Prisons serve as giant holding pens for people our society has come to see as subhuman. Sing Sing resists such dehumanization through a tender portrait of the creative capabilities and emotional lives of prison actors.
Colman Domingo stars in Sing Sing. (A24)
The film opens on a stage: it’s the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) is delivering Lysander’s famous lines: “And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’ / The jaws of darkness do devour it up / so quick bright things come to confusion.” The actors take a bow, basking in their audience’s applause.
Backstage, the men buzz, congratulating each other on a great night as they form a line. They’ve changed into green uniforms and they’re observed by a guard. These are not just actors, but prisoners.
Sing Sing tells the story of a theater troupe inside the Ossining, New York, maximum-security prison of the same name: Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a nonprofit that was founded in 1996 and has since expanded to seven more facilities across the state. It’s a tender portrait of the creative capabilities and emotional lives of a group of men who have been cast off by society as something less than human. What’s more: the overwhelming majority of the cast are actual RTA alumni, playing versions of themselves.
The film follows the theater members through the months following the Shakespeare production, in which they break from the usual fare of time-honored classics like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, much to the chagrin of RTA’s thespian cofounder Divine G. Instead, the group decides to perform a maximalist work of patent absurdity, motivated by the suggestion of Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, a tough-guy newcomer to RTA, that their fellow inmates might enjoy something lighthearted.
Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, the resulting play, is outright goofy. It’s spun up over a weekend by Brent Buell (Paul Raci), the group’s director. The plot involves mummies and pirates, time travel and Robin Hood and Freddy Krueger and cowboys, a hodgepodge of elements incorporating every RTA member’s suggestions. It even has Hamlet, to appease Whitfield (his relief proves short-lived when the troupe casts Divine Eye over himself for the role).
The relationship between slightly self-involved Divine G and the macho, desperately outraged Divine Eye — we first meet him as he shakes down a fellow prisoner for drug money in the yard — is the heart of the film as the former, seeing something special in Divine Eye, tries to help him shed his armor. Theater as sanctuary and escape, though this proves far easier said than done.
The events are based on a true story. RTA really did put on a production of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code. John H. Richardson wrote about it in the 2005 Esquire article “The Sing Sing Follies.” Writer-director Greg Kwedar and his writing partner Clint Bentley then bought the rights to the article and spent seven years reworking it into a script. Maclin and Whitfield helped write the film, receiving a “story by” credit. They’re both executive producers on the film too, which A24 is distributing.
Domingo, one of the few non-RTA alums in the production, leads the cast, and his turn as Divine G, who churns out literature in his cell and becomes a mentor of sorts to Maclin, is entrancing. Offstage, we see Divine G, a self-taught legal expert who assists other men with their cases, prepare for an upcoming parole hearing, allowing himself to hope that the system might be forced to free him thanks to evidence of his innocence. (Without spoiling it, the scene of the hearing itself provides one of the film’s more devastating lines.) In real life, Whitfield was wrongfully incarcerated for nearly twenty-five years.
Though Sing Sing was shot quickly over the course of three weeks in July 2022 between Domingo’s other commitments, it’s a searing performance. Several shots of Domingo exhaling have stuck with me weeks later. In interviews, he has credited the performance to his scene partners, stating, “You can’t lie with these guys.”
That’s what makes the film remarkable. Domingo is a bona fide movie star, magnetic and graceful and dazzlingly beautiful. Yet often, it’s Maclin who steals the show. When the camera lingers on him as he watches the other RTA members with skepticism and suspicion, he evokes nothing so much as a boxer, explosive energy radiating just below the surface. It’s no wonder A24 already has another project with him in the works.
And while they aren’t all equally natural onscreen, Sing Sing’s other RTA alumni — David “Dap” Giraudy, Patrick “Preme” Griffin, Mosi Eagle, Sean “Dino” Johnson, and Camillo “Carmine” LoVacco, who all play versions of themselves — make the movie shine as an ensemble performance, even if Domingo and Maclin’s dynamic is the center of the plot. (The real Divine G, too, has a gratifyingly funny cameo, in which he asks the fictionalized version of himself for an autograph.) These men are serious actors; it’s unlikely that they would’ve found their calling without RTA.
A summary of Sing Sing’s message would mention art’s transformative potential, gangsters made sensitive once they let their guards down and process the traumas of life both before and in prison — as one actor puts it, “We’re here to be human again.” It’s a well-worn theme, one that flatters filmmakers as artists themselves. But there is also truth to it: the recidivism rate for RTA participants is 3 percent, far lower than the 60-percent national rate, and the film is a demonstration of why that is, an exploration of how creativity can lead to deeper self-understanding, offering a critical aid for life on the outside. (Leslie Lichter, RTA’s current executive director, hopes the movie might aid in the program’s expansion.)
The script occasionally oversteps into sentimentality (and offers little exploration of the forces that landed these men behind bars in the first place), but it’s also entertaining, funny, and never slow despite several scenes that consist entirely of the RTA participants performing acting exercises. It opens nationwide next month; bracket your cynicism and go see it. I’m no sap, but I joined a crowd of women in beelining for the restroom when the lights went up, eager to fix whatever damage my tears had done to my makeup.
I saw the film at its New York premiere — a special night, as Domingo put it while introducing the film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, because much of the cast is from the borough. It was the first showing of the film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last fall, in which all the actors were in attendance, making the evening a homecoming, replete with several well-deserved, boisterous standing ovations.
Yet that night wasn’t really the film’s debut in New York. The actual premiere had taken place the week prior, when Kwedar and Bentley, joined by several RTA alumni cast members, screened the film inside Sing Sing. The incarcerated men offered standing ovations, and Maclin and Johnson then spoke on stage with a pair of currently incarcerated men (the film is dedicated “to the RTA members who made it home and those still inside”). As Kwedar said before the lights went down in the Harvey Theater, “It was the most profound experience of my theatrical life.”
Colman Domingo portrays John “Divine G” Whitfield in Sing Sing. (A24)
Kwedar and Bentley worked as RTA volunteers, and Sing Sing’s entire cast and crew, from Domingo to the production assistant, received the same pay rate and equal equity in the film. That’s a reprise of a model the writing duo adopted for 2021’s Jockey. It’s hard to imagine the rest of the ultra-hierarchical film industry implementing such an approach. Which is too bad, both because it’s the fair thing to do, and, according to Domingo, it produced a noticeably different dynamic on set: “This wasn’t just work for hire.”
“A traditional hierarchical pay structure — where only a few at the top held all the ownership and were paid at a hugely stratified rate — would find its way into the experience on set,” Kwedar told the Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t know that we would’ve had as open and as warm and as honest of a set.”
After the Brooklyn premiere, there was a party at the bar across the street. There, the cast and crew caught up as servers circulated with appetizers and glasses of champagne. The actors swapped stories about their newfound lives: some had gone to TIFF, with the filmmakers finding a path for them to attend despite the complications that accompany travel for people with felon status. Others spoke of upcoming screenings or professional engagements on the horizon.
As I stood among the crowd, sharing in the actors’ elation at how different their surroundings were from where they had first met, I noticed a framed playbill on a table, its margins covered in signatures and heartfelt inscriptions. “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code,” it read. “Rehabilitation Through the Arts, Sing Sing Correctional Facility, May 17, 18, 19, 20 2005.” The cast members standing nearby briefly marveled at it, then they returned to discussing the future.