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All the Jail's a Stage

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As they began to let their guards down, the inmate actors started to understand that the moral conundrums faced by Hamlet were not unlike the choices they made in their own lives. "By the end, they were acting," Madsen says. "It was an incredible transformation of their ability to read and speak the lines, and understand what they were saying."

Act I, Scene IV

Shrill screams echo off the classroom walls at Vandalia. Guards would come running if this kind of racket was heard anywhere else in the complex. But when the cast of Macbeth is warming up before practice, noise and laughter are the rules, not the exceptions.

"Respond physically to the way you feel when you hear this news," Wilcox instructs them. "There's a tornado coming!"

Almost everyone throws her hands over her head and shrieks. "Now open your eyes and respond in slow motion to what you will do next," Wilcox says. Everyone runs, but no one runs for the door. When Wilcox points this out, they all burst out laughing.

They regroup and Wilcox gives the next cue. "You've been paroled!" she shouts. This time everybody screams and runs for the door, giggling all the way there.

Lena Malawey laughs as she watches from her wheelchair. The 41-year-old mother of two suffered a stroke last year, shortly after beginning a seven-year sentence. Her soft, youthful face is framed by short, light brown hair. A single blue teardrop is tattooed beneath her eye.

After the stroke, Malawey says, she was unable to memorize lines but found herself with a gift for drawing, something she had never done before. "That's how I came to be the art director. It's like it's just there," she says as she sketches Lady Macbeth. "I want it to appear to the audience what she's thinking," Malawey explains of the drawing, which will eventually be made into a set. "This is where she starts plotting the death of the king."

Suddenly, a piercing alarm interrupts Malawey.

"OK, ladies," announces Diane Davison. "It's a fire drill!"

Everyone hustles down the long, wide hall. Davison unlocks the door and reminds them to stay in a line as they make their way to the yard. The inmates stand in the drizzling rain, trying to keep warm in their brown prison-issue jackets as the guards count them, then count them again -- then count them again.

Malawey rolls her wheelchair to the back of the line. "The prison system teaches you to be hard," she says. "With prison, the closeness -- human closeness -- is not allowed. In Agnes' class, you're allowed to touch people."

Inez McClendon and Katrina Watts sing "You Are My Shining Star" as they stand in line. McClendon, who is 26, wears a black 'do-rag on her head and has two gold-capped teeth. She looks tough. She is tough. But when she speaks, the soft voice of a nightingale comes out.

"That's the only place I'd love to be 24/7," she says of Wilcox's class. "It's a struggle trying to stay out of trouble here. It's always tense. In that class, you feel free."

McClendon was arrested for armed robbery in St. Louis when she was eighteen. Now she's writing rap lyrics, skits, stories and poems. "When you're eighteen, you don't got nothing but ego and attitude," she explains. "This class has given me courage. You don't have to have your walls up, your mask on. You can let it all hang out and let everything go."

Act I, Scene V

The band members take their places against a white wall, and the choir sits in two rows about twenty feet away in the gym at Bowling Green. Stan Schell is rehearsing his lines as the musicians and singers practice the opening number.

Schell is 56, with a strawberry-blond beard, glasses and very little hair. He's been in prison since 1990 but won't say why. His large belly is covered by a T-shirt that reads, "The Hamlet Project Act III-2001." When Prison Performing Arts produced Hamlet in Pacific, Schell played Guildenstern and a gravedigger. He was transferred to Bowling Green last year and was selected for the lead role in The Gospel at Colonus, an adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus.

"The Gospel at Colonus is taken and put into a black Pentecostal church, circa 1950s," Schell explains. "When it was on Broadway in 1984, Morgan Freeman had the lead role. He had the character of the preacher. So Morgan Freeman and I have something in common."

The opening scene begins with Schell preaching from the "Book of Oedipus" and recounting the last days of the man whose life was destroyed because he unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.

"We begin with the Sunday service," Wilcox announces and then moves off stage. Schell lumbers across the room and takes his place behind a music stand.

"Brothers and sisters, I take my text this evening from the Book of Oedipus," Schell blusters with an authentic Southern accent. (He's originally from Fort Worth, Texas.)

"Oedipus, damned in his birth....."

The choir chimes in with affirmations of "Amen!" and "Uh huh!"

"Damned in a bloody show with his own hand....."

"That's right," someone shouts out from the choir.

Schell continues, gesturing into the air with a conviction that Elmer Gantry would envy. "Pitifully snared in the net of his own destiny."

The drums, guitars and keyboard fire up as the choir sways back and forth, eyes closed, singing: "Don't go away, oh Father, I pray."

"Who will be kind to me?" asks Hayward Silas Jr. in an exaggerated voice.

"Don't, don't. It sounds silly," Wilcox says. "Just speak it."

She's not harsh, but she's not gentle either. He tries again and delivers the line perfectly.

"Who will be kind to Oedipus this evening and give alms?" Schell asks. "Who will give alms to the wanderer though he asks little and receives still less?"

The play begins with Oedipus arriving at Colonus, the place where the gods have told him he will die. He has been wandering blind from town to town for twenty years after being kicked out of Thebes for his unspeakable crime.

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