SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS:
THE POWER OF DRAMA IN A WOMEN'S PRISON
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 which 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 Jean Trounstine writes 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, discovers in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of her incarceration. We meet:
v Dolly, a 50-ish grandmother who brings her knitting to classes and starts a battered women's group in prison
v Bertie, a Jamaican beauty estranged from her homeland, torn with guilt, and shunned for her crime
v Kit, a tough, wisecracking con who stirs up trouble whenever she can--until she's threatened with losing her kids
v Rose, an outsider in the prison community who lives with HIV and eventually gains acceptance through drama
v Rhonda, a college-educated leader whose life falls apart when her father dies and who struggles in prison to reestablish her roots
v 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.
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SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS is a wonderful story of aesthetic power and redemption, intensely moving
I read every word, crying as I went. Prisons are monuments to ignorance yet Congress has seemed to decide
that the appropriate thing to do is keep the ignorant, ignorant. It's frustrating in the extreme to understand
what is so obvious to Jean Trounstine and to me but which the powers that be choose to ignore.
Jean Harris
President and Founder, The Children of Bedford Fund
Author of Stranger in Two Worlds
[Trounstine] has crucial things to say for theater itself -- for the meaning of Shakespeare and how,in the
stripped-down environment where mirrors are a luxury,theater and literature become a necessity -- a daily bread
which is not entertainment or a commodity, but a spiritual and social nourishment that nurtures the health of the
spirit through the offering of hope, self-esteem, aprocess that enables critical self-examination, and collective bonding.
Paula Vogel
Pulitzer-winning playwright Brown University
Jean Trounstine has written a courageous and hauntingly powerful testimony of the lives of six women
behind bars and their struggles for reclaiming their dignity as well as their humanity. Through the power of
drama and the beauty of art, Trounstine and the women of her story no longer belong to the realms of thei
invisible and the forgotten. On the contrary, Shakespeare Behind Bars is a story of fortitude and hope,
transcendence, courage as well as the solidarity of the human spirit in adversity. An indispensable contribution
to literature, human rights, and world justice.
Marjorie Agosin
Winner of the United Nations Leadership Award on Human Rights
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PUBLISHED BY ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, 2001
available at your local bookstore, Amazon.com, and Barnes and Noble.com
http://academic.middlesex.cc.ma.us/jeantrounstine