It’s crucial, and foreboding, that Sing Sing begins on a stage during a stirring performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) recites the play’s final lines to rapturous applause, in a production that’s been fully realized with lighting, costumes, and props. The cast is a group of lively and committed actors who also happen to be incarcerated at the notorious New York maximum-security prison.
It quickly becomes clear this isn’t a dream or a flashback, it’s sometime in the 2000s – and Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program has already bore nurturing fruit for its participants for some time now. Before we see anything else, Divine G and his other incarcerated castmates are introduced as creative spirits. The easy way to tell a story of finding hope in even the bleakest of circumstances has been done many times over: Milk the despair; swoop in with a savior; heal the wayward souls through the power of arts, sports, etc.
These narratives may mean well, but such a neatly curated dramatic arc is typically reductive and pathologizing of the very people it purports to humanize. Director Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing is, mercifully and beautifully, different. Co-written with Clint Bentley but very much a collaborative effort with input from participants and alumni of the prison’s RTA program, the poignant drama avoids the well-trodden path at nearly every turn.
It doesn’t ignore the despair, but it doesn�.
