Danny Waller
I'm the body up there. But the words are coming from mostly William Pride, the man that I killed. He's mostly the one talking.

Agnes Wilcox
There's not much defense between the actor and the word, as you get with an actor who puts his or her training between the two. These guys call it like they see it. And it's true, it's just dead true.

Jack Hitt
That's Agnes, the director. Besides putting on plays at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center Visiting Room, she's mounted shows on more familiar stages, the acclaimed Actor's Studio in New York, the Berkshire Festival in Stockbridge, and the Eugene O'Neill theater center in Connecticut. After becoming the Artistic Director of the New Theatre in St. Louis, she started an outreach program to take professional actors doing dramatic works by writers like Don DeLillo, and perform them before prison audiences. In time, the prisoners became the actors. And in more time, this side project took over her entire theater company. Now, this is what she does, directing prisoners, who may not have the chops of professional actors, but have an intimacy with the material that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Agnes Wilcox
When Claudius is in the chapel and speaks about his sin and his regret and his ability to undo it, it broke my heart. Because the man playing it felt all of those things fully. And I know these guys have deep regrets, but it was palpable. The audience was stunned. You could hear a pin drop. And that was especially true with the inmate audience. He says, "Oh my offense is rank. It smells to heaven. It hath the primal, eldest, curse upon it. A brother's murder."

Edgar As Claudius
Pray can I not, though inclination be sharp as will, my stronger guilt defeats my strong intent. What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood? Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?

Edgar Evans
My name is Edgar Evans and I'm 39 years old and I play the King, King Claudius, in Hamlet.

Edgar As Claudius
And like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, and both neglect.

Edgar Evans
I don't consider myself no great actor or nothing, but I try to do the best I can. And when I did the speech, I was looking upward. The chapel is at an incline there. And I was just looking up toward the top and it was like no one was there but me. I literally, honestly, didn't see a soul in the chapel when I was saying this. Maybe even-- and I'm just, I'm not saying this for-- it seemed almost like I was praying this actual speech to God.

Edgar As Claudius
But O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder? That cannot be, since I am still possess'd of those effects for which I did the murder, my crown, my own ambition, and my queen.

Edgar Evans
I have a wife and four kids. And by being incarcerated, I've felt that I've really let them down. When I said that speech and my wife was here in the visiting room, I don't know if it had an impact on her. I don't know if she truly understood all of the content. But I wanted her to hear that speech more than anybody.

Edgar As Claudius
O, wretched state, O, bosom black as death. O limed soul, struggling to be free art more engaged. Help angels. Make assay. Bow, stubborn knee and hearts with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the newborn babe. All may be well.

Jack Hitt
Edgar wouldn't tell me his crime. Although, I found myself playing a constant guessing game with all of them about this. They wouldn't discuss the past. That was then, they said. This is now. But I had to know. So one morning, instead of visiting, I went to downtown St. Louis, not far from the arch, and sat in a records depository reading old case files. It was more horrible than I thought.

One guy I particularly liked shot a man in the head twice at point blank range. Another of my new friends raped his pubescent daughter, impregnating her. Later there was an abortion. Another friend grabbed a man getting out of a car, put a gun to his chest during a robbery and pulled the trigger. Others had sodomized children, younger children, the age of my own children.

I didn't fall asleep for a long time in my frigid Ramada Inn room. At 3:00 in the morning, I had one of those cinematic nightmares. I dreamed that a very good friend of mine, an editor at a magazine, had me over to dinner. She got angry with someone else there, pulled out a gun and plugged him twice right in the face. Then she asked me not to talk about it with anybody.

I panicked. And the next thing I knew I was sitting up in my hotel bed, panting like a sprinter. It didn't take Freud to figure out what it meant. Someone I knew and liked was a murderer. I wanted to talk to the cast about this, but I was anxious. I know this sounds crazy, but I was afraid I might hurt their feelings. I felt like they have betrayed me. But strangely, I felt that I had betrayed them too. There was only one day left to talk, just before the final performance. So before curtain, I asked Brat to sit down with me. I could barely spit out my question.

Jack Hitt
You know, we came in here three months ago or five months ago, and met you all for the first time as actors. And so yesterday, we decided to go down to City Hall and read everybody's record. And I have to say, since I met you as an actor first and now I know what you did, it's very hard for me to wrap my mind around this other guy that's on paper. And, so I want to know how you do it. How do you square the Brat Jones of-- what was it, 13 years ago?

Brat Jones
Yeah, yeah.

Jack Hitt
--with the one that I see on the stage tonight?

Brat Jones
It's taken a lot of practice. I'm trying to discover who I am now. It's not been easy. I was off into the drugs and all those things when I got locked up for that case. And I slowly had to come out of those things. Because I always knew in the back of my mind that I had already went to the lowest point in life, so now it was time to see what I could do as far as going to the highest point in life.

Jack Hitt
It was a hard question for any of them to answer. They all said the same thing. But I'm this guy now. I'm not that guy. Are we forever the prisoner of our actions? It's a good question. It was Hamlet's question. And it's the unresolvable conflict in our penal system. Why do we put people in jail? To rehabilitate them and restore them to our company or to punish them, regardless of how much they might change? One can't hold both these ideas in one's mind simultaneously. That's why our prison debates on TV and in Congress are so vehement and incoherent. The two sides cannot be squared by mere politics. They can't even be squared by the people at the center of the debate. Here's Danny.

Danny Waller
When I first got this sentence, I said, I'll go ahead and just die in here. Because I don't deserve to be out there the way I am. That was 13, 14, years ago. But a person changes. I'm no longer the criminal I used to be. I know that I will not do any other crimes out there. But I took a man's life. Do I deserve to be out there? I cannot say.

James Word
Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good. In the is not a half an hour's life-- no medicine in the world, blah, blah, blah. I can't get it. I forgot. Line.

Agnes Wilcox
The treacherous instrument is in thy hand.

Jack Hitt
It's opening night, dress rehearsal. Word has flubbed his line again. Things aren't going well. The only time the authorities would allow a dress rehearsal is in the hour before actual curtain. This is the first time the cast has seen the acting stage, the first time in costume, the first time they have real props-- skulls and shovels, the shovel is a story in itself, given every prison fear of shovels. You can use them to dig tunnels, remember? The authorities insisted on using only a flimsy, cardboard replica. Everyone is tense, even Agnes.

Agnes Wilcox
Guys, let's double the pace so we can get through this, get it all up. The sight is dismal--

Inmate Actor
The sight is dismal.

Agnes Wilcox
And our affairs--

Jack Hitt
We are in the prison chapel where their first performance will be held before an audience of inmates. Six months after my first visit, it is, at last, show time.

Male Inmate
Alan, how you doing today?

Jack Hitt
Armed guards let the audience in the door one by one. Agnes calls her actors together in a corner and gives them the final pep talk.

Agnes Wilcox
Paul, Edgar, could I have you? OK, things to think about. Make sure to stand still on yours and other people's punch lines. If something falls apart, pick it up, go somewhere with it. Make up words. I don't think anybody here has memorized it, so we're safe. And mostly, this afternoon people were working so hard. I don't think you had much fun. Hard work is behind us. This is the night to just have a blast. One for the team.

Jack Hitt
Once the play starts, Danny and Stan deliver their lines OK, but all that antique Elizabethan wordplay isn't connecting with the audience. But then midway through the scene, the crowd starts to really respond to the emotion in Ophelia's funeral march. Laertes is the last mourner, humming at the side of the grave, tossing rose petals on her corpse. Right away, the action picks up. The Hamlet's appear, taunting Laertes about the sincerity of his grief. They quarrel and exchange insults. A duel is proposed, which culminates in the last swordfight scene.

Most directors block this scene as a professional fencing match. Agnes has it looking like a knife fight in an alley. The audience totally gets it. Word holds his arms slightly up from his sides, his hand gripping his sword like he would a shiv. He and one of the Hamlets are circling each other like thugs. Word jerks his shoulders forward-- a pure back alley feint, a fake move meant to intimidate his opponent, something all of them have probably seen right in the yard.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

Then the room goes quiet as the actors start slicing one another, leading to Laertes' death scene.

James Word As Laertes
Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good. In thee is not a half an hours' life. The treacherous instrument is in your hand, unbaited and invenomed. The foul practice has turned itself on me. No. Here I lie, never to rise again. Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Let mine and my father's death be not upon thee.

Jack Hitt
The audience, like a living thing, leans forward in unison to watch Word slide down the chapel wall and die. There are no cackles of discomfort, no shouts from the gallery, just breathless silence-- the silence of recognition.

In all, there were three performances. And on the final night, before family and dignitaries, the entire cast found the magic that Paul said would happen during that first read-through. The actors knew that this would be the last time they'd get to perform as a group. So when Danny and Stan came out for their final gravedigger appearance, somehow those Elizabethan jokes worked.

Inmate As Gravedigger
Art a heathen? How does thou understand the scripture? The scripture said Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?

Jack Hitt
Having seen every performance, I can testify. The actors rose above their talents in that last show. Mike and Hudson as the belligerent priests, Buck and Tommy as the ambassadors, Sylvester as Fortinbras. You could feel the mutual support. Just as missed lines and other mistakes play off one another and can spiral downward into fiasco, the rhythm of the room can go the other way too. Strong lines beget better performances. The gang of Hamlets came together in a way they hadn't before. That little mob seemed like one voice. But the real surprise for me that last night was Hutch.

Big Hutch As Horatio
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. There's still yet some liquor left.

Jack Hitt
It's here that Hutch's Horatio delivers his most famous line. The play is almost over. He's surrounded by corpses and speaks to his dying friend, Hamlet. In the other performances, I always thought Hutch had been plagued by what you might call the Jack Nicholson syndrome. The actor's persona is bigger than any role he might play. But tonight, Horatio has Hutch under control and the audience in his hand. He has the one great line to deliver. And as Hutch might say, he nails it.

Big Hutch As Horatio
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Jack Hitt
So Hamlet dies and Fortinbras takes over. And then the drums of Hamlet's funeral begin. On other stages, a curtain would fall. But here, beneath the cafeteria's unforgiving fluorescents, the actors just stop. From the back of the room, Agnes says simply,

Agnes Wilcox
End of play.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

Jack Hitt
The audience tonight is a mix of St. Louis' artistic elite. It's a theater crowd-- polite, well-dressed people. Many of them have helped fund this production. They want, and fully expect, to meet the talent afterwards. And for many of the actors this moment-- they call it the cast party-- is the most prized. James Word and Edgar Evans mentioned it specifically when I talked to them. Just the chance to stand around in a room full of normal people, drink a coke, and carry on about the play, the future, the weather, the freedom to chat and mingle like you were in the lobby of a theater instead of a bullet-proof visiting room.

[AUDIENCE AND CAST MINGLING]

In a high security prison though, when a play is over, it's over. No sooner had the bows finished than Danny, who doubles as the stage manager, turns right around and starts frantically striking the set. The guards had informed everyone that they'd have about 10 minutes for the cast part.

Like any play, all the work was for this moment, to get to the end of the last performance successfully. And now that it's here, these few minutes are shot through with a kind of melancholy. In the side room-- everyone sees him-- is the guard waiting to strip search them back into the yard. He wears a dull expression on his face and rubber gloves on his hands. But that would be 10 minutes from now. There's still time for pretending.

Inmate Actor
Thank you, sir. Thanks for coming out. We appreciate the support.

Audience Member
I really liked this act.

Inmate Actor
It was so complicated.

Jack Hitt
According to the prison commissioner, 97% of the people locked up today will someday join us on the outside. Manuel is leaving for a halfway house in 48 hours. He could have been out weeks before, but chose to stay in prison so he could finish the play. Hutch has a scheduled date for release. And a few more of the cast have parole board hearings coming up to decide whether they've changed enough and should be allowed to mingle with us on the outside. To that extent, this whole night, including the cast party, is just another rehearsal.

[MINGLING]

Ira Glass
Jack Hitt lives in New Haven.

Excerpt from the song: "Desperado"

Desperado
Why don't you come to your senses
You've been out riding fences for so long now
And freedom, oh freedom
Well, that's just some people talking
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your feet get cold in the wintertime
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losing all your heavy load
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away

Desperado . . .

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This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.
© 2002 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass