The play’s the redemptive thing for Colman Domingo and these maximum-security inmates.
August 2, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT“Sing Sing,” directed by Greg Kwedar, is a tenderhearted, heavy-handed dramedy that stars recent Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo as John “Divine G” Whitfield, a maximum-security inmate piqued that his prison’s latest theater production didn’t cast him as Hamlet. It’s based on the members of a real acting troupe at Sing Sing, New York’s famous prison, which, when it opened in 1826, forbade prisoners to even speak.
Two of the convicts — the actual Whitfield and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin — wrote the story, adapted into a screenplay by Kwedar and Clint Bentley, with Maclin and several of the other now-released men from the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program playing a version of themselves. Paul Raci plays their director, Brent Buell, and you can tell he trained these first-timers well enough to hold their own alongside the Oscar contender.
Domingo’s character also feels a tad autobiographical. Lately, the actor has been chasing prestige awards bait — his version of Hamlet — that shortchanges his marvelously charismatic presence. Domingo can play funny, angry, powerful, loose, commanding and damaged all at once. But here, he gets only one scene to prove it and spends the rest of the run time being as mild and pleasant as the film itself.
As much as the script quotes Shakespeare, it’s a lot closer to “The Shawshank Redemption,” a well-meaning reminder that the incarcerated are human beings, too. It announces that theme early and often, and to bolster its case, none of the characters even mention what landed them in the joint for over an hour, and most never mention it at all.
At least we leave convinced of the value of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. Acting encourages these men to get so vulnerable, they acknowledge their tough guy facade is simply the role they were born to play. They’re glad to take on another one — they just needed the opportunity.
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'Sing Sing' actor Colman Domingo on a maximum security prison’s life-changing programArturo Conde is an editor and a bilingual freelance journalist. He writes for La Opinión A Coruña and has been published in Fusion, Univision and City Limits.
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