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| Shakespeare lives behind locked doors at prison theater |
| By columbiamissourian.com - Lainie Mullen |
| Published: 01/13/2012 |
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VANDALIA — The actors file into the rehearsal room in two's and four's. Some smile at each other. Others glance around cautiously. They wear identical costumes of beige trousers and vests over white T-shirts. Some wear subtle makeup. The director of the ensemble, a small woman with round glasses and a firm handshake, greets them, then pulls a roll of blue carpenter’s tape from her bag and passes it around. The women tear off little pieces and stick them to the floor to mark the parameter of a stage. Together they transform the visiting room of the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center into a theater. The inmates-turned-actresses meet on Thursday afternoons in November for their once-a-week rehearsal of William Shakespeare’s "The Tempest," Acts III, IV and V. They will perform, in full costume and makeup, on Jan. 18 and 19 for fellow inmates, and again Jan. 23 for family, friends and Department of Corrections staff. Director Agnes Wilcox has been staging Shakespearean plays in prisons since 1995 through Prison Performing Arts, a St. Louis-based nonprofit that teaches performance arts in Missouri prisons and youth correctional centers. She brought the program to the women’s prison in Vandalia in 2003. The performance group at the facility here, which houses about 1,500 minimum and maximum security prisoners, is open to all inmates, regardless of sentence or crime. The Vandalia actresses have performed a few non-Shakespearean plays, including a Bertolt Brecht play and one contemporary piece about black women wearing large church hats. But the prisoners continue to ask for Shakespeare. They staged the first acts of "The Tempest" in July. Read More. |
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