28 August 2024

Sing Sing is a tender portrait of creativity behind bars

The film stars former inmates playing themselves as they stage a performance on the inside.

In a maximum-security prison in New York state, a group of inmates sit in a circle and close their eyes, invited by their acting teacher, Brent, to think of their “perfect spot”. Sean “Dino” Johnson recalls working in the sun mowing the lawn, and then lying down in the freshly cut grass, the smell of it, and his dog coming over to lick his face. Camillo “Carmine” LoVacco describes a picnic he took with his late wife in June 1972, where they sat beside the lake in Prospect Park drinking Manhattan Specials and he told her he loved her for the first time. Once each prisoner has said his piece, Brent says: “I think you guys are becoming actors.”

It is a funny, knowing line. In reality, these men already are actors. Save for Brent, a scrawny man with great gravity (Paul Raci), and two others, the leading cast of Sing Sing are former inmates, alumni of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) programme, playing themselves. The scene is a re-creation of an improv exercise undertaken on the inside.

RTA, which teaches theatre, dance, music, creative writing and the visual arts in six prisons in New York, was set up in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in 1996. The programme is incredibly successful – its website claims a reoffending rate of just 3 per cent among its members, compared to the US national average of 60 per cent. Sing Sing is, on one level, a very accomplished advert for it.

The film is loosely based on an Esquire article about a play RTA put on at Sing Sing in 2005, called Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a time-travelling comedic romp. The group has just finished a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and is in need of a new project – and some new members. The self-assured, erudite John “Divine G” Whitfield – a real-life former Sing Sing inmate who was wrongly convicted of murder, played here by Colman Domingo (The Colour Purple, If Beale Street Could Talk) – recruits Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, a hothead drug-dealer with an XL Bully hunch to his shoulders who lets slip that he knows King Lear. While the members discuss which play they might tackle next, Maclin suggests a bit of comedy might be what their fellow inmates need. The resulting play, written by Brent, incorporates all the various elements suggested by the group, including ancient Egypt, gladiators, cowboys, pirates, Hamlet and Freddy Krueger.

The RTA members’ progress towards their final performance – the line-learning, the workshopping – gives Sing Sing a straightforward, chronological propulsion. But its core is the less linear development of Whitfield and Maclin’s friendship. They’re an unlikely pair: Whitfield earnest, enthusiastic, a little pretentious; Maclin aggressive, spiky, begrudging. But Whitfield recognises that Maclin has the potential to own the stage just as he owns the prison yard. Domingo is transcendent as Whitfield, but the strength of his performance is matched by Maclin’s. You would struggle to guess which was the Oscar-nominated actor and which the former inmate.

Sing Sing is an affectionate, tender film about brotherhood and forgiveness; one of the first rules of the RTA, Whitfield tells Maclin, is that members call each other “beloved” rather than “n*”. Watching them dance and make believe, it is easy to forget these are men convicted of serious violent crimes. Though we see Whitfield drop to the ground and press every inch of himself into the grass as a siren sounds across the yard, or waiting outside his cell while it is ransacked in a routine search, director Greg Kwedar doesn’t allow the camera to dwell too long on the horrors of prison life. Sing Sing is concerned not with the system as such, but with the humans within it, and the way the system strips their humanity.

The great irony is that in learning to act, the inmates are also learning how not to. At an audition for Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, Miguel Valentin, replete with full-face tattoo and a sort of Mohawk ponytail, is asked what roles he has played before. “Ha, ha,” he responds, “I’ve been playing a part my whole life, bro.” A lot of what the inmates get up to in theatre class might look a bit silly – “Walk like you’ve won the lottery! Now like you’re a zombie!” – but in being vulnerable with one another, in becoming someone else, they let their guard slip, they forget to swagger. Anger is the easiest emotion to act, Whitfield tells Maclin, coaching him through his “To be or not to be” monologue. Try getting to what’s underneath: try acting hurt.