Shakespeare Behind Bars
The Power of Drama In A Women's Prison
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A deeply stirring account of one woman's experience teaching drama to women in prison.
I began to understand that female prisoners are not "damaged goods" and to recognize that most of these women had toughed it out in a society that favors others-- by gender, class, or race. They are Desdemonas suffering because of jealous men, Lady Macbeths craving the power of their spouses, Portias disguised as men in order to get ahead, and Shylocks who, being betrayed, take the law into their own hands.
So writes Jean Trounstine in Shakespeare Behind Bars. In this gripping account, Trounstine, who spent ten years teaching at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, focuses on six inmates who, each in her own way, discover in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of incarceration. We meet:
* Dolly, a fiftyish grandmother who brings her knitting to classes and starts a battered-women's group in prison
*Bertie, a Jamaican beauty estranged from her homeland, torn with guilt, and shunned for her crime
* Kit, a tough, wisecracking con who stirs up trouble whenever she can-- until she's threatened with losing her kids
* Rose, an outsider in the prison community who lives with HIV and eventually gains acceptance through drama
* Rhonda, a college-educated leader whose life falls apart when her father dies and who struggles in prison to reestablish her roots
* Mamie, a nurse in the free world, now the prison gardener who makes cards with poetry and dried flowers and battles her own illness behind bars
Shakespeare Behind Bars is a uniquely powerful work that gives voice to forgotten women, sheds a compassionate light on a dark world, and proves the redemptive power of art and education.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Teachers who think their students are tough might find inspiration in Trounstine's 10-year stint teaching creative writing and theater in a high security Massachusetts state women's prison. Wry jokes about "captive audiences" and costumed inmates who are "dressed to kill" aside, Trounstine's tone is serious, and we watch her grow increasingly emotionally attached to her students. In chapters devoted to each of six inmates and prefaced by a brief quote from the Bard, Trounstine (editor of Changing Lives Through Literature) attempts to understand her students' lives and crimes through literature. "Dolly," who is abused by her boyfriend, seems especially drawn to The Taming of the Shrew; "Kit," the class clown, reminds Trounstine of Shakespeare's many fools. Rose, who is stigmatized by inmates and staff alike because of her HIV status, gives a heartbreaking rendition of Shylock's famous "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, revealing that Trounstine isn't simply fitting her students' complex lives into theatrical set pieces. Despite their initial fear that "Shakespeare is white man's theater," the students come to identify with the playwright's characters and use the experience of performance (Trounstine ends up directing eight plays) as a kind of art therapy. Aimed primarily at an academic audience, this affecting memoir should appeal to educators and general readers interested in the relationship between social change and artistic practice.
