218: Act V

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. OK, here is something that we did not expect. Check this out. This was recorded on a stage in Brooklyn, St. Francis College.

Ira Glass

Same month in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu.

Ira Glass

Same month, a professional company in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Public Theater.

Ira Glass

In Colorado, at Camp Shakespeare, you can actually hear the sneakers of the teenaged Hamlet squeaking.

[SNEAKERS SQUEAKING]

Ira Glass

And at the Bay Area Shakespeare Camp, presented by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, the kids put on a production that they have concocted that is made up entirely of death scenes from different Shakespeare plays. That seems because, um, kids love death scenes.

Ira Glass

Eight-year-old Marissa Graham grabs her throat like a cat in a violent cartoon. Everyone in the production is eight, except for Polonius, who's six.

Ira Glass

There's actually no way to tell how many productions of Hamlet are up in any given month. In summer 2002, when we first broadcast today's show and when we made these recordings, the American Theatre website listed 12 theaters doing Shakespeare's Hamlet, 11 productions of the play I Hate Hamlet, one production of something called Hamlet Dreams, and one theater doing the dreadful and feared Hamletmachine.

Of course, Hamlet itself is kind of a weird play. The central character is in a situation that very few of us are ever going to find ourselves in. His uncle killed his father and then married his mother in order to become the king. The play is four hours long. The main conflict of the play is a guy debating, in long, complicated monologues, whether or not he should kill somebody. What is there in that for most of us to relate to?

Unless, of course, we happen to be murderers. And what would the play be like if it were actually performed by murderers and other violent criminals? What would they see that the rest of us do not?

Well, today on our program we answer that question. And the answer is, a lot. Over the course of six months, reporter Jack Hitt visited prisoners at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center-- which is a high-security prison-- from their first rehearsal to their last performance of Act V of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We're devoting our entire program today to the drama that he found there. Our program today, "Act V." We bring you what we believe is one of the most evocative productions of Shakespeare done anywhere in 2002, one you would have had a hard time getting tickets to-- it was only performed in prison. Here's Jack Hitt.

Jack Hitt

The first thing they hand me when I pass through the thick iron doors is a tiny black box called a screamer. Pull the cord attached, and a phalanx of armed guards will sweep from all points of the prison and try to rescue me. I keep it in my pocket as I enter a huge yard with more than 1,000 prisoners wandering around. Some of the guys are playing handball against walls, some are lifting weights as I walk across, most are friendly. A couple of the skinheads, their arms dense with spider tattoos, narrow their eyes as I pass.

Across the yard, there's a big building. A long corridor leads to a door marked Education Annex. Inside, there's room D-168, where a small, white-haired woman, Agnes Wilcox, is holding auditions for Hamlet.

Jack Hitt

Dressed in loose prison uniforms, the actors sit around tables in the cinder block classroom beneath inspirational slogans-- believe in yourself, think positively. The aspiring cast is half black, half white, and ranges from young lifers in their 20s to old timers in their 50s. Because it's against the rules to congregate an audience of felons for the four hours it would take to perform the whole play, Agnes has staged one act every six months, starting in December, 1999. Tonight is the first read through for Act V, the final bloody climax. Many of the inmates here never finished high school, and all they had known of Shakespeare was the phrase "To be or not to be." Tonight they are hearing some of the other famous speeches for the first time.

Jack Hitt

Most read-throughs with any cast are terrible. This one is terrible too. The actors know it. But they plow on through the script. An inmate named Paul, who serves as Agnes' assistant director, explains why.

Jack Hitt

The local critics agreed with Paul. The Act IV performance earned a review in the St. Louis paper. The actors were said to be commanding and compelling. With the entire performance, the reviewer wrote, "A 400-year-old text is restored to freshness." It seemed hard to imagine.

I've seen Hamlet a dozen times. I've seen Kevin Kline do it at the Public Theater. I saw the famous Diane Venora version three nights in a row. I even saw Ingmar Bergman's production done in Brooklyn, performed entirely in Swedish. What else is there to learn from watching another Hamlet?

But the truth is, this production was different. Because this is a play about a man pondering a violent crime and its consequences performed by violent criminals living out those consequences. After hanging out with this group of convicted actors for six months, I did discover something. I didn't know anything about Hamlet.

Remember how it starts. Hamlet sees his father's ghost, who explains he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet's uncle. The ghost commands Hamlet to avenge his death by killing Claudius. The play is basically Hamlet pondering this single horrific action, and whether he can be the man to do it. "To be or not to be."

These days, when people say the name Hamlet, it's usually just a metaphor, shorthand for somebody who is afraid to act, who dithers and thinks too much. We almost forget just what action Hamlet was contemplating. These actors haven't forgotten.

Jack Hitt

Let me explain something. The character of Hamlet is played by four people. They are all on stage at the same time, taking turns delivering the lines. Agnes did this partly to give more actors speaking roles and not saddle any one man with all that dialogue. But as theatre, it works. Hamlet's role is full of long soliloquies and rhetorical asides. This small gang of Hamlets, which mutters to itself and laughs at its own jokes, nicely captures that fractured quality of Hamlet's different personalities. And it's also bonded the four actors together. They call themselves "The Hamlets" and constantly talk about their character. To Chris, it seems like Hamlet is just the fifth guy in their odd clique-- another criminal with a complicated past.

Jack Hitt

Chris and the Hamlets practice alone most days. Finding time when the four can just get together by themselves is tough when there's always 1,000 inmates around. So they do it where they can.

Jack Hitt

One of the problems of doing any play in prison is that being a good actor is the exact emotional opposite of what it takes to be a successful inmate. Rather than close off all feeling and look tough, you have to open your vulnerable self up and withstand often cruel laughter as you try to find some authentic emotion within you. In this way, a level-four high-security prison is no different from high school. And so most of the inmates who audition for Agnes tend to be, you know, actor-y people-- the theatre-types of prison. Back in 1999, they just had to put up with abuse from the bigger, meaner inmates. But that changed. In fact, a lot changed, after Agnes cast the role of Hamlet's best friend.

Jack Hitt

You might be surprised to learn that Derrick "Big Hutch" Hutchison is big. He has a smooth, bald skull and hooded threatening eyes-- the kind of guy that if you met him, you might think, he's probably serving 120 years for armed robberies. And that would be correct. Hutch isn't like the rest of the cast, and he's the first person to tell you.

Jack Hitt

That's Tim, who plays Osric. And as a minnow/guppy, his take is a little different.

Jack Hitt

In other words, he's an actor. But Big Hutch is also a critic. His criticism is sharp and extends to places most actors avoid-- his own character, Horatio.

Jack Hitt

Have you ever heard anybody talk about Shakespeare's characters this way? Hutch was always doing this-- talking tough, but then betraying a real gift for literary criticism. Call it his inner minnow. In fact, he pointed out a weakness in the structure of the story I'd never heard before in all my experience with the play-- that Hamlet's dilemma over killing Claudius isn't really much of a dilemma.

Jack Hitt

Once Hutch got on this riff, he kept going. Denmark's a prison, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz, in Act II. And Hutch says you could do a version of the play that takes this central metaphor literally. All the characters in the play are types he sees in the yard every day. The Claudiuses, who will do anything for the emblems of power-- money, drugs, high-end tennis shoes; Poloniuses, who kiss up to the powerful; Rosencrantz and Guildensterns.

Jack Hitt

And in Hutch's version, he solves the play's structural problem, fabricating a true dilemma for Hamlet by giving him good reasons to kill Claudius and not to kill him.

Jack Hitt

Two months after my visit with Hutch at the first read-through, I was cleared once again into the old classroom. The actors tell me they've been practicing their lines wherever they can, often shouting them from cell to cell. Agnes has also had local professors come in and lecture. She assigns the cast essays to write about their characters. And the Hamlets have been walking the track, memorizing their lines, as has Danny, the Gravedigger. This rehearsal, they're already tinkering with tempo and intonation. That first read-through seems like eons ago.

Jack Hitt

A lot of what you see looks like any rehearsal. Agnes is taking notes, a couple of guys are reading to themselves, and the occasional line reading devolves into laughter.

Jack Hitt

The scene that's really slaying everyone tonight is the first appearance of Osric, the king's toadying courtier.

Jack Hitt

Tim is the one member of the cast with screen time, one second of it. He used to live in California. And in a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello revival, he was in the background in one fleeting camera pan, hitting a volleyball. Tim once ran a trucking company, and like most of the cast doesn't want to discuss his crime. But he does want to talk about how he researched his character-- in the TV room.

Jack Hitt

To me, this seemed like an especially risky interpretation of the part. But Tim explains that folks on the outside have a TV movie understanding of prison sexuality. There is a small group of gay prisoners in the closet, another smaller group that is actually out, and then there's the vast majority of prisoners-- straight men, not having any sex at all. Just like outside, Tim says.

Jack Hitt

Putting on a play in prison is different. First, Agnes always has to deal with some last minute crisis. Tonight, one of the Hamlets can't come. He was assaulted and was placed in solitary for protection. Plus, everyone must be strip-searched in the side room before and after every meeting with Agnes or with me. Worse, it's incredibly hot. The room is stifling. The only relief is an ancient stand-up fan in the corner. And a lot of the time, the actors are just trying to figure out what their lines mean. Here's Chris, one of the Hamlets.

Jack Hitt

After a few months, the rehearsals begin to resemble a routine. They always start with some silly voice relaxation exercises.

Jack Hitt

The cast is such a mix. There's Chris, who's a member of Toastmasters International, and when not rehearsing likes to listen to Journey on his Walkman, while his good pal Brat, a former gang-banger, has a subscription to a lapidary magazine. Then there's Edgar, a former Post Office employee, and Mike, a fight coordinator and a devout Wiccan. And then Stan, who's obviously a college educated businessman, now trying his hand at writing Zane Grey Westerns. And of course, there's Hutch, the killer whale.

What keeps them coming back to D-168, where Agnes, this tiny, tough lady, bosses them around? Here's Edgar.

Jack Hitt

This is Brat Jones, another one of the Hamlets.

Jack Hitt

Everybody had powerful answers for why they were in the play. One guy with a third grade education level said that he was surprised to find out that he wasn't stupid, just uneducated. And for almost all of them, acting was beside the point. But one inmate got bit by the drama bug, and bit hard. His first step onto the boards was a revelation.

Jack Hitt

James Word looks like an actor. He's young and handsome with a smile that can carry him through just about any situation. He plays Laertes, the brother of Ophelia. For the first few acts, Laertes was played by an Amish pedophile. That's another story.

But the Amish pedophile got transferred, and so it's almost legend in the prison now, like something out of 42nd Street. James Word stepped into the role. He created a sensation among the cast when they realized what a really forceful performance could do for a character. Word made a lasting impression, even on the killer whale.

Jack Hitt

The first chance I get to see Word in action is at tonight's rehearsal, where Laertes goes to the grave of his sister Ophelia. Word was a natural, and talked about acting that way too. Laertes' emotions in the final act roller-coaster from grief to fury to shameful regret. To pull it off, Word channels Laertes' character in a way that should make any method actor cringe with jealousy.

Ira Glass

Coming up, what the ghost of Hamlet's father can teach you about murder. In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, what we're doing today is that we're devoting our whole show to Jack Hitt's story, from the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, where over the course of six months Jack watched prisoners rehearse and stage Act V of Hamlet. Again, here's Jack.

Jack Hitt

As the performance day grew closer and I spoke to more and more of the actors, it became clear that each actor used his past, in dense psychological ways, to understand his part. All the Hamlets saw themselves in their version of the Dane, and Edgar would stop me in the hall to tell me that he thought evil King Claudius had some redeeming qualities. But for one actor, the relationship was even more complicated. He used his part to help understand his past.

Jack Hitt

That's Agnes, the director. Besides putting on plays in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center visiting room, she has mounted shows on more familiar stages-- the acclaimed Actor's Studio in New York, the Berkshire Festival in Stockbridge, and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. After becoming the artistic director of the New Theater in St. Louis, she started an outreach program to take professional actors doing dramatic works by writers like Don DeLillo and perform them before prison audiences. In time, the prisoners became the actors. And in more time, this side project took over her entire theater company. Now this is what she does-- directing prisoners, who may not have the chops of professional actors but have an intimacy with the material that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Jack Hitt

Edgar wouldn't tell me his crime. Although I found myself playing a constant guessing game with all of them about this, they wouldn't discuss the past. That was then, they said. This is now. But I had to know. So one morning, instead of visiting, I went to downtown St. Louis, not far from the Arch, and sat in a records depository reading old case files.

It was more horrible than I thought. One guy I particularly liked shot a man in the head twice at point-blank range. Another of my new friends raped his pubescent daughter, impregnating her. Later, there was an abortion. Another friend grabbed a man getting out of a car, put a gun to his chest during a robbery, and pulled the trigger. Others had sodomized children-- younger children, the age of my own children.

I didn't fall asleep for a long time in my frigid Ramada Inn room. At 3:00 in the morning, I had one of those cinematic nightmares. I dreamed that a very good friend of mine, an editor at a magazine, had me over to dinner. She got angry with someone else there, pulled out a gun, and plugged him twice, right in the face. Then she asked me not to talk about it with anybody.

I panicked. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting up in my hotel bed, panting like a sprinter. It didn't take Freud to figure out what it meant. Someone I knew and liked was a murderer. I wanted to talk to the cast about this, but I was anxious. I know this sounds crazy, but I was afraid it might hurt their feelings. I felt like they had betrayed me. But strangely, I felt that I had betrayed them too. There was only one day left to talk, just before the final performance. So before curtain, I asked Brat to sit down with me. I could barely spit out my question.

Jack Hitt

It was a hard question for any of them to answer. They all said the same thing. But I'm this guy now, I'm not that guy. Are we forever the prisoner of our actions? It's a good question. It was Hamlet's question, and it's the unresolvable conflict in our penal system.

Why do we put people in jail? To rehabilitate them and restore them to our company, or to punish them, regardless of how much they might change? One can't hold both these ideas in one's mind simultaneously. That's why our prison debates on TV and in Congress are so vehement and incoherent. The two sides cannot be squared by mere politics. They can't even be squared by the people at the center of the debate. Here's Danny.

Jack Hitt

It's opening night, dress rehearsal. Word has flubbed his line again. Things aren't going well. The only time the authorities would allow a dress rehearsal is in the hour before actual curtain. This is the first time the cast has seen the acting stage, the first time in costume, the first time they have real props, skulls and shovels.

The shovel is a story in itself, given every prison fear of shovels. You can use them to dig tunnels, remember. The authorities insisted on using only a flimsy cardboard replica. Everyone is tense, even Agnes.

Jack Hitt

We are in the prison chapel where their first performance will be held before an audience of inmates. Six months after my first visit, it is, at last, showtime.

Jack Hitt

Armed guards let the audience in the door, one by one. Agnes calls her actors together in a corner and gives them the final pep talk.

Jack Hitt

Once the play starts, Danny and Stan deliver their lines OK, but all that antique Elizabethan wordplay isn't connecting with the audience. But then midway through the scene, the crowd starts to really respond to the emotion in Ophelia's funeral march. Laertes is the last mourner, humming at the side of the grave, tossing rose petals on her corpse. Right away, the action picks up. The Hamlets appear, taunting Laertes about the sincerity of his grief. They quarrel and exchange insults. A duel is proposed, which culminates in the last sword fight scene.

[DRUM ROLL]

Jack Hitt

Most directors block the scene as a professional fencing match. Agnes has it looking like a knife fight in an alley. The audience totally gets it. Word holds his arms slightly out from his sides, his hand gripping his sword like he would a shiv. He and one of the Hamlets are circling each other, like thugs. Word jerks his shoulders forward-- a pure back alley feint, a fake movement to intimidate his opponent, something all of them have probably seen right in the yard.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

Then the room goes quiet, as the actors starts slicing one another, leading to Laertes' death scene.

Jack Hitt

The audience, like a living thing, leans forward in unison to watch Word slide down the chapel wall and die. There are no cackles of discomfort, no shouts from the gallery. Just breathless silence, the silence of recognition.

In all, there were three performances. And on the final night, before family and dignitaries, the entire cast found the magic that Paul said would happen during that first read-through. The actors knew that this would be the last time they get to perform as a group. So when Danny and Stan came out for their final gravedigger appearance, somehow those Elizabethan jokes worked.

Jack Hitt

Having seen every performance, I can testify, the actors rose above their talents in that last show. Mike and Hudson as the belligerent priests, Buck and Tommy as the ambassadors, Sylvester's Fortinbras. You could feel the mutual support. Just as missed lines and other mistakes play off one another, and can spiral downward into fiasco, the rhythm of the room can go the other way too. Strong lines beget better performances. The gang of Hamlets came together in a way they hadn't before. That little mob seemed like one voice. But the real surprise for me that last night was Hutch.

Jack Hitt

It's here that Hutch's Horatio delivers his most famous line. The play is almost over. He's surrounded by corpses and speaks to his dying friend Hamlet. In the other performances, I always thought Hutch had been plagued by what you might call the Jack Nicholson syndrome. The actor's persona is bigger than any role he might play. But tonight, Horatio has Hutch under control and the audience in his hand. He has the one great line to deliver. And as Hutch might say, he nails it.

Jack Hitt

So Hamlet dies, and Fortinbras takes over. And then the drums of Hamlet's funeral begin. On other stages, a curtain would fall. But here, beneath the cafeteria's unforgiving fluorescence, the actors just stop. From the back of the room, Agnes says simply--

Jack Hitt

The audience tonight is a mix of St. Louis' artistic elite. It's a theater crowd-- polite, well-dressed people. Many of them have helped fund this production. They want and fully expect to meet the talent afterwards. And for many of the actors, this moment-- they call it the cast party-- is the most prized. James Word and Edgar Evans mentioned it specifically when I talked to them. Just the chance to stand around in a room full of normal people, drink a Coke, and carry on about the play, the future, the weather, the freedom to chat and mingle, like you were in the lobby of a theater instead of a bulletproof visiting room.

Jack Hitt

In a high-security prison, though, when a play is over, it's over. No sooner had the bows finished than Danny, who doubles as the stage manager, turns right around and starts frantically striking the set. The guards had informed everyone that they'd have about 10 minutes for the cast party.

Like any play, all the work was for this moment-- to get to the end of the last performance successfully. And now that it's here, these few minutes are shot through with a kind of melancholy. Soon everything will end, and everyone will return to his pre-acting life. Here, that near future is visible. In the side room, everyone sees him, is the guard waiting to strip search them back into the yard. He wears a dull expression on his face and rubber gloves on his hands. But that would be 10 minutes from now. There's still time for pretending.

Jack Hitt

According to the prison commissioner, 97% of the people locked up today will someday join us on the outside. Manuel is leaving for a halfway house in 48 hours. He could have been out weeks before but chose to stay in prison so he could finish the play. Hutch has a scheduled date for release. And a few more of the cast have parole board hearings coming up to decide whether they've changed enough and should be allowed to mingle with us on the outside. To that extent, this whole night, including the cast party, is just another rehearsal.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt, he's a longtime contributor to our show and a writer for the New York Times Magazine.

Since we first aired this program back in 2002, all of the main actors that Jack to in his story have been released from prison. Edgar, who played Claudius, went to work at a hospital - became chief union steward there - and recently retired. Big Hutch works in public transit. Tim moved to Hollywood hoping to produce his own screenplays. Danny, the guy who talked about speaking as the man he killed -- was released from prison just a few months ago, in May. Manuel got out long ago and died in a truck crash in 2008.

Agnes Wilcox their director died in 2017 after decades of running Prison Performing Arts, which she founded. Chris, Edgar, and Big Hutch were at her funeral. The organization is still going strong. Chris Edgar and Brat are involved with their alumni theater program. You can learn more about them at prisonperformingarts.org.

[MUSIC - "DESPERADO"]

Ira Glass

This episode of our program was produced by Alex Blumberg, with Starlee Kine, Wendy Dorr, Jonathan Goldstein, and me. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Our technical director for our show is Matt Tierney. Production help with today's show from Diane Wu.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our programs co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia, or as we like to call him, Shamu.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.