):
all right. So that's universal. That's always gonna be there.
And as long as he's talking about the human reality,
the human life, it's always gonna be relevant. It'll never die.
Shakespeare will be here long after we're gone, guaranteed, because
he speaks to us in your heart, speaks to us
in your mind, and he allows it to flow from
(25:49):
your tongue. What, Lord, Lord, how this world is given
to light? I I was there, and how the breath
was so was he? But we both rose at an
instant in ball wholl Hour, and if the bid would ride,
(26:17):
I'm making meet my Schuur. Where There's a Will Finding
(26:44):
Shakespeare is written and hosted by Me Barry Edelstein. My
co host is m Weinstein. Our show was produced by
Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott, with assistant producers Jennifer Sanchez
and Salmon Ahad Khan. Our executive producers are Katherine Girardo
from Pushkin and Alex Lewis and John Myers from Row
Home Productions. Our editor is Audrey Dilling. Our mix engineer
(27:06):
is Justin Burger. Our theme is an original composition by
Hannis Brown. Samuel Buzid is our fact checker. Vicki Merrick
is our voice coach. Our show was recorded at Bill
Corkery Productions, Leopard Studio, and The Old Globe. Where There's
a Will is a co production of Pushkin Industries and
The Old Globe. Barry Edelstein. That's Me is Erna Fincy
(27:28):
Veturbie Artistic director and Timothy J. Shields. Is Audrey S. Geisel,
Managing Director of the Old Globe. For the Globe thanks
to Sound director Paul Peterson and Assistant to the Sound
Director Evan Eason, Director of Marketing and Communications Dave Henson,
Assistant to the artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd, The
Theodore and Audrey Geiselfund provides leadership support for The Old
(27:50):
Globe's year round activities. To learn more about the Tony
Award winning the Old Globe one of America's leading regional
theater companies, visit the Old Globe dot org. If you
love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus
content and add free listening across our network for dollars
and ninety nine cents a month. Find the Pushkin Plus
(28:12):
channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. To
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Pushkin. What is honor a word? What is the net
word honor? Who had he'd died? Where that he feel it? No?
Those are lines from Shakespeare's play Henry the fourth Part one.
(00:36):
It's Sir John Falstaff speaking the scoundrel who's as outrageous
as he is oversized. He's on the battlefield honor, bound
to fight for king and country, but he'd love to
get out of it. So he gives the whole idea
of honor a cross examination and decides it's not for him.
(00:57):
Therefore on none of it. I'm Barry Edelstein, artistic director
of the Old Globe in San Diego, one of our
country's great Shakespeare theaters. And this is where there's a
will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and Pushkin industries. Oh yeah,
the Douglas Fatable, all those Where are those colleges? Adm
(01:20):
imbow I will see d by bye in bow down,
in bow me today. I give you lead to powder
me and eat me too tomorrow. The man playing Falstaff
is named Omar, and he's not a professional actor. He's
incarcerated at Sentinella State Prison in the southern California Desert.
(01:40):
He and a dozen other men are part of a
program called Reflecting Shakespeare run by the Old Globe. Over
the course of about eighteen weeks, they study Shakespeare, rehearse
scenes from his plays, delve into their themes, and then
prepare a performance to share with others in the prison.
And as this work continues, Shakespeare goes from being a
(02:02):
famous author they may not know much about, to something
else entirely, a friend, a lifeline, a mentor, a spiritual guide.
Sounds I'm afraid it is gun powder Percy, though he'd
be dead. How if he should counterpeat two we writs
(02:24):
by my thing, I proved he would be the better counterfeit.
I've been working on Shakespeare for decades as a stage director,
a producer, a teacher. I'm used to finding him in
the theater and the library and the classroom. But Shakespeare
has this tricky habit of showing up in all sorts
of other places too, places where his writing so powerful
(02:47):
and beautiful somehow touches people even more profoundly than it
does on the stage, places like a maximum security prison
in the middle of a remote southwestern desert. But here's
the question, what on earth is Shakespeare doing here? And
what is it about? Him and his writing that makes
it mean so much in a place like this, what nod,
(03:12):
how this world is given to light. The Old Globe
is hardly the first theater company to bring Shakespeare to
incarcerated populations. There have been prison Shakespeare programs for decades
(03:35):
now all over the world, so many that there's even
a regular International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference. I spoke at
it in twenty eighteen and I met practitioners from the UK,
New Zealand, the Czech Republic, India, all of them doing
the kind of work happening in San Diego. I went
to Sentinella last summer for the culmination of our Reflecting
(03:57):
Shakespeare program. There's a balcony behind us, and there's an
armed guard patrolling up there, and in the front row
are some of the men who are incarcerated here on
yard day, and they're wearing their blues from the California
(04:19):
Department of Correction and Rehabilitation. I got to see Omar
and the others present their final performance in the prison gym,
and that sound in the background that's the actors getting ready,
doing a little exercise where they sort of trade energy
around the circle and it forms an ensemble it forms
(04:40):
a company out of these individual guys. After the warmups,
I got a chance to speak with Omar, the man
who's playing Falstaff. He's charismatic and enthusiastic, and according to
his teachers, he's a natural leader, and he'd take Shakespeare seriously.
I'll talk about Shakespeare to my wife, right, talk with Shakespeare,
this and that. Yeah, you know in next surprise, what
(05:01):
do they think? They think? What do you? What do
you be? It's my wife is nice. Why do you
keep going? Right? Because the thing I'm taking to the
Shakespeare taking time wave murder. Right, So just why you
keep going? I said, because it's an opportunity for me
to show my emotion up and down twenty six twenty
seven years. I get up a smile every day even
(05:22):
though I'm in prison, because I get to come to
programs that are unique like this, and it takes me
outside of prison. It does. This isn't the first time
you've been in touch with Shakespeare, right, You've had some
past experience with it, not only in here, only in prison.
Probably would have never even checked into Shakespeare. But for
reflecting Shakespeare, it comes so naturally you. It's fantastic. We
(05:46):
got great teachers, and they give you the license to
just experiment and try open up, you know, don't be
afraid to raise your voice and make your thoughts known.
Erica Phillips is one of those teachers. The program is
a theater based program that uses Shakespeare as a launch
point for creative and reflective writing. And it's a process
(06:11):
that is intended to build connectedness, decreased social isolation, build
some confident skills, and also build a community of artists.
Erica's the Old Globe's Arts Engagement programs manager, and she
developed Reflecting Shakespeare with program associate James Pillar. Yeah, it's
a program about offering the opportunity to step out of
(06:36):
your comfort zone, whatever that might be, I think. Erica
and James work at a number of correctional facilities in
the San Diego area, including Sentinella. When you're incarcerated Sentinella,
very typically you've committed a violent crime. It's very possible
that you've committed murder. It's also possible that you've been
involved with some sort of drugs crime, and there are
(06:56):
many people incarcerated because of the three strikes law. At Sentinella,
Erica and James have been working with the men on
a piece they call Becoming King Today. What you're going
to see is actually an in house mashup of three plays.
We're looking at Henry four Part one, Henry four Part two,
and Henry five in order to follow the story a
(07:21):
young prince who was in line to become the next king.
There's a lot of questions about whether he had it
in him to do so, so we're gonna watch his
growth for rightfak what d ye raised me said and
makes me sitting envy, then my lord number Lass should
be the father of a blessed son while looking at
(07:42):
the propraise of him see the righteous honors theame Brown,
I'm a young here preparing for a final performance like this.
One begins early with the very basics. The group meets
once a week. The work starts with theater games, and
then Erica James and the other teaching artists start to
introduce Shakespeare's text a line at a time, and we're
(08:05):
saying like, if you don't know the word, our approach
is gonna be just like go for a load and proud.
You know we're gonna break it down later, and this
is just a chance. So yeah, there's a lot of
everyone getting just to speak that language out loud and
getting used to hearing your own voice doing it, setting
up a space or the opportunity where you might be
(08:25):
able to go, oh, I know what this is, and
I understand why this is right, and I can say
it as somebody else. And then the next thing is
we all stand up in the circle and your next
step is to say that line to the person across
the circles. And now we're connecting to someone further away, which,
of course it lends into stage technique. And you might
be saying that line to someone you never speak to
(08:47):
out on the yard for a whole ton of reasons.
You may not know them. You may be because of
some of the politics in that place, you can't talk
to that person. So that's where we starts. That might
be day one, when this opportunity came. I was like, well, sure,
why not? Why not try it? Because I'm not used
to speaking in front of crowds. That's John Quill, he's
(09:10):
in reflecting Shakespeare for the first time. Yeah, I described
Jean Quill as a He's about six feet tall, he's
got long dreads that usually ties back. He's smiling a
lot actually, so he's got really sparkly eyes, and he's
got a kind of bouncy effortvescent energy. Just feels like
he's gonna lift off. So I was like, well, what
I want to learn is to get out of my
(09:31):
comfort zone, you know what I mean? Even if it
was the fact that they said, we have to do
it for the whole yard, Okay, I want to be
comfortable speaking in front of that many people. As the
weeks go by, this strange and complex language from four
hundred years ago starts to sound less alien. Soon the
men in the program relate to it in the same
(09:51):
way that professional actors do. How can I say his
weird wayward words? That's unique because I like to figure
out other ways of speaking and things like that. In
Shakespeare brings that out and you can see the emotion
in the words. It may not be a sidebar that says,
oh well, at this time you should cry, but the
(10:12):
way that things are set up, you can tell, okay,
I have to put a motion into this part, or
I don't put motion into this part. So that was
a beautiful thing. I loved it. I loved them. God say,
my gray, how my royal, how God save you my
three board, my key, my job, I saved you my
(10:32):
heart or no no, no big fall, too deep, prayers
where there's a will, We'll be back after a short break.
I vanish thee on pain of death, not to come near,
(10:56):
or persons by ten miles. There's some magical things that
happens when dealing with a text like Shakespeare that feels
like it has nothing to do with you. As you
unpack what is going on the scene, what's going on
with this character, and everyone's figuring it it out, people
are going, oh, I get that, but that's like this,
and become so safe to talk about whatever that issue is,
(11:18):
whatever's going on with that person, because you're not talking
about yourself. It's this other thing, my lord, my lord.
The most striking thing about my day at Santinella, and
the scenes that moved me most in this performance of
Becoming King were the scenes that Shakespeare didn't actually write.
(11:39):
Eric and James name this program Reflecting Shakespeare because it
asks the participants to lift out key themes in the
passages they're performing and then to reflect on the ways
that these themes connect to their own lives. Here's an example.
Midway through the show, there's a scene from Henry the
Fourth when King Henry lays into his son Prince Hal
(12:01):
about what a disappointment he's been. The young man promises
his father that he'll change, gets his father with an
under So what the promise either you have given to
someone where someone is given to you that has never
been broken cast Let's say this first line altogether. Here
we go. I hold onto this promise like the rarest
(12:24):
of jets. After that scene, six men stood and they
took positions around the circular space that was taped out
on the floor. Six tough men who have been convicted
of some serious things, who've been incarcerated in some cases
for decades, and they talked about promises and change, and
(12:50):
they're mothers. My mother made me a promise that she
will always stay in my heart whenever I go. She
is one woman that never lade me wrong in life.
I remember my mom telling me at an early age
she would always have my back no matter what still
to do name my mom has never broke this promise.
(13:10):
My mama showed up for me in ways I couldn't
even imagine. Jeans getting ready to understand that the most
broken person can be guided enough. It's enough change takes courage.
Why not doubt? Cheers rolled down my cheeks, my heart
jus for joy. Loyal to a fault or slave to
a ghost? We want rolled the same streets coast to coast,
(13:37):
now across rule. Doubt is in the age? Who will
follow who? When the light changes? Duke you care? Is
it progress we seek or destruction under our feet? Reflections
like these are peppered throughout the show. The men's writing
(13:58):
is revealing personal, and it's surprising to hear, especially in
this brutal place. But Shakespeare transcends the environment and touches
something inside these men. The magic of being Shakespeare is
Shakespeare writes on genuine humanity, so there's always the possibility
(14:18):
of a connection in there. But the other magic of
Shakespeare is it's hard. It's a puzzle, but because it's
so distant, no one thinks they're talking about themselves. It's
the trick so that by the time we get to
figuring out what's going on this scene, it's so distant
that we can pose a writing prompt that's so personal.
(14:39):
Here's John Quill again, Shakespeare. It has a way of
throwing you into the actual vote. So while you're acting
you're figuring out, well, how does this connect to my life?
How can I connect this part to my life? What
have I been through in this part of my life
that that reflects with this who we have here? Did
not tell me that that man was dead. I did.
(15:01):
I saw him reathless and bringing on the ground art
now a life. So my story is u It's a
strange one, that's a scary I spoke with him by zoom,
so apologies for the sound of his audio, but I
wanted to talk with him because he's a graduate of
Reflecting Shakespeare. He's been involved with the justice system since
(15:22):
nineteen eighty four. He was a teenage gang member in
Los Angeles. In twenty twenty two, after twenty seven years
incarcerated in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the
last seven of which were served at Sentinella, he was released.
He's just been hired as a teaching artist at the
Old Globe, and he planned to return to Sentinella, not
(15:43):
as an inmate, but as a Shakespeare teacher, so that
he can share with the men still inside the kind
of personal transformation he experienced. If you're talking about Shakespeare,
which you're really talking about as a human condition, and
that gives an individual opportunity to talk about, Hey, this
is the thing I've never been able to express about
(16:05):
how I live, about the things that happened to me.
And look in this story and you can see me there.
People were able to see that. You connect with that immediately.
A Scary had a job at Sentinella. He worked as
a recreation clerk in the prison gym. One day he
watched a class of reflecting Shakespeare, and he remembered some
(16:28):
Shakespeare he'd learned in school. So he spoke some I
broke into to be not to be? That is the
question whether it's is noble in the minds of men
to suffer the outrage, stings and agrows of misfortune, or
to bear arms against him by opposing end them. When
I did that, they've known that I had known something
(16:49):
about Shakespeare. I asked a Scary if there was a
specific play that made an impression on him that started
to change him into a different person. So Henry the
Fourth that play. It connected with me in a real way,
because I consider Harry to be a man of destiny.
(17:10):
In his to Henry the Fourth plays, Shakespeare tells the
story of a young man who undergoes a gigantic change.
Prince Hal or Harry, reforms his ways, he redeems himself,
and he transforms into a king Henry the Fifth, a visionary,
a leader, a hero. In connecting with a fictional transformation,
(17:31):
Ascari had one of his own. Something had to happen
to him first, the goal through all of that nonsense
and tom foolery when he was a child and when
he was young and rebelling against his father, there are
people who are destined to do something other than be mediocre.
That play really resignated with me was that was about
(17:53):
that particular condition, about how you have to go through things,
and I would just reflect about the things that I
had to go through to become who I was. So
Prince hal is a guy nobody expects anything of him, right,
everybody knows he's going to be the king. But he's
hanging out with Falstaff, he's hanging out in this are,
he's getting involved in all sorts of stuff that a
prince shouldn't be doing. And his father tells him he's
(18:16):
no good and that he's never going to amount to anything.
He's going to embarrass the whole family and the whole monarchy,
and yet he turns it around right, right. He grew
into this man of extreme courage, and he did what
he had to do the say of the country, and
even when he was advised to do otherwise, he had
(18:38):
to make the difficulty decisions to go and do what
needed to be done. And that really resonated with me,
because it's true in my own life that that's kind
of the trajectory I took. Do you know of other
men who went through the Shakespeare program that had as
deep a transformation as you did. I don't know many
(18:58):
who didn't. Honestly, I don't know many people who went
from Shakespeare from class one to the end of the
play who weren't changed by that experience. It's impossible not
to be. It's just impossible not to be. But it's
not simply Shakespeare. That's the secret sauce. Shakespeare is the
(19:20):
lynch pain. It's you know, it's the Cornerstone's the thing
upon which you must build this other thing. But what
happens in the room is people get to examine their
humanity in ways that they were never able to. There's
nothing there now that will permit you to examine your humanity,
like looking at Shakespeare and then talking about it from
(19:42):
a personal perspective, like who are you? Who is the
Othello in your life? Who is the hamdling in your life? People?
If you give people an opportunity to tell you what
they know, they will. And you've given a man in
prison the opportunity to show you who he is where
it's safe to do so, and he will show you.
(20:04):
But in doing that he learns something about himself. He
will see himself sometimes for the first time in his
whole life. He'll see himself for who he really is,
and make a decision about it or not that's who
he wants to be going forward. We few, we happy
(20:34):
few We banned the brothers, for he today that shares
his blood with me shall be my brother and tentlemen
in England now and then shall think themselves to curse
they were not here, and hold their manhoods teeth while
any speech the thought put us upon Saint Christine's day.
(21:14):
I have been studying how I may compare this prison
where I live unto the world. That's Shakespeare's King Richard
the Second. He's imprisoned and awaiting his death. At the
end of the play, he has this absolutely gorgeous speech.
He conceives the inside of his cell as a mirror
(21:35):
image of the world outside. Shakespeare uses prison as a
metaphor in a few of his plays. Hamlet is one.
He suggests that the finite space of a cell can
be paradoxically infinite once the liberating powers of the mind
set to work. I love this as a way of
(21:56):
thinking about Shakespeare. In prison programs like this one, in
these bleak, airless places, Shakespeare becomes a conduit to something
open ended. Here's Omar again. It's an expliration not just
of the language, but of yourself, right, Because if you
can't see yourself in Shakespeare, something's wrong with you. I've
(22:18):
seen Shakespeare in theaters all over the world, but in
this place, unlike at the Royal Shakespeare Company or the
Old Globe, Shakespeare's words aren't really the main event here.
It's not so much about Shakespeare as Shakespeare, but instead
Shakespeare as a vehicle for a whole range of other things.
(22:41):
That's actually one of the beautiful things about this program, right,
because you see a person come in and he's clammed up, right,
and he has that he still has that mask on
from the prison. And then once he's here, maybe once
or twice, you see the clam opening in the pearl
begin to show itself. Right in this beare gymnasium, Shakespeare's
(23:05):
a connector. He brings together artists from a fessional theater,
staff members from a state bureaucracy, armed guards, and men
serving time for some very violent acts, all of us
laughing together at Shakespeare. In this isolated institution. Shakespeare's a healer,
(23:27):
helping men to make change, men whose lives have been
suffused with trauma, helping them see that there are other
ways for their emotional lives to work. Shakespeare points them
toward essential human experiences that they can grasp as their own.
Inside this stark, cinder block bluntness, Shakespeare expresses softness, gentleness, loveliness.
(23:55):
Expression like this is fraught in prison, even forbidden. But
Shakespeare gives these men a new language to speak things
that they feel but don't know how to say. A
voice from half a world and half a millennium away
becomes theirs. An idiom that could not be more remote
from the one spoken here becomes their native tongue, and
(24:20):
I kind of boggle at it. You'll see people that
you may not have talked to because of racial differences
or prison politics. They'll stay, Hey, how you doing today? Yeah?
Why did you? Did you study that? Could you? And
then you have a true cromaraderie that transcends prison. You
can't help but change being in Shakespeare. There's no way
(24:40):
that you can be the same person. Impossible, It's literally impossible.
Sentinela State Prison is its own world. On the one hand,
it's kind of plane blank. On the other there's an
extremity to it, all those gates and locks and fences
and guards and guns. The men inside have that feeling
(25:04):
about them too, John quill Omar. They're ordinary and extraordinary
at the same time. Prison is beyond the normal. Somehow,
it's intense, heightened. Maybe that's why it's such a natural
place for Shakespeare. Shakespeare wasn't about time. He was about people,
(25:28):
all right. So that's universal. That's always gonna be there.
And as long as he's talking about the human reality,
the human life, it's always gonna be relevant. It'll never die.
Shakespeare will be here long after we're gone, guaranteed, because
he speaks to us in your heart, speaks to us
in your mind, and he allows it to flow from
(25:49):
your tongue. What, Lord, Lord, how this world is given
to light? I I was there, and how the breath
was so was he? But we both rose at an
instant in ball wholl Hour, and if the bid would ride,
(26:17):
I'm making meet my Schuur. Where There's a Will Finding
(26:44):
Shakespeare is written and hosted by Me Barry Edelstein. My
co host is m Weinstein. Our show was produced by
Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott, with assistant producers Jennifer Sanchez
and Salmon Ahad Khan. Our executive producers are Katherine Girardo
from Pushkin and Alex Lewis and John Myers from Row
Home Productions. Our editor is Audrey Dilling. Our mix engineer
(27:06):
is Justin Burger. Our theme is an original composition by
Hannis Brown. Samuel Buzid is our fact checker. Vicki Merrick
is our voice coach. Our show was recorded at Bill
Corkery Productions, Leopard Studio, and The Old Globe. Where There's
a Will is a co production of Pushkin Industries and
The Old Globe. Barry Edelstein. That's Me is Erna Fincy
(27:28):
Veturbie Artistic director and Timothy J. Shields. Is Audrey S. Geisel,
Managing Director of the Old Globe. For the Globe thanks
to Sound director Paul Peterson and Assistant to the Sound
Director Evan Eason, Director of Marketing and Communications Dave Henson,
Assistant to the artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd, The
Theodore and Audrey Geiselfund provides leadership support for The Old
(27:50):
Globe's year round activities. To learn more about the Tony
Award winning the Old Globe one of America's leading regional
theater companies, visit the Old Globe dot org. If you
love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus
content and add free listening across our network for dollars
and ninety nine cents a month. Find the Pushkin Plus
(28:12):
channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. To
find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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