On February 3, the cast of the film Sing Sing took it back to where it all began: the stage. In 2005, a group of inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility put together and acted in an original play, a time-traveling adventure called Breakin' the Mummy's Code. Their story was then dramatized, with those formerly incarcerated actors starring, in the Oscar-nominated film Sing Sing. On Monday at New York Theatre Workshop, the cast of Sing Sing performed that same play on the stage—to multiple standing ovations.
As Sing Sing director Greg Kwedar told the audience before the show began, the play Breakin' the Mummy's Code was first performed at Sing Sing in 2005 for four nights. "This is the very first time it has ever been performed again on stage," said Kwedar. "This play, Breakin' the Mummy's Code is a time-traveling musical comedy. It's totally bonkers. And in our movie, we embellish nothing. But there is a genius at the center of it...what does it mean to experience joy and creativity?"
Breakin' the Mummy's Code was written over a whirlwind weekend by Brent Buell, a director and volunteer for Rehabilitation Through the Arts—which brings arts programming (including theatre, visual arts, and music) to prisons. This initiative, founded in Sing Sing in 2006, is dramatized in Sing Sing. As one character describes it: "We're here to become human again. To put on nice clothes and dance around. And the enjoy the things that is not in our reality.”
Buell himself is even a character in the film. Buell wrote the play for the men at Sing Sing after they told him that they wanted to do something joyful, that wasn't rooted in pain. "I was a jaded, long-term New York City director and producer, and I was really losing my love of theatre," said Buell. "And because of these guys, and what I saw that the art can do for them, it brought back my love of theatre and gave me a whole new life."
In Breakin' the Mummy's Code, a young man living in ancient Egypt must avenge his mother's ("mummy's") death, by finding clues to her death throughout time—which leads him to gladiators, Freddy Kruger, Robin Hood, and Hamlet. At the February 3 performance, the audience laughed and cheered as Robin's band of Merry Men sang, and applauded after Clarence Maclin delivered Hamlet's iconic soliloquy with moving clarity.
Though many of the performers on the stage starred in the Sing Sing film, Monday's event was the first time that every person who was part of that original 2005 play were back in the same room—as Maclin pointed out in the post-show talkback.
"This is more of a reunion," he said. "It's more of a coming back together, a family. This thing that we created here is so magic. It's so powerful, and it's just reaching all across the whole planet. I'm glad y'all got to see a little bit of it tonight."
The film Sing Sing is currently nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Colman Domingo, who plays John "Divine G" Whitfield, based on a real RTA participant. The real-life Whitfield (who makes a cameo in the film) was present at the February 3 event—as the film dramatizes, Whitfield was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and found healing and purpose through writing plays and performing in them.
"At that time in my struggle, in my life, I had been in prison for a crime I didn't commit. I found overwhelming evidence of my innocence and could not get out. So for me, [RTA] was therapeutic, in the sense that it gave me an avenue to survive and to deal with the harshness of a wrongful conviction," said Whitfield, who is now a PEN award-winning writer. "I figured if I'm in here for something I didn't do and I gotta deal with all this pain and suffering, my way of getting back at the system was to make sure when guys walked out, they didn't come back. That was my way of fighting the system, of making sure when guys got out, they stayed out." He then added, to audience applause: "RTA has a recidivism level of 3 percent. Sixty percent of the national population of all other prisoners come back to prison within three years. We gotta beat the system."
In the Sing Sing film, the men act in a dramatized version of their own lives—reliving a crucial point in their personal journey. For those involved in the film, it was an opportunity to showcase a prison story that deviated from the standard violent stereotypes—to show that those behind bars are human beings who have value and can be redeemed. In a physical representation of that ethos, every man who performed on the stage had bios listed in the show program that included their photos and what they're currently up to after incarceration. For instance, Maclin won a Gotham Award for his performance in Sing Sing while Miguel Valentin is now a tattoo artist living in Florida.
"We do this, not just for us, but for our future generations," said Valentin, who plays himself in Sing Sing the film and whose daughter is currently a student at AMDA. "The fact that we can come together, give out a message. And for me, that message is that anything is possible. Anything is possible. You are not your past."
The event was presented by film production company A24, in partnership with the philanthropic organization Just Trust and with the support of New York Theatre Workshop.
