Teaching in Prison

We all know the figures: we rival China and several Middle Eastern countries in the number of prisoners we execute; we jail Black and Hispanic men at alarmingly high rates (they make up 62% of the prison population despite comprising only 25% of the national population); we incarcerate Black women at rates anywhere from ten to thirty-five times higher than White women; and we throw the book at drug users.

There's knowing and knowing.

For the past year, I've been teaching plays to a group of female prisoners at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, known informally as MCI-W. It's not a weekly gig, although I would like it to be. At the moment, I show up every ten weeks or so, books in hand. I can't bring cookies, candy, or handouts, just my paltry insights and what I hope is a pleasant smile. My first couple of sessions weren't as trying as I expected. Another faculty member who volunteers asked if I was horrified by the setting. I wasn't, I told her, affecting something of a tough girl demeanor. And, truth be told, the institution could be far worse. Yes, it's stolid and overbearing, and doors clang alarmingly as one is buzzed through successive entries. The halls and rooms are well lit, though, and there are plenty of inviting public spaces: rooms for sitting and watching t.v., a library (sorely in need of more books), and a gym. One night I arrived early and witnessed a line-dancing class in session, the prisoners enthusiastically grooving to silly music. Some of them whooped and others smiled. It didn't seem bad at all.

Last night got to me.

We were to discuss Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, that old standby. I haven't taught the play in a long time, and frankly it was never one of my favorites. Rereading the script over the weekend, I had one of those, "so that's what I was missing all these years!" moments (the reverse of "what the hell did I ever see in that book?"). The artistry of Miller shone through every page, from the plebeian poetry to the kinesic gestures, such as Linda's constant mending of nylons and jackets, effecting with her hands what she can't repair in her family. Miller's formal solution to the problem of representing double time on stage (i.e. objective reality unfolding alongside Willy's reveries) is brilliant, a synthesis of expressionism and good old realism. I also read a terrific production history of the play, Brenda Murphy's study in Cambridge UP's Plays in Production series. Boy oh boy, what I would have given to see the original production! What a talented ensemble: Elia Kazan's classic Method direction, Jo Mielziner's minimalist design, and Alex North's plangent score.

Then there's the story, as perfect a vehicle for exploring the shortcomings of the American dream as ever devised. Even if you have only half a heart, you can't help but think about a society that throws aside a 63-year-old man who is used up. So I sit down to spend 90 minutes discussing the inequities of 1948 with women in 2008 who experience firsthand the gap between what we profess to be as a society and what we too often are. Don't get me wrong: some of these women undoubtedly deserve to do time. There are murderers and embezzlers in my group: women who did away with their husbands (or at least tried) and women who had good jobs but nonetheless helped themselves to a little extra. One of the more eloquent prisoners, a soft-spoken, sweet-faced girl in her twenties, quietly shared insight after insight, the result of careful, thoughtful reading. She pricked my interest, and after the session I asked the officer manning the visitor's room about her crime.

"She killed a man when she was fifteen. Thirty years."

This particular officer has a heart as ample as her figure (she qualifies as a "traditional woman," in the words of Precious Ramotswe). Not all of the correctional staff are that kind. The officer clicked her tongue in sympathy and related her own story: alcoholic father; brutal beatings; one brother already dead from heroin. Several times in her youth, her fingers tightened around a kitchen knife. She doesn't know what kept her from stabbing the miserable s.o.b. "There but for the grace of God . . ." and her voice trailed off. "I could be wearing a uniform in there instead of a different one out here," she added thoughtfully. As to why a teenager would stab a man, she can't provide details, but she suspects the girl was defending herself. To my successive questions--why was she tried as an adult? why didn't she have a decent lawyer?--the officer shrugged.  It's as much a mystery as her decision not to stab her father all those years ago.

I drove home, happy for the substantial Irish whiskey Rod placed in my hands. I luxuriated in the smoky sting of the liquor while listening to Rod's attempts at consolation.  He pointed out that for a few hours, I've given the prisoners something else to think about. Have I? Do they really need to read what they experience firsthand?

Musings on Marlowe, Part I

While visiting my beloved Uncle Steve in Bend, Oregon over the holidays, I finally finished Park Honan's biography of Christopher Marlowe. Well-written and thoroughly researched, Honan draws upon Queer Theory and Cultural Studies while avoiding some of their methodological pitfalls. Honan's Marlowe comes off as a brash young man, brilliant in poetry and learned in the classics but a naif in regard to the treacherous world of Elizabethan spy craft.  He was a lousy spook, although he probably put his clandestine activities to good literary use.  Among other disasters, Marlowe managed to get himself arrested in the Low Countries for sharing a room with another spy who was blithely counterfeiting coins, a treasonable offense.  Ironically, utter cluelessness probably saved his life: Sir Robert Sidney (brother to Sir Philip) interrogated Marlowe, deduced his innocence, and then despatched the feckless lad back to England.  Oh, youth!

Naivete and good connections will cover only so many missteps, and Marlowe, as is well known, met an early and particularly grotesque end.  Honan's interpretation of the events leading to Marlowe's stomach-churning death (dagger plunged two inches into the bony orbital plate housing the eyeball) seems right.  Conspiracy theories abound, and it's tempting to chalk up Marlowe's demise to homophobia, religious fanaticism, or court intrigue.  He was, after all, given to "atheistical" outbursts while in his cups, and he was undoubtedly a liability to the spymaster, Thomas Walsingham, especially by 1592 when witch hunts for Catholics and atheists intensified.  I tend, however, to be skeptical about conspiracy theories.  As history teaches us, assassinations more often result from petty jealousies, political indignation, or mad musings than carefully orchestrated plots involving shadowy operatives and orders from on high.  In Marlowe's case, he probably provoked a minor operative, Ingram Frizer, not so much because of what he did, but for what he was: charming, flashy, brilliant, and possessed of a lightning wit that could pun equally well in Latin or English, much to the delight of his patron Walsingham. Marlowe's worst crime was to be everything Frizer was not; and the assassin, like most shabby little men, thought his rise depended on the poet's decline.  And the ambitious Walsingham, eyeing James VI of Scotland as Elizabeth's likely successor, didn't need to be saddled with a half-assed spy mouthing off in taverns around town.

While I find plausible Honan's account of the poet's short and violent life, I disagree with his assessment of Marlowe's artistry.  Inevitably, Marlowe is coupled with Shakespeare, and the tired literary game of "had Marlowe lived, would he have surpassed Shakespeare" continues to be played.  They're such wildly different dramatists that it seems foolhardy to compare them; they just happened to write at the same moment.  Honan, though, behaves like Frizer toward Marlowe, concluding that the rise of his biographical subject depends on the fall of his putative rival.  So even though it's a tired game, piqued as I am by Honan's assessment, I can't help but weigh in: Marlowe, a terrific poet, was as lousy a dramatist as he was a spy (and probably for many of the same reasons--John Le Carre is especially eloquent on the more literary aspects of spy craft).  

My fabulous former teaching assistant, now at Harvard pursuing a M.A. in Dramaturgy, did a first-rate guest lecture last year in Theatre History comparing Marlowe and Shakespeare from an actor's perspective.  As Sean noted, Marlowe has little feeling for the taste of words in the mouth: he's miserly with caesuras and profligate with monstrous, run-on sentences.  Worst of all, he rarely gives his actors anything to do on stage: they're passive mouthpieces for large scale, gorgeous speeches in which either nothing happens or everything happens too quickly and without any motivation or even sense.  Speeches rarely provide insight into the characters. His sense of dramaturgy is laughable, and here Honan tries to make a virtue out of ineffectual plotting, arguing that Marlowe's genius burst the trussing of dramatic form.  Thus his bitty, fragmented succession of loosely related scenes becomes evidence for some sort of proto-modernist experimentation in dramatic form.  Sorry, Honan, but I don't buy it.  Brecht's creation of an epic theatre--an aesthetic response to dialectical materialism--is a far cry from Marlowe's choppy, half-realized dramas.  The former brilliantly weds Marxist theory to practice, using a non-organic form to explore, thematically and coherently, modernist preoccupations with alienation, mechanization, politics, and aesthetic experimentation. Brecht's redaction of Edward II stands head-and-shoulders over Marlowe's original.  

I'm going to make an inflammatory statement here by asserting that Marlowe's scripts are pretty much unplayable, interesting to watch in their disjointed weirdness and flights of poetry, but unconvincing as drama.  Witness the Shakespeare Theatre Company's recent production of Tamburlaine, to be explored in Musings on Marlowe, Part II . . .