Description: "Whorl Inside a Loop,” a funny and moving new play, written and starring Sherie Rene Scott. The Volunteer is, yes, an actor with a history on Broadway (now appearing in — ack! — “Conquistadors the Musical”), who has agreed to donate her time, or so we at first assume, to teach a dozen classes at an unnamed maximum-security prison.Ms. Scott is the only female member of the cast, and the only white one. The half-dozen other performers are black men who portray the inmates the Volunteer works with, and also numerous ancillary roles, like the prison staffers and the Volunteer’s gabbling friends and family, with whom she shares her tales of life (temporarily) behind bars. The show is cleanly but dynamically staged on a bare wooden platform, with metal folding chairs and a few simple props suggesting the antiseptic oppression of prison. As the show’s creators well know, the drama here is not primarily in the interactions between the Volunteer and her students or her coterie of friends — which are often funny but hardly momentous — but in the dark trajectories of the men’s lives that are revealed as she leads them to turn their experiences into shapely monologues. Their hard upbringings, the unhappy circumstances that led them into crime, the sometimes scandalously long sentences they received: These histories make for riveting, disturbing theater, and as recounted by the superb cast, they open windows into the lives of men whose stories mostly go untold, except in investigative journalism. (The script was created with “additional material” from Andre Kelley, Marvin Lewis, Felix Machado, Richard Norat and Jeffrey Rivera, some of the prisoners Mr. Scanlan and Ms. Scott worked with.) Outside, and with the eager encouragement of a producer friend, a plan is hatched to create a play — the one we’re watching, more or less — using the testimonies of the men. Will Broadway beckon? And, more important, does the Volunteer have the right to appropriate the experiences of her “students” for her own purposes? Inside the prison, mention of a possible play leads to the assumption that the men will be performing an evening stitched together from their monologues for the other inmates, perhaps the parole board, and, in a somewhat suspect plot twist, perhaps even Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Ms. Scott’s character meets at her hair salon. But it’s hard to listen to their stories without sorrow over how their early experiences — of poverty, abandonment, drugs, neglect — may have (must have) shaped their trajectories. And to sympathize when the Volunteer simply but eloquently describes their narratives as “stories about guys who’ve lost their lives, but are still living.” This playbill was signed by the complete cast. The play was staged by the Second Stage Theatre Company at the Tony Kiser Theatre with previews starting on August 4, 2015 and ended on September 27, 2015.
Price: 9.99 USD
Location: New York, New York
End Time: 2024-11-25T19:44:14.000Z
Shipping Cost: 5 USD
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Original/Reproduction: Original
