Incarcerated New Yorkers staged a Broadway show in prison

A harshly-lit waiting room in a maximum security prison is the last place you’d expect to watch a Broadway play. But a group of correction officers and prisoners’ families who visited the Green Haven Correctional Facility did just that on May 17.

Men incarcerated at the prison in Stormville, New York, performed a rendition of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” a play by Keenan Scott that follows seven Black men through a single day in Brooklyn. Each character has an allegorical name, like “Love,” “Depression,” or “Lust.” The play ran for three nights, with only the final performance open to the actors’ families.

It was produced by the nonprofit Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a group that brings theater, dance, music, creative writing and visual arts programs to eight prisons within a 200-mile radius of New York City. A feature film about the group’s work starring Colman Domingo is set to open in July. At the performance this month, organizers with the nonprofit said acting helps members connect with their families and neighborhoods once they’re released. While over 60% of people nationally return to prison within three years, the recidivism rate for Rehabilitation Through the Arts members is less than 3%, according to group organizers.

“This is what redemption looks like,” 32-year-old understudy Jeandro Perez said as nearly 100 people trickled into their seats.

Over the course of the nearly two-hour performance, one character gets shot, another spends hours hitting on women, a third dispenses wisdom at the barber shop. The makeshift stage was surrounded on all four sides by rows of seats. Tall murals behind the audience depicted the borough 70 miles away, including new buildings replacing old brownstones, a Whole Foods and a giant Nets logo.

Beyond the visiting room's walls, 2,000 prisoners sat in their cells. But as the play began, the audience was transported to NYCHA's Gowanus Houses.

The character Depression, played by Kenneth Portee, mourned gentrification in the area, saying: "It's like white people don't expect to see me no more."

“They'll turn around and look at me like I'm not supposed to be here, and I've been here my whole life … Ha! They have a Paris Baguette right there on the corner,” he continued.

“What the f--k is that?” replied Lust, played by Ahmad Raye.

The audience erupted into laughter.

The play’s themes of gentrification, gun violence, over-policing, poverty and fatherhood resonated for the actors and their families alike. While deciding on which play to perform, actors from East New York in Brooklyn or Burnside in the Bronx saw themselves in the characters.

“I don’t recall much of a fuss,” co-Director Ikee Halee said of the process by which group members selected which play to perform. Halee is also incarcerated at the prison.

“Halfway through reading it, we realized that these characters were pretty much us,” Halee said.

At one point in the play, at least two actors stood to face the correction officer as they delivered emotional monologues about the nation’s carceral system.

“We were not born convicts,” Eddie Cordero, 66, said in the performance. “We were birthed into a system that saw us as that.”

Several of the officers looked ahead, holding their faces still as stone. They ignored the actors, who for the first time were dressed in regular clothes and moving freely within the room. One actor later said those officers badgered him when he went to rehearsals each week.

Cordero, who’s been in prison for 22 years, said he had pain from his hernia throughout the show. But that didn’t stop him from shouting each line.

“Black men seem to have an expiration date that expires before everyone else,” he said. “Time, to us, is and must be more treasured.”

Jesse Williams, 37, said the program has kept him from getting into trouble at Green Haven after years of “gangbanging.” His daughter, who’d just turned 6 that week, was beaming in the front row beside her mom and grandma as he took the stage.

“This was one of the best moments of my life,” Williams said. “My wife, my daughter, my mom — they never seen this side of me.”

After the show, the actors had just a few minutes to hug and talk to their families. Portee said he joined Rehabilitation Through the Arts in 2018. Rehearsals three times a week helped him stay present, he said.

“I’m not in the yard. I’m not in my cell. I’m not nowhere. My main focus is on whatever they have to teach us,” he said.

As the audience poured out of the prison and into the foggy parking lot at around 9:30 p.m., Portee returned to his cell.

“All I’m going to do for the next week or two is just keep going over these scenes and have a smile,” he said.

Correction: Due to an editing error, the caption of the first photo in this story has been updated to correctly identify Eddie Cordero.