As a reporter, I sometimes receive mail from those behind bars who have story ideas or who keep in contact after a prison interview. Recently, I had a note from someone in a New York prison suggesting I see Sing Sing, a new movie about a theater program at Sing Sing, the maximum security prison in New York . This person hadn’t seen the film, but he had heard the buzz about it and that it was about redemption.
A movie about prison? One look at the Christianity Today news section this summer will tell you why I didn’t feel like watching something that would make my spirits lower than they already were. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that way lately.
But oddly enough, Sing Sing, in theaters August 2, parted the clouds for me. For one thing, it’s a very good movie. Led by the twin talents of Colman Domingo and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, it’s generating Oscars chatter for its actors’ performances.
It wasn’t the movie’s award chances that raised my spirits, though. It was its vision of community, its stunning use of the word beloved in one line of dialogue. That’s what the movie is about: how being beloved can change someone, can make the irredeemable redeemed. The person who wrote me that letter was right.
Sing Sing is based on a real theater program at Sing Sing called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), where a group of men behind bars puts on productions of Shakespeare and other plays.
When we join the story, the men are skipping the Bard to do a production of their own making, featuring time travel, Westerns, ancient Egypt—and sure, a little Shakespeare. They title it Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code.
The film is funny and it’s heartbreaking. It depicts the heaviness of prison without being gratuitous; it depicts people changing their stories without being naive. The men don’t become better by reading self-help books, embarking on a private program of personal growth. Instead, it’s their community that hauls them by the collar into a better version of themselves. When one man doesn’t understand a stage direction, the other men jump in to explain; when one is angry, the others try to de-escalate the situation; when one is crying, another listens and comforts through the prison wall. Without spoiling anything, you’ll want to stay for the credits.
At one point in Sing Sing, the director of the play says, “Who would have thought the healing of the planet could start behind the walls in Sing Sing?”
The healing of the planet? At moments, the movie has this almost-too-earnest dialogue. But Christians know what the character is talking about. Restoration of all things—of the whole world—can come from unlikely places. Like a stable, or a prison.
In Surprised by Hope, theologian N. T. Wright comments on John 21:17: that moment when Jesus, after his resurrection, asks, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
“There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster,” Wright says. Resurrection, Wright argues throughout his work, is not just about going to heaven but about restoring all things. That restoration happens not through individuals figuring out the big questions of life on their own, but through the entire body of Christ working together—a restored community of head, hands, feet, and elbows.
RTA is not a faith-based program, but in real life, it’s working toward aims similar to those of Christian organizations behind bars—organizations that want to give the incarcerated some measure of a restored life, that want to remake a human being after “disloyalty and disaster,” as Wright describes it.
After seeing Sing Sing, I spoke to Sean Pica, who grew up in New York prisons—he went in at age 16 and was released at 34. Pica says his years in Sing Sing should have been the worst of his life after he “failed everyone.” Instead, he was restored—and became the first in his family to earn a college degree.
Pica recalled that when he first arrived at Sing Sing as a skinny teenager, a group of older Black men came to his cell. They told him to make his bed and sign up for school.
“They wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he said. They pushed him to get a high school diploma. Pica did. He went on to get an undergraduate degree from Nyack College, a now-shuttered Christian college that had a program at Sing Sing at the time. Then he got a master’s degree from the now-shuttered New York Theological Seminary.
He also experienced the benefits of RTA; while incarcerated, he became the carpenter for the productions and built sets. He knew the men portrayed in the film.
A free man for 22 years now, Pica runs Hudson Link, a nonprofit college education program behind bars that has 700 students enrolled (it had early ties to Nyack before Nyack began to struggle). He’s not quite sure how he ended up leading a college program.
“That is God’s hands all over that,” he said, underlining how he needed community to get to where he is now. “It’s not a solo [expletive] sport.”
The film hits close to home for Pica, literally: Hudson Link operates within a 30-yard radius of RTA, so the organizations’ ties are close. Pica still builds sets for the theater productions—including the sets for Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, the production depicted in the movie. When A24, the studio behind the film, held a screening at Sing Sing this year, they invited Pica.
He was in disbelief, sitting in the packed chapel auditorium in the maximum security prison and watching men he knew quoting Shakespeare on the big screen. He didn’t care if the film screened anywhere else.
And what did he think of the film?
“It’s the real deal,” he said. “I cried through most of it.”
Emily Belz is a staff writer on the news team.
