- My name is Susan Baraboo.
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 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 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 Caeser, 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,
editor of Performing New Lives, his book.
[applause] Thank you.
- 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 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 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 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 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 the kingdom,
the retirement gift basically.
So he does this for Goneril, for Regan,
but his joy, his darling, his Cordelia,
is the one that he really wants to hear the big love from.
And he says to her,
"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 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 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 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 know anything about analytical psychology,
as a complex.
Meaning a pattern that is born
from one's history and that has tremendous energy behind it
and that still drives our lives 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 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 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 six 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 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 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 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, 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.
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 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 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,
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.
[laughter]
No more Escrima sticks.
But the men build their swords and daggers out of cardboard.
And that's just fine.
They're actually quite good 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 text
that's really important regarding prison theater programs
is that it's a place of sanctuary.
One of the bitter ironies of the US 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 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 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 kind of stretch and 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, 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 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 some ways,
and yet wanting to go through,
just dive in and have some kind of personal transformation.
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 earned his GED.
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.
[laughter]
Who could turn from being very affectionate and seductive
and nurturing to being really on your case in a serious way.
So, if you know the speech,
these are the forgeries of jealousy.
He knocked that one out of the park.
"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.
Being balanced 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 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 child either right before,
was born either right before he got into prison
or right after.
But, you know, was conceived, obviously, before.
And he loves his son.
He loves his son so much.
But, you know, 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 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 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 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.
[laughter]
They both fall in love with her.
They're 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 speech goes like this:
"Banished the kingdom?
'Tees 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.
[laughter]
But this very quick overview of the Shakespeare Project
and the book is something that I hope resonates for you
and gives birth to some questions.
So, why don't we open it up for questions?
[applause]