Helen Zelon

EVERY AFTERNOON at 3:50, a long whistle calls across pasture and corn rows, skimming above the country farigrounds and fat spools of feed hay drying in the sun. It’s the afternoon freight train snaking through LaGrange, Ky., past the town’s ranch houses and slope-roofed bungalows and through the rolling bluegrass of horse country. The moaning whistle pierces the still, bright afternoon in a dusty prison yard, the heart of Luther Luckett Correctional Complex.

At first, Luckett looks like a highway rest stop, with a green canvas awning and geraniums in the planting beds. Look again. Concertina wire glitters on the prison’s whitewashed walls, and a guard tower looms above. This is a fortress, designed to confine the men considered society’s undesirables. Murderers and sodomists, rapists and pedophiles, drug dealers, check-kiters, dead-beat dads, car thieves and stick-up men shelter in uneasy community within its locked compound.

Luther Luckett is also the unlikely home of Shakespeare Behind Bars, the only all-male, full-drag Shakespeare company in the U.S. prison system. Kentucky Shakespeare Festival’s producing director Curt L. Tofteland founded the group five years ago. This spring, it mounted Titus Andronicus, with its grisly plot points of hacked-off limbs, multiple murders, an amputated tongue and the baking of princes into a pie.

Prison arts programs are a staple of American penal culture. Theatre programs range from the playwright’s unit in Sing-Sing, in Ossining, NY, to Rhodessa Jones’ Medea Project in San Francisco and Buzz Alexander’s network of workshops, conducted through the University of Michigan. Tofteland’s group is unique in its single-minded devotion to Shakespeare. At its most basic level, the men of Shakespeare Behind Bars are a microcosm of the prison world, drawn from every race, class, and culture. The dramatic work of the players is the catalyst for internal scrutiny and discovery.

What bizarre alchemy blends criminals and blank verse, and sends a felon into a floor-length skirt, simpering behind a hanky for an audience of inmates? “It’s Shakespeare, man,” says 26-year-old inmate Demond Bush, who left home at 15 for a hustling life of running drugs and hanging with his “associates” on the Louisville streets. “This group stands for the love of Shakespeare. I can’t get enough.”

Every afternoon, the men inside Luckett hear the train whistle beckon, approach, and fade away. One week a year, the whistle signals another kind of journey, as the men of Shakespeare Behind Bars prepare for the evening’s performance. After a year of weekly workshops and rehearsals, it’s time at last. Three performances for the prison and one for invited guests comprise the company’s entire season.

Backstage in the gym, under buzzing fluorescent lights and constant video surveillance, actors arrive singly and in pairs, feigning cool but bristling with anticipation. Backstage crew, inmates all, run through their checklists: Stretcher, ladder, prop heads, scrolls, arrows, baby doll. Curt Tofteland, sporting his signature ponytail, vest, and Birkenstock slides, strides in, toting two pies that will be demolished with gusto in the play’s final scene. You don’t see pie in the prison’s chow line, and the two beauties sit, enshrined, in the center of the prop table. The men all come to inspect the pastry and ogle the crumb topping, admiring the apple slices oozing out from a picture-perfect crust.

With his gray hair trimmed Caesar-style and a closely clipped beard, Hal Cobb, playing Titus, arrives clutching a box of peppermints and a mug of tea, nursing a bum throat. Demond Bush strolls in next, his baby face shaved clean for his performance as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, a role he shares with Leonard Ford. Tamora began as Demond’s role, but after a mysterious “forest fire” in his cell–and 90 days’ opportunity for introspection in the hole–Leonard, originally cast as Marcus, stepped in. Now, each man has learned both parts and will do two performances of each.

Randy True unspools a length of blood-red jersey from his lips, rehearsing the revelation of Lavinia’s amputated tongue. Lean and pale, Randy sports a “What Would Jesus Do?” wristband and a worn canvas cap, embroidered with his last name in heavy Goth script. Skeptical about playing a woman, Randy was daunted less by the character’s tragedy than by the drag factor. “I thought long and hard about doing this. I thought, I’m gonna have to hear that crap on the yard.” His mentors in the company, Sammie Byron, Hal, and Leonard, “were pretty frustrated with me. I was gonna bullshit my way through, not show nothin’ at all, but then, things got interesting. I didn’t understand the language, but now I do. And I like the little dress –movin’, holdin’ it. It’s not easy to run in a dress!” he laughs, swishing the burlap folds from side to side.

Sammie Byron, playing Aaron the Moor, is already on stage as the audience drifts in. Sammie is “the real glue that holds the group together, a real force in Shakespeare Behind Bars,” according to Tofteland. At rehearsals, he sits at the director’s right hand, and between workshops, he rehearses with men on the yard. He’s got next year’s play, Hamlet, half-memorized by the time Titus opens.

As the men gather, the energy builds. Everyone’s psyched, hopped, adrenaline flowing like a river. Black and white, gay and straight, Christians and Muslims, East Kentucky mountain men and Louisville gangbangers, all check their props and wriggle into their burlap vests — the universal base costume — over prison-issue khakis and black T-shirts. “Look at us,” says Khalil (Clarence) Hall. “We come from all over, form every race and class. A lot of us, we’d never talk to each other on the yard. But when we come together here, we want this to work. We have to rely on each other. On the street, if it didn’t work, we’d just kick it to the side.”

Randy adjusts the laces of his skirt, shaky hands fumbling with the fabric tape. Demond helps Big G — blond and ruddy Jerry Guenther, massive at 6′5″ and close to 400 pounds — with his vest ties. G is nervous, wriggling his fingers, thick as sailor’s ropes. “Y’all right, man?” asks Demond. “I’m cool,” says G. “Let’s do it.” Leonard experiments with his headdress, wrapping the burlap length into a chignon, a braid, a turban.

Tofteland collects the group into a pre-game huddle. A tangle of arms loop around random backs; some of the big men perch their elbows on the little guys’ shoulders. Eyeball to eyeball, the group stands in a moment’s stillness. Toftelalnd stretches his hand, palm down, into the group’s center. Like dominoes, the men stack their hands into a multicolored two-foot tower. “One, two, three, Shakespeare!” At last, the play begins.

In a setting primitive enough for Elizabethan theatre — a bare gymnasium, a single painted canvas drop, simple costumes and hand props — the men of Shakespeare Behind Bars say that their work has changed them, bound them into a kind of family that many had lacked.

Billy Wheeler, a Shakespeare Behind Bars alumnus now living and working in Louisville, even chose Shakespeare over freedom when he rejected parole and served out his stretch to play Julia in the company’s first full production, Two Gentlemen of Verona. “Parole board never saw nothin’ like it,” he says, chuckling. “Shoot, finishing something up was worth a few months’ more time to me. Besides, I couldn’t let the guys down.”

Often, the men choose and cast the play themselves, but Tofteland chose Titus deliberately to address the pervasive violence that is the too-frequent legacy of his actors: Many of the men grew up in abusive homes, with fathers in prison, or now have uncles, cousins, or brothers in the system. Officer Karen Heath, the prison liaison for Tofteland’s company, says, “The Shakespeare group becomes like a family — they support each other 100 percent. They learn where they went wrong and why they’re in here. Curt doesn’t take any shit off any of them.” She pushes a lock of salt-and-pepper hair out of her eyes and smiles. “Big bad weight-lifting thugs up here playing a woman! Shoot, they’re out there rehearsing” — on the yard, in the cellblock dorms — “even when we don’t have rehearsal.”

That dogged devotion pays off today, as the first scenes unfold. The audience, a motley assortment of inmates, pays close attention, responding especially to the sexual innuendo and conniving set into motion in Act I. The gym doors squeak open and bang shut as latecomers arrive. Two beautifully groomed men lean back on the bleachers, claiming a space much larger than they occupy, like cats sprawling in a pool of sunlight.

The men in the company represent the cream of an unusual crop. To participate in Shakespeare Behind Bars, inmates must have at least six months “clear” conduct — no infractions, write-ups, or time in the hole. Recruits are sponsored into the group by standing members. “Some guys don’t understand the language, have no clue,” says Heath. “Some really respect it but don’t have the courage to do it.” Many of the company are lifers, or in for long stretches. “In prison, you have a choice,” explains Heath. “You can serve your time, or you can live your life, inside the institution.”

BACKSTAGE, MIKE ROGERS LOOKS LIKE THE KID WHO GOT PICKED LAST
for every sports team. With thick glasses, a heavy gait, and a stutter that bursts, staccato and dominant, into nearly every sentence, he seems a less-than-ideal candidate for Shakespeare. But Big G pushed him to audition, and it’s tough to say “no” to Big G. Titus is Mike’s debut, in a series of small roles. Before his first entrance, everybody backstage is rooting for him, and when he comes back again, blushing deep violet, he is mobbed by men, slapping five and whispering “Mike’s the man!”

“All the way from childhood, I have been a person with low s-s-self-esteem. I th-th-thought highly of others, but not of m-my-myself,” Mike explained later. “My father told me I wasn’t nothing. Getting to Shakespeare here, C-c-c-curt tells us, ‘You’re everything!’ Sammie, Hall, L-l-lavassa [Lavassa Anderson, who plays Lucius], all support me. The first time I com ein, I m-m-messed up three-four times. I’m like, I don’t know anything, t-t-turned around to leave. Big G stopped me, said ‘Where you goin’?’ I said, I don’t know any Sh-sh-shakespeare. G said, ‘I brought you up here, you’re gonna try out.’ I said, I’ll m-m-make a fool of myself and a f-f-fool of you.” Guenther, easily twice Mike’s size, looked at the younger man deadpan, and said “I been made a fool of plenty of times; go ‘head on.”

“My first time s-s-s-steppin’ on stage, I think, ‘I’m g-g-gonna get out here and fall on my face.’ But I delivered it, and without any speech problem. I felt like, hey, I’d just won a marathon, just broke Wall Street or somethin’. I really felt good. My knees still knocked a little,” he adds, sheepish. By his third scene, Mike is reeling out vast blocks of verse, barrelling through without a trace of a stutter. “That’s the main thing, to believe in yourself. If somebody says you can’t do something, don’t believe them.”

Mike stumbled onto a path in prison that hadn’t opened to him on the outside. Facing imminent release in July, he worries about his future. From acting he’s learned “the value of teamwork, how to open myself. Shakespeare and the cast taught me how to approve of myself.” After a pause, he adds, “Getting out’ll be hard. I get attached to people. I’ll miss the guys.

SAMMIE BYRON’S MEASURED TONE OFFSTAGE COUNTERS THE RAW POWER of his physical mass. In Act 2, as Aaron the Moor, he strains at his prop shackles. Schwarzenegger-sized biceps mountain down his brown arms as his hands, twin mallets the size of Porterhouse steaks, clench and unfold. Unrepentant, he listens to the charges laid against him, opal-green eyes flashing, and then the anger erupts in a torrent of invective. He brags of rapes, arsons, graves he’s robbed, corpses defiled.

In a quiet moment, Sammie reflected on his work with the company. “In our lives, in our crimes, we took the issues at hand too far. Our task is to tell the truth on stage, understand that conflict or confrontation, deal with it, and move on. No one has to get hurt.” This high ideal becomes more difficult in practice, when some of the violent acts Shakespeare writes mirror the crimes Sammie and other members of the company have committed. Playing Othello last year affected Sammie far more deeply than he’d anticipated, resonating with the murder that put him into Luckett on a life sentence. “The first time we did the death scene my whole day was a wreck,” he said. “Stayed with me for quite a while. I went back to the dorm; I was cryin’ and had headaches all day. It just made me think about, what could I have done differently?”

His castmates understood, he said, and adds, “It will always hurt, but it’s okay to hurt. It’s a relief more than anything. No matter how truthful it is, it is still just a character.”

Demond Bush credits Sammie with polishing his raw passion into something comprehensible. All hip-rolling urban cool. Demond took a lot of heat from Tofteland and the guys for his diction. “There were those who were more educated,” he says. “Even in prison you have these different classes. I said, man, I can’t understand this stuff. It was all these self-doubts returning again. And I said, I’m not gonna let this happen. Because I never finished anything in society, on the street. I got enrolled in technical school, I never finished it. I coulda went to college playin’ baseball, never did that. I coulda went to art school, never did that. I said, man, I’m just not gonna quit this.”

“It’s beautiful, man,” coaxed Sammie at rehearsal last June. “I really love your passion, but your diction…”

“I practice with Sammie because he’s very pronounciated,” Demond explains, “but when I’m on the yard with the rest of my entourage, if I talked that way, I’d get beat up.” He mimes a pounding. “Shakespeare helped me to blossom out on the inside. I feel like the wild rose that grew from concrete.”

Before the Bard, Demond goes on, “I was unable to control my emotions, so I lashed out. We all have times when we’re angry, frightened, scared of whatever. It’s how you contain it.” With a sly smile, he confesses a role he covets. “I love Lady Macbeth. She is so treacherous. Like her husband don’t wanna do nothin’, she’s there sayin’ do it, do it! If I play those dark kinds I can sort of release when I’m hurt and angry. I can still see the human ’cause I can still see the good traits.”

ONSTAGE, LEONARD MINCES, MANIPULATES AND SEDUCES AN EMPEROR
as tonight’s Tamora, clearly reveling in the nuanced language. Before prison, as an upright Christian family man and computer programmer who’d run for state office, he nonetheless possessed “a tremendous degree of self-hatred, self-loathing.” Articulate and occasionally sardonic, he struggles to explain how and why he is at Luther Luckett, sentenced to 50 years as a sex offender. “The idea of prison is to separate you from society,” he says, a smile spreading across his smooth, pale face. “Shakespeare Behind Bars is a little bit subersive. It subverts society’s desicre to separate me from humanity.”

Leonard sees his roles — Tamora and Marcus — as polar opposites. Marcus is the play’s conscience, but the Goth Queen resides on the dark side, inciting her gullible sons to unspeakable violence. “Her vengeful impulses are not something to be disgusted about,” says Leonard. “She’s human. I can see how her son’s killing would put the anger and pitilessness into her, because people I’ve offended have behaved the same way to me. They didn’t show me mercy or kindness. What society chose to do to me was evil, but what I did was evil, too: I have a choice here — I can be destructive or not.”

As basic as it seems to give actors room to make their own choices, it’s a rare shred of autonomy in the highly structured prison world, where every details of daily life is prescribed and dictated by the routine of the institution: when to eat, when to sleep, when to work, when to shower, when to report to the prison barbershop for a shave.

Curt Tofteland believes in creating islands of autonomous space within the tightly strutuctured prison culture. “He meets people right where they are, and lets you make your own choices,” says Demond. “You messed up? Then you try it again.” Staging a kamikaze curtain call, giving notes, coaching actors, Tofteland treads lightly into traditional directing territory. There’s very little ‘do this, and then do that,’ to his approach. Instead, he hands the power over to the guys, deliberately and by design. “Get those scripts out,” he chides at one notes session. “You all know why you messed up.” His key instruction: “Tell the truth.”

Hal, onstage in the title role nearly the entire evening, wryly explains later that he’s Titus by default. “It was my turn to do a big role.” The work hasn’t been easy. “I really got into his head, and it was not a good place to be: He kills his daighter, he kills his son, he kills the Emperor and Tamora the Queen.”

His character’s actions unnerve Hal, who is in Luckett on a capital offense. Growing up in a large fundamentalist family, he says he “went to Bible college and became a minister, got married, tried to be the perfect Christian boy. The whole fact that I am gay didn’t fit into the external belief system that I had tried to live my life by. Titus –its almost like chapter and verse — he is equivalent to a modern-day fundamentalist, only his religon was Rome’s religon.” Just as Hal did, Titus follows “all the things his belief system dictates, and his whole life is yanked out from under him.”

“That’s the double-edged sword to doing this part,” Hal goes on. “That’s how I’ve latched on to the character, because it will help me bring some of those things to the surface and deal with them. It helps me understand him and communicate him better. I have an 18-year-old daughter — I can understand the tenderness toward the daughter.” Here Hal’s open face partly clouds over, and he turns away. He doesn’t see his child any more. “I killed her mother–” his lilting voice sinks to a monotone, “–at a point when I thought God had turned his back on me. I tried everything possible not to be gay. As a minister of the church, married with a young child, I felt I was headed to hell in a handbasket and dragging my wife — the only person I ever felt had really loved me — to hell, too.”

Six years into his life sentence, Hal’s searching to fill his existence. A trained actor — he attended acting school in California, where he fled in the years after his crime — he values the professional worth of Tofteland’s work, but especially treasures the personal connection. “Very rarely around here are we treated just for who we are right now,” Hal says. “The staff, the other inmates, all they can see is a label — our past, our crime, whatever. Curt just sees us as people.” The longer he’s locked up, Hal adds, “the harder it seems to be to hold on to humanity and compassion.”

LATER THAT WEEK, THE ROUTINE REPEATS, WITH VARIATIONS. AN HOUR
after the 3:50 freight, it’s showtime again — family night, the height of the season. Well-dressed and groomed to a shine, knots of people enter the visiting area, passing through the first set of electric doors at the prison’s entrance, which close behind them before a second set pushes apart. Earlier in the afternoon, the men moved the production up from the gym to the spacious visiting room, where 80 empty chairs face the makeshift stage. They soon fill with chattering guests, and the air turns electric with anticipation.

Demetrius Burrus spots his mother and brother from backstage. He’s excited; his mom thinks this is a regular visit, and he wants to surprise her. “I want to show my momther I’m not just wasting time; I’m doing something productive.”

Sammie scans the house for his 13-year-old stepdaughter. Setting his props, he checks again to see whether she and an adult relative have come or not. Finally, they arrive. Sammie starts to release and the play begins.

At the act break, Randy True walks around like a king, one arm draped around his mother, the other around his girlfriend. Demetrius finds his mom, her face one big smile, and shows her a brown leatherette document folder. He dangles it high above her reach, teasing her for a moment, then lowers it to her waiting hands. It’s his GED certificate, and when she registers his achievement, she wraps her arms around him in a loving embrace. Both Demetrius and his mom are still crying when they let go.

In the little fenced playground that abuts the visiting room, Sammie and his stepdaughter linger together on a paved landing, comparing their hands, palm to palm, to see how much the girl has grown. He is tender with her, but says little. The love he feels shines through in Act 2, when his character, Aaron, dotes on his own (prop) baby, lavishing attention on the doll like jewels on a lover. Sammie uses Aaron’s words — Shakespeare’s text — to tell his child how he feels. His longing and passion are as plain as the red-stamped streaks that mark the audience’s wrists, inky stigmata that show they’ve passed the guards’ scrutiny.

At the final scene, with dead bodies littering the stage and two more pies devoured, the audience rises for a foot-stamping standing ovation. Many people are laughing in delight, and some are in tears. There are only a few scraps of time remaining: It’s 8:30, and the men have to be back in their dorms soon, for the 9pm count. A team of guards stands ready just out side the visiting-room hallway, to take the men into the bathroom and janitor’s closets for the required strip- and cavity-search. “C’mon guys,” says Karen Heath, moving through the knots of conversation, “time to go.”

Behind the guard shack at the far end of the yard, a sunset stripes the sky gold, mauve and purple. “That’s some sky,” muses Karen. The audience files outside to the parking lot, wishing each other well, then driving off. Their men stay behind, once again part of the Luckett machine, yet changed — enriched, awakened, challenged, fulfilled. “In prison, there’s not much to hold on to,” Demond explained once. “This is one thing that a core group of men has founded, like in a dark place, there’s a light. When you have a light like this, you don’t want to let it go dim.”

[Sidebar]

A DAY AT A TIME

The prison moves in its own inexorable routine, a set of precision gears powering a giant human engine. Four times a day, every day, prisoners line up in their concrete and glass cellblocks for a census. There are classes and clubs, along with daily meetings of substance abuse and sex-offender programs. Four times a day, there’s pill call: 98 percent of the men at Luckett are medicated, with everything from Paxil and Prozac to estrogen supplements for the lone transgendered inmate whose sentence began midway through a sex change. The routines comfort and numb; they provide structure yet necessarily deny the men the freedom of self-determination.

Fully 97 percent of the men at Luckett will be paroled or serve out their sentences, says Warden Larry Chandler. “These guys are going back to society; we tell them, the system can support you, but it can ruin you, too. It makes decisions for you — what to eat, what to wear, what to do. Does that help on the outside? No.”

Chandler’s genial warmth is countered by a discomfiting scrutiny, a penetrating gaze from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. “It’s not difficult to understand the company line — how to get along, how to make the warden think you’re taking advantage of opportunities when you’re not. Gotta get through the bullshit, gotta push to get to the real stuff. Shakespeare clears away the bullshit.” The trick, Chandler says, is knowing the moment of change, and recognizing that the possibility of change exists.

“Every time there’s a performance on the yard, everything has to adjust: head counts. bunk checks, work details, meals,” Chandler says. More intimate disruptions follow for the inmates, who are strip- and cavity-searched after every public performance.

Chandler’s candor allows his blunt assessment of prison culture. “the prisons today fill the mission once fulfilled by welfare. On the streets, you can have nothing, but come to prison and you’ve got rights.” Globally, “Americans are the experts on prison, but nobody’s looking at the final product, the 20-year inmate that goes out again.” Prison is the means, not the product, says Chandler. The product is the man.

Filed in Articles, Features