Shakespeare Saved My Life Page 15

  No matter what he does, he will never leave prison.

  CHAPTER 52

  Romeo and Juliet

  In the summer of 2006, after creating full-length workbooks of more than one hundred pages for each of the three criminal tragedies of Shakespeare—Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello—Larry had completed his “quarantine” time and joined the group in population. Immediately, he was recognized as the leader of the program, and we were ready to take on our greatest challenge yet: to create an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet geared toward at-risk teens. As always, Larry wrote the workbook that guided our work and was geared toward the intended audience. His introduction challenged our young readers: “Are you ready for the big leagues?”

  When it comes to literature, Shakespeare is equivalent to 2-Pac in the rap industry, Led Zeppelin in the rock industry, Michael Jordan in the world of basketball, or Muhammad Ali in the world of boxing. He is the man! For the past four hundred years, he has had no rival! Maybe you associate Shakespeare to that “high falutin’” class of society, but that is not Shakespeare’s fault, and you are mistaken if you think he targeted that class.

  Shakespeare is telling our story! He is telling the story of complex, conflicted people who are facing real issues, who have real problems, who know what it’s like to lose, who know what it’s like to cling to the edge, and who know what it feels like to be lost. But unlike many who attempt to use our circumstances to demean us, Shakespeare uncovers the power in these circumstances and offers you the tools to shape the life that you truly desire.

  How can four-hundred-year-old stories do that? These stories are not merely “good stories”; they are tools that can give you back the power that the world, and you yourself, has deprived you of. When you think about the choices Macbeth makes, or the pressures Hamlet feels, you are confronted with fundamental principles that are important in our culture: honor, pride, conscience, ego. What do these words mean—to you? Make no mistake about it: this is not a simple thing to do. Shakespeare is not a cartoon or TV show used for simple entertainment. It is not a movie where your heroes and villains are obvious roles. These stories require you to actually think! I don’t mean the kind of thought required just to follow what is happening in the story. I mean the kind of thought that requires you to figure out who the hero is, and who the villain is, or even what it means to be a hero in the first place.

  You are going to have to dig inside yourself and come face-to-face with parts of you that you never knew existed. And, yes, the language is tough. These facts aren’t meant to scare you away. I just thought that you should know that this is no cake walk. But I have every confidence that you are more than capable of stepping up into the “big leagues” of intellect. Others may want to water things down for you, because they see you as mere juveniles.

  But I know that you are not simple-minded kids. Some of you have had experiences in life that sixty-year-old men will never have. Some of you have had enough hardships to last a lifetime. And some of you are smarter than the great majority of adult prisoners I have met in my thirteen years in prison. I was also just a juvenile when I became a prisoner, and I allowed these circumstances to define me as just that for many years. You can take back the power that you have been deprived of when you stop letting others define you as “kids,” as “prisoners,” as “outcasts,” or whatever other labels people imprison you with. Only you can give them the power to do that, and only you can take that power from them. This prison that we’re in physically doesn’t matter. We were prisoners before we got here, and we’ll be prisoners when we leave here unless we realize that we’re fighting the wrong battle.

  What matters is your own psychological prison—and you can break those chains. What have you got to lose? What else do you have to do? The worst that can happen is that you miss one television show. The best that can happen is that you find true freedom.

  In addition to the workbook, we filmed a short video introducing our juvenile audience to the play of Romeo and Juliet and to six prisoners who—like Romeo—committed murder as teenagers: Patrick at eighteen, Jon at eighteen, Larry at seventeen, Steve at sixteen, James at sixteen, Dustin at fourteen. In the film, they speak directly to the teenage audience, telling them about the story of Romeo and Juliet and how it relates to them, trying to convince them to turn their lives around before it’s too late—before they end up with life in prison.

  I brought the video into some of the alternative high schools near my campus. This was a tough audience: I worried that we wouldn’t be able to get them to turn their lives around, but there was one kid in particular, covered in tattoos and piercings, who I couldn’t even get to turn his chair around and face the TV. Pointedly, he ignored the impassioned pleas of Patrick, of James, of Dustin.

  And then Larry came on the screen.

  “I don’t know, man,” Larry says in an unstaged, honest moment. “It just keeps going through my head that I didn’t listen, you know, to these good-intentioned older guys telling me, ‘Hey! If you don’t straighten up your life, here’s what’s gonna happen.’ I didn’t listen, so I don’t know what makes me think that you’re listening now.”

  The tattooed kid turned around. He was actually looking at the screen!

  “I mean, it’s true,” Larry continues, “all of it’s true. But here’s the thing, man. The big problem isn’t trouble—well, obviously, it sucks—but the big problem is that twenty years from now, you’re gonna look back and see that your life hasn’t changed. You haven’t gone anywhere, man. You’re still just that same scared little kid you were at fourteen.”

  That got them all listening—and thinking. Here’s what some of them wrote in response to the video (with all misspellings intact):

  I’m 17 years old, I’ve been to juvy 2 times in my life for battery and theft/breaking in entering. I’m the one who said that Shakespere was retarted and there was no point to it. But hearing it from you guys and not a boring teaher is making it a lot better.

  I leon that the story is real well it like real life, that what I like about it. Even today world you got yo own craw and yo own side of town. I cant even remember how mane time I been at a pratty or something and people stared fighting over north side and south side stuff.

  And, amid the doodles of a disinterested teenager, here is what the tattooed kid wrote:

  Well yea I was leasoning. Why? Becaes yall was talking about something. I mean yall was talking about how fucked up it can be if you make the worng chouies. If yall was talking about bullshit, prulbe woulda want to sleep. So I trying to say I leason to people than can help me.

  CHAPTER 53

  Romeo and Juliet for Youth Incarcerated as Adults

  At Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, the YIA unit houses the Youth Incarcerated as Adults: teenagers serving long sentences, often life, in an adult prison. The former SHU manager, Ken Gilchrist, was now the manager of this unit, and I offered to include some of these kids in our Romeo and Juliet project with the assumption that he would immediately recognize what a positive role model Larry and the others could be. After all, Larry had been a youth incarcerated as an adult himself. But whereas Larry, at age seventeen, was thrown in among hard-core adult prisoners to start his life term, I learned that the Department of Corrections now had an absolute rule prohibiting any interaction whatsoever between juvenile and adult offenders. “They can’t come in here,” Gilchrist informed me. “You’ll have to make a video for them.” So that’s what we did, expanding on the video I had brought into the alternative high schools.

  The Shakespeare group in open population spent the next year writing an original adaptation of the play geared toward what they affectionately called these “badass kids.” They didn’t focus on the love story, though. Instead, they focused on the peer pressure that can push a good kid like Romeo into murder, and they interwove their own stories of how they each became a teenage killer and what their prison experience had been like. Sort of a Scared Straight through Shakespeare. They called thei
r adaptation Tybalt Must Die! This was very much a group effort, and although Larry was recognized and respected as the leader, he chose to play the lesser role of Benvolio. It is a small part, often overlooked in productions of the play, but Larry saw Ben as “the voice of reason” who tries to talk the others into a peaceful resolution to their conflicts. At the end of each scene, Larry stepped forward and spoke into the camera. The action onstage froze and the lights dimmed as he addressed the teenage audience with probing questions such as, “Why do these people feel such ‘blind hatred’ for one another? Who do you hate blindly?” and “Why does Romeo give in to his buddies? Why do you?”

  The approach he was taking with the incarcerated juveniles was the same one that had worked so successfully with the adult prisoners. “They’re no different,” Larry said. “They just have a shorter attention span.” One day, when I made a reference to these “hard-core kids,” he taught me another important lesson.

  “You cannot use those words! What we do not want to do is isolate these kids as ‘hard-core.’ That will only encourage the celebrity they find in the results of their behaviors. You have to think of these kids in need of your help as just that: kids in need of your help! Even you, great doc, are not above the influence of subconscious prejudice. Wow! Was that a tongue-lashing, or what? No, man, I’m just kidding.”

  But that was what he always said when he was not kidding.

  “So what should we say?” I asked him. “What would have spoken to you as a ‘kid in need’?”

  “It doesn’t really work that way. It’s not what someone says to a kid that really matters; it is more the experience. Trust me, they have heard it all. People throughout history have searched for the ‘magic words,’ as you already know. These videos may have a powerful moment when they see us kids doing life in prison. For that time, it is a really strong deal, but it does not deal with the cancer…it is just a powerful moment. Their self-image, insecurities, social icons—all that is not impacted, and that is the cancer! Hopefully, we can create an experience that makes them indict these cancers, and that will not happen but through sidestepping all their little defense mechanisms. Basically, sneak attacks that anticipate their defenses and then smash their reasoning! It is not quite as cruel as Socrates, but it is that same method. Man! I just realized that!”

  CHAPTER 54

  Balance

  Prison is a stressful environment: for those who live there, work there, and even those who voluntarily enter.

  “I’m glad we live an hour away,” my husband once said to me, “or I’d make you drive around the block for an hour before I let you come in.” True, that hour on the open country highway, with rap music blasting, helped begin the process of unwinding. But it took a good bit more than an hour to come down from the day’s new discoveries and insights, worries and plans for the week ahead. A glass or two (or three or four) of cheap red wine sipped while I related the day’s events to Allan became a weekly ritual.

  But it wasn’t a healthy way to detox over the years, especially when I started developing heart issues, inheriting my parents’ chronic high blood pressure. The stress was compounded by concerns about my aging parents’ declining health and about their financial needs, which I worried about not being able to meet if I did not obtain that all-important tenured position at the university. I had to find a healthy way to destress.

  I took up yoga. Even if I was the oldest kid in the class, and even if I couldn’t touch my toes, I enjoyed the physical and emotional balance that it offered. The drama of my Friday nights was followed by yogic calm on Saturday morning: Ommmm. It was the perfect antidote for prison stress. If I wasn’t teaching Shakespeare in prison, I would have loved to teach yoga (if I were qualified to do so). The yoga classes that I was taking always ended with a progressive relaxation exercise done while lying on the floor in the pose that’s called “corpse.” Thinking it would be a good warm-up to begin our rehearsal session at the prison one day, I introduced a modified version of the technique.

  “Stand up, everyone,” I said. Fifteen prisoners got up from their chairs.

  “Spread out a little bit.” They did, wondering what I was going to ask next.

  “Now, close your eyes.”

  What?!

  “Uh…Dr. Bates, I don’t think—”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “I won’t ask you to do anything…weird.”

  They looked skeptical.

  “Trust me.”

  Trust: that’s the key word in prison, and it’s not earned easily. And you never, ever ask anyone in prison to close his eyes. The fact that every one of them did was the strongest evidence I’ve ever had of how much they did, in fact, trust me.

  But I was a failure as a yoga teacher; most of them concluded that it was weird. Nevertheless, I continued to enjoy my weekly sessions with the group at the local Y. Teetering on one leg with hands folded in prayer position made me more balanced, mentally and physically. Eventually, I even touched my toes.

  CHAPTER 55

  Tybalt Must Die!

  In the summer of 2007, when the Romeo and Juliet adaptation script was finished and ready for filming, the group performed in the prison chapel before an audience of invited guests that included all of the top administration of the prison, the media, and, most importantly, their own family members.

  After years without contact, Larry had reunited with his own family—mother, two brothers, countless nieces and nephews—thanks to Shakespeare. He now had something positive to talk about in letters and phone calls. He wrote to his brothers about his work in the Shakespeare program, and he encouraged his nieces and nephews to stay in school. He invited them to come to the Shakespeare performance, excited to be receiving visits after so many years. (The only visitors most segregated prisoners receive are their attorneys, with whom they converse by telephone and through a glass partition. Family visits are even more restrictive: the prisoner sits in a closed-circuit video booth while his relative sits in another booth in a different part of the prison. Few prisoners have family members devoted enough to drive for hours to talk to their loved one through video.)

  I got to meet Mom and both of Larry’s brothers when they attended the Shakespeare performance. No doubt their presence made him especially nervous when I asked him to give the introductory address. He spent weeks preparing his speech, entire days struggling with just the opening words: “Welcome, everyone!” He read from his handwritten script in our rehearsal session, then crossed it off, saying, “Man, that sounds retarded!”

  Now, with the cameras rolling and the audience watching, he held his script tightly in his shaking hands…and never even looked at it.

  “Shakespeare,” he began, “saved my life. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. I swear!” And he raised his right hand as if swearing an oath.

  “The Shakespeare program began in the segregation unit,” he continued, “and I’d spent ten and a half years in those units. I went in as a nineteen-year-old kid, and I didn’t get out till I was a thirty-year-old man. While most people spend their twenties trying to find their place in this world, I spent every single day of my twenties pacing my cell in isolation, trying to find reasons not to leave this world. And that’s when I was introduced to Shakespeare through Dr. Bates. I was at the crossroads in my life. I wasn’t sure if I would find the courage to stay where I was or to go beyond where I was. To…to kill myself.”

  From somewhere in the audience, I could hear a gasp. I wondered if it was Larry’s mom. I wondered if she knew that he had been to that point in his life. He had told me that he had written a suicide letter—but did he send it?

  “It was the right moment for me, so I said yes, I wanted to study Shakespeare. She left me a speech by King Richard the Second, which he was expressing from his own supermax dungeon four hundred years before. I just couldn’t believe that this guy was pacing around in his own dungeon, just like me. That was my first exposure to Shakespeare, and it would literally change the re
st of my life.”

  Standing off to the side, trying to be inconspicuous, I became aware of one of the photographers turning his camera toward me, and I wondered why.

  “So the last few years that I was in segregation I spent analyzing and discussing Shakespeare through a hole in a steel door with a group of other prisoners. We’d discuss what we read, and everything would come up for discussion. We’d try to define these terms like honor, integrity, etc. It really forced me to find some kind of substance to these terms that shape our lives. I was forced to look into a mirror, basically, at myself, to give these things real meaning. That changed the way I felt about everything, about others, about myself. I was literally digging into the very root of myself while digging into Shakespeare’s characters. For instance, I couldn’t say that Hamlet’s impulse for revenge was honorable if I couldn’t tell you what honor is, and I couldn’t. I still can’t tell you what honor is, but I can tell you some of the things that it’s not, and Hamlet’s revenge is one of them.

  “I eventually left segregation and Dr. Bates continued to allow me to work with the program. She asked if I could re-create my thinking patterns, how my two selves came into conflict with one another. So I basically re-created my own experience, and put it on paper so she could gather them together and bring it back there where these guys are going through what I was going through: literally just fighting for their lives. I wanted to challenge them to go through what I went through, to try to define these terms because these things drive our lives and we don’t even know what they are. I think it’s critical to get these people to start addressing these questions.