Founded in 1996, the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program helps incarcerated people reintegrate into society and develop new skills, self-esteem, and self-awareness through the arts. Based in six correctional facilities in New York State, the initiative, which emphasizes human dignity rather than punishment, has had unexpected success; studies show that less than 3% of participating inmates return to prison, compared to a 60% recidivism rate in the United States.
Inspired by the results and humanity of the program, director Greg Kwedar and his co-writer, Clint Bentley, purchased the rights to an article from the magazine Esquire which chronicled the production by a troupe from the maximum security prison of Sing Sing of the original musical Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code.
Aware of having a golden subject – a subject that could just as easily descend into cliché, sentimentality or contempt – the two accomplices wisely opted, in developing their project, for a documentary approach, meeting the participants in the program and those interviewed in the article, recreating from their experience and their stories the trajectory of the play and its actors, even going so far as to entrust roles to several of them.
The resulting film — Sing Sing — enjoys a striking aura of authenticity, which testifies to the relationship of trust established between the production and the actors, and a real desire to embrace the spontaneity, chaos and emotional charge of artistic creation.
We meet John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo), a founding member of the RTA, who helps the group put together their next production while preparing for his own release. Imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, Divine G finds meaning in his role as leader and creator within the troupe.
But when he convinces inmate Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), best known for the drug trafficking he set up within the prison, to join the upcoming show, his confidence takes a hit. In addition to proposing, for the first time, to the other members to put on an original comedy rather than a Shakespearean tragedy, the recruit gets the lead role in the play to the detriment of Divine G, who is used to the spotlight.
In depicting the relationship between the two prisoners, the director takes a more conventional path, that of a rivalry that, through the vulnerability offered by art, becomes a brotherhood. If the scenario here turns out to be quite predictable, the pitfalls are avoided thanks to the remarkable performances of the two main actors, who let shine through in their looks – captured wonderfully by a camera that never hesitates to get close to their faces – all the complexity of their condition, their doubts, their audacity too.
The feature film stands out more in the sequences reserved for the meetings and rehearsals of the theater troupe, which create, by their composition as by the feeling that emanates from them, a striking contrast with the austerity and violence of the scenes taking place in the context of the prison. Fluid and opportunistic, Greg Kwedar’s direction manages to recreate this feeling that must accompany the inmates when they cross the doors of the theater premises, that of finally being able to be themselves, while we see them exchanging lines, doing warm-up exercises, discussing point-blank. The filmmaker gives these sequences an impression of immediacy and spontaneity of a striking realism, which, unlike other passages, never seem overwritten, in addition to paying a heartfelt homage to the power of theater.
The cinematography also rightly reinforces the discordance between the two universes that coexist in Sing Sing prison, while at the same time accentuating the imbalance between the two sections of the storyline. Never mind! We leave with tears in our eyes, with the hope that everything is still possible.