‘Opened my whole world up’: inside Oscar-tipped prison theater drama Sing Sing

An acclaimed movie spotlights a program offering a world of creativity to those living in a New York maximum security prison

When Sean “Dino” Johnson first heard of a new theater program from another guy in the yard at Sing Sing, a maximum security prison 30 miles north of New York City, he thought it was a joke. “I’m like, ‘Theater?’ I’m waiting for the punchline,” he recalled recently over Zoom. “Theater? This is a maximum security facility and you’re talking about wanting me to run around with tights talking about to be and not to be? Stop playing.” Johnson first got caught up in the punitive US carceral system at 15, as a wayward youth in Queens. At Sing Sing, he was a man of few words, a self-proclaimed “block monster”. “I couldn’t communicate too effectively,” he said. “And when I ran out of vocabulary, violence was the only thing I knew and leaned on.”

Johnson had no theater experience, but the program, called Rehabilitation through the Arts (RTA), piqued his interest. He went to the first meeting to check it out, do props, find “something to do other than sitting around this yard and counting time”. He started reading a script for a new play and, to his surprise, enjoyed it. He kept reading. He brought the script back to his cell, went to another reading, even began looking forward to them. “It just started changing my thinking, like, ‘nah, I can’t get into trouble. Then I won’t be able to go down and be able to read,’” he said. Before RTA, Johnson had “very little to say, because every time I open my mouth, people take it the wrong way and it leads to something else. Very misunderstood.” The program “just opened my whole world up”.

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