Shakespeare at Pendleton: Fifth Anniversary

Colleagues:
Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the first meeting for Shakespeare at Pendleton, the program I facilitate at the Pendleton Correctional Facility. In our five years, we’ve done three shows: the first-ever performances of Coriolanus and of Timon of Athens within a prison and Scenes from Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our current effort is to create a show of monologues and scenes from a variety of plays. If our planning goes well, this will be our quickest show to reach performance; we are aiming for April or May. We are likely to make Julius Caesar our next full play.
With his permission, I’d like to share the story of Zach. He was the lead actor in our 2015 show, Coriolanus. Zach spent more than a decade incarcerated for a shooting incident. He was released from prison earlier this year and is currently on parole. While we were rehearsing Coriolanus, we got some news that made Zach angry, and to himself, he had plotted to sabotage the play. His intention was just not to perform after we had done all of the rehearsing. The character Coriolanus is probably Shakespeare’s angriest character, and anger is the dominant emotion of the play. “Anger’s my meat,” says one of the characters, “I sup upon myself and so shall starve with feeding.” Yet, just through the process of rehearsing, Zach realized that Coriolanus the character was too much like Zach himself, and he learned to deal with his anger by examining the character he was playing. We had a successful performance of the play on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 2015.
On parole, Zach is working for his aunt and uncle in their business. This is what he wrote to me today: “I’m doing great. I accepted that I only have God to thank for my life and circumstances. I have handed my life over to Him and am currently working on trying to grow in Him and build a relationship. Work has been super busy. My aunt and uncle had to fire one tech then a second tech got injured so they are really down on manpower. Things are going great though.”