Colman Domingo Shines as a Part of a Prison Theater Troupe in the Powerful ‘Sing Sing’

By Seth Freilich | Film | April 10, 2024 |

By Seth Freilich | Film | April 10, 2024 |

The American Life has produced an astounding 800+ episodes, and many consider 2002’s “Act V” one of their best (it’s my all-time favorite). “Act V” is one of those episodes that tells a single story, this one being about people incarcerated in a high-security Missouri prison staging the last act of Hamlet. A few years later, Esquire published an article called “The Sing Sing Follies” (in theory, you can read it here, but it’s paywalled), about a similar prison theatrical experience in New York’s maximum security prison, Sing Sing. Based on that article and a few other sources, Sing Sing ostensibly tells the story of a group of incarcerated men putting on a theater show. But what the film really tells is a tale of endurance, healing, and brotherhood.

The lens through which this story is told is the prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (the “RTA”) theater troupe. The group has an outside director, Brent (Paul Raci, Sound of Metal, but a council of five men who are incarcerated make the decisions like what show they’ll perform every six months and when men on the waitlist can join the troupe (yes, it’s a popular enough program that there’s a waitlist!). Sing Sing opens on Divine G (Colman Domingo, Rustin) delivering a close-up riveting Shakespearean monologue as part of the RTA’s most recent performance. Later, Divine G and his friend Mike Mike (Sean San José) see new-to-Sing Sing Divine Eye pulling off a scam on another man. Impressed by his performance, they ask Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin) to consider joining the RTA. While he shoves off the offer, Divine Eye walks away, noting, “y’all thought that was acting, you ain’t seen nothing.”

So, of course, Divine Eye is at the next RTA meeting, albeit skeptically. After some improvisational theater exercises — which include a winking nod to Domingo’s Fear the Walking Dead past as the men are tasked with meandering around like zombies — the group begins to discuss the next play, leaning towards a new drama that Divine G has written. Divine Eye questions why they can’t do something more fun, which leads to a preposterous brainstorming session. A few days later, Brent has returned with a 140-page script for “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code,” a wild time travel romp involving Egyptian princes, Peter Pan and Captain Hook, mummies, pirates, a cowboy, Freddy Krueger, and Hamlet. Everyone just assumes that Divine G, the group’s strongest performer, will play Hamlet, which gives Domingo an opportunity, auditioning for the role, to deliver the famous “to be or not to be” speech. As solid as his delivery is, however, the highlight of this moment comes after the monologue, when he has a pitch-perfect reaction of bewilderment that someone else is also auditioning for the part — Divine Eye ends up winning the role, to no ill will from Divine G.

From here, the film follows the group’s journey and struggle to plan, practice for, and prepare the preposterously large show. But, again, this is merely a lens to get at the movie’s real story. Although we learn the circumstances about how some of these men wound up in Sing Sing, that is not really the point either. The film is not interested in exploring prison as a retributory experience; instead, even within the incredibly broken and corrupt system that is the prison industrial complex, there are still opportunities for true reflection and rehabilitation, and that is the story Sing Sing wants to tell, how the bond formed through the RTA allows Divine G and Divine Eye to form a deep friendship of trust, support, and love. The film’s other plot threads beyond the production’s staging all circle around and feed into this central relationship.

What this means, of course, is that Sing Sing lives and dies on its performances. The South By Southwest screening I attended was two days before Domingo was set to attend the Oscars, where he was nominated for Best Actor for his Rustin performance. When I left the screening, the first thing I told my friends who missed it was that Domingo may want to plan to be back at The Dolby Theater a year from now because he is perfect as Divine G. While Domingo has a few showstopping scenes with Divine G as his situation and emotions get the best of him, the real strength of his performance comes in the space between those moments: the small things like that post-Hamlet monologue reaction; the way he reacts without judgment to Divine Eye’s early flashes of anger and frustration; the way he responds to the way he responds to several soul-crushing events. It’s a grounded, stunning performance.

As Divine Eye, meanwhile, Maclin is playing himself and making his screen debut. While his performance understandably lacks some of the nuance that Domingo brings, he makes up for it with raw sincerity that grounds his performance in a different but no less effective way. Maclin has to take his character on a journey from a walled-up and angry man to one who can eventually offer himself emotionally to someone else. It’s an affecting performance that makes for a fulfilling character journey. Many other real-world Sing Sing RTA members appear in the film, and the funny thing is that Maclin is so good that his performance causes those others to look a bit dull by comparison. A viewer who does not know the background of these castings could find this aspect of the film distracting, particularly when one formerly incarcerated man is tasked with a long monologue, which he delivers well enough but which works more because of the words than his performance.

Coming into the film knowing this, however, actually contributes positively to the weight and impact of the story Sing Sing is telling. From the beginning, we know this is a story of hope and found brotherhood. This film shows us men getting honest and vulnerable with each other in a way we do not often see in movies featuring “tough guy” masculine men. In fact, during a rehearsal scene, one character notes that “anger is too easy to play; what’s more complicated is hurt,” which is the film’s underlying thesis. To the extent these are angry men, it’s because they are hurt men. They are men “here to become human again, to enjoy the things that weren’t in our lives anymore.” This is a film that does not simply tell us but shows us that no matter what you have done in the past, no matter what terrible place you find yourself in, there are ways out.

Learn more about, and maybe donate to, the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program.

Sing Sing had its US premiere at SXSW 2024. It’s set to come out via A24 in July 2024.