The Sing Sing Players: A Psychoanalytic Reflection by Sally Foreman

This summer I attended a film festival screening of Sing Sing (2024), an atypical prison drama starring Oscar-nominated Colman Domingo and former inmate Clarence Maclin. The film is based on the true story of a drama program – run by nonprofit organisation Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) – at Sing Sing prison, and has created a buzz thanks to rave media reviews and the fact that the majority of the cast were formerly incarcerated.

RTA has been running arts programs in medium and maximum-security prisons across New York State since 1996, with a clear mission:

RTA helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment.*

The organisation’s rationale is that punishment doesn’t work, and its impact is reflected in a prominent statistic on its website: compared to 60% of prisoners nationwide who return to prison within three years of release, less than 3% of RTA members are re-incarcerated.* RTA programs prioritise community-building, as well as the development of skills and qualities that every community needs to thrive: communication, cooperation, emotional containment and processing, critical self-reflection, compassion.

RTA is not a drop-in activity. RTA is not about becoming a professional artist. RTA is a commitment to a community of peers that uses the arts as a tool to support emotional, social, and cognitive growth.*

I was curious about RTA’s statement that the program is not about becoming a professional artist – since, in the case of Sing Sing, that is arguably what’s happened, particularly for Maclin. Watching the film, I found myself wondering what the pursuit of “art” meant to the men in the program: is there a difference, for the prisoner-actors, between art for art’s sake and art for rehabilitative purposes? Do they see themselves as artists, participants in a social support scheme, or both?

In the film’s opening scenes, a group of prisoners must decide on their next stage production. They debate the cathartic and entertainment value of drama versus comedy, finally settling on a custom-written script that incorporates all of their imaginative desires: Breakin’ the Mummy’s Curse reads like a Freudian wish-fulfilment dream plot, allowing the men to play warriors, clowns, ancient Egyptians, and even Hamlet himself.

Divine G (Domingo) is a novelist and playwright, imprisoned for a crime he says he did not commit. He takes art seriously and wants the dramatic role of Hamlet that goes to Divine Eye (Maclin), but – in an instance where the artistic impulse is subsumed by participation/rehabilitation goals – readily gives his all to the hammy role of the Gladiator. We watch the cast struggle to learn lines, embody a character, overcome self-consciousness and their resistance to make-believe. When Divine Eye scorns the costumes, he is gently told: “Here we dress up, dance around, and enjoy all of the nice things that aren’t part of our reality.” We see how art functions, for the prisoners, as a transitional space between what’s real and unreal; there’s a sense of escape in pretending to be something other than oneself, even as the pretence seeps into one’s ego and brings about authentic transformation.

 Sing Sing is an aesthetic work, intent on finding unlikely beauty in its setting. Warm sunlight filters into a prison cell, illuminating walls covered in photos, postcards, and personal art. There are several shots of bucolic Ossining, and images of birds flying or perched on barbed wire. Rehearsals take place in a cathedral-like space, with a stage, vaulted ceilings, exposed brick and gleaming white walls, mesmeric ceiling fans, an abundance of natural light. The film tends not to dwell on the brutality of prison life, and largely avoids the standard visual tropes. We mostly don’t know what crimes the men are imprisoned for. The selective lens frees the men from clichéd perceptions of their character, encouraging the audience to see them as amateur dramatists before convicts; at the same time, it somewhat sidelines the daily suffering that the inmates draw on, process, and temporarily escape through their art.

Compare the angle offered by the documentary film Dramatic Escape (2015), which follows an RTA production of A Few Good Men. Clarence Maclin/Divine Eye once again stars as himself, but this time he’s not acting; he’s served seventeen years for robbery at Sing Sing and is awaiting his release date. The setting is more recognisably “in jail”. Rehearsals take place in a cramped classroom with educational posters on the walls: Months of the Year, Days of the Week, Anatomy of an Atom. The men speak in charged voices of strip searches, inmate violence, and overhearing the guards’ fire practice at the on-site shooting range. They reflect on past actions, regret, and the hard path to redemption, speaking directly and intimately to the camera. In this harsh environment, the men’s dramatic pursuits take on a high-stakes seriousness; as we watch them drill lines, respond to coaching, and strive to inhabit their characters more fully and convincingly – sometimes resulting in “character bleedover”: an excess of identification with their role, which can feel like a loss of self-control – we see a process of sublimation taking place, the diversion of raw emotion into art.

The RTA members interviewed in Dramatic Escape are deeply reflective about their personal transformations and their place in society – but when they’re acting, their sole focus is what they put in to the work. One cast member, Kenyatta, shares some advice that was given to him by RTA’s founder, Katherine Vockins: to look for the love in every scene, and to make the audience feel that love. “A scene driven by love is more powerful than a scene driven by ego,” Kenyatta explains. Rehabilitation, arguably, is a process of strengthening and training the ego to be better able to keep emotions in check; the artist’s goal, by contrast, is to abandon the ego and become a channel for emotional experience. The interplay between the two is a fascinating dimension of the RTA concept.

Sing Sing and Dramatic Escape are transformation narratives: stories of hope, rehabilitation, and found family. What the audience also bear witness to are individuals claiming their identities as artists. The men’s talent and professionalism have the final word.

At the end of the Sing Sing screening I attended, the cinema audience applauded warmly and began to leave their seats. But when the former inmates who star in the film reappeared in turn on screen for their close-ups, each man looking humorously into the camera as he’s credited “as himself”, the audience sat down again to watch. This time they waited until the credits stopped rolling before breaking into a final, invigorated round of applause.

* source: https://rta-arts.org/about-us/