You know when they say, “use your personal experiences to make your character come to life”. Well how do you use personal experience to play Hamlet, a murderer, well you use the feelings of the night of the murder. Inmates can most defiantly complete this goal. Well from this one hour documentary with no images just the voice of Jack Hitt what I saw is a new perspective on how to read Hamlet, well not really a new one, but one with a new twist. This one that states that Hamlet never reacts and blah blah blah, but adding an inmate’s perspective and how it could be interpreted in a prison scene.
What really stood out to me was when someone said “at least I can feel human in here” and all of the last five minutes where the crew of Missouri Eastern Correctional Center performance of Hamlet really touched me and made me think profoundly of the situation. That was when this really shifted from, one way you could read Hamlet and act it out to a talk with a really deep message. It was based on how reading it and how their past was connected, and they were all touching. It was also not full of how it COULD make one feel, but how it actually CAN make one feel.
“These guys call it as they see it and its true.” This play is much more than a play or an art, but it was a way to correct the error of the inmate’s past.
