Sing Sing review – Domingo and Maclin deliver powerhouse performances

We first meet John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) on a stage, reciting Shakespearean verse. His expression is far away, blissful: enraptured by each word individually, transported by the poetry of their procession. It’s only backstage, as the cast members change out of their costumes and corrections officers lead them back to their cells, that the truth becomes crushingly clear.

This is by all accounts true to the experience of the real Whitfield, who while incarcerated at Sing Sing played a role in founding the still-active Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, through which those incarcerated write, produce, and act in stage productions. Taking part in this troupe, members can nourish themselves creatively, even within a prison-industrial complex bent on breaking their souls. RTA can’t erase the despair of life behind bars, but it offers participants freedom and a refuge to do the work of rebuilding themselves. As one member puts it, “We are here to become human again.”

That’s certainly the case for Divine G, an actor and playwright even before he was incarcerated, but it’s also the case for Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin, playing himself), a standoffish new recruit who runs the prison yard while harbouring a secret love of Shakespeare. Egos clash as both men audition for the lead role in their next play, with RTA instructor Brent Buell (Paul Raci) watching on with amusement, but Sing Sing isn’t about their conflict so much as the richer, more honest self-expression that this tension gradually yields.

Kwedar encountered RTA while producing a documentary inside a maximum-security prison, where he met a young man raising a rescue dog in his cell; the reciprocal nature of this healing so upended his assumptions of incarceration that he dug into various programs focused on rehabilitation. Reading a 2005 Esquire article, ‘The Sing Sing Follies,’ Kwedar learned of RTA participants staging an original play inside the New York prison; he then spent seven years developing Sing Sing with RTA leadership, volunteers, and participants. What results is a fictionalised drama infused with the earnest vision of a documentary. Outside of a few professional actors, including Domingo and Raci, the rest of the roles are played by formerly incarcerated performers; beyond playing themselves, the actors dig deep into processing what they’ve been through.

Domingo’s strength has long been his intensity of presence, an emotive manner of embodying that’s at once intimate and expansive; though the characters he brings to life can be complex, compelling, and self-contradicting. There’s a combination of passion and purpose at play in what he achieves in Sing Sing.

Often sharing the screen with Domingo, Maclin makes an even more powerful impression; the scenes in which these two circle each other, gradually lowering their defences and letting themselves become vulnerable, are gorgeously tender and dramatically vibrant. In a story about art’s transformative potential, it’s the wondrous slow bloom of their bond that most distils Sing Sing’s poignant power.

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