Living Shakespeare at the Lansing Correctional Facility, Kansas: Rehabilitation and Re-creation in Action

Abstract

Living Shakespeare is an all-male, all-inmate theatre program offered under the auspices of Arts in Prison at the Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas. It was founded by Scott L. Cox in September 2011 and has produced four full-length productions of Shakespearean plays to date. The program, inspired by Shakespeare Behind Bars at the Luther Luckett Correctional Center in LaGrange, Kentucky, operates under the belief that participation in a Shakespeare-based theatrical production program offers the inmates opportunities to develop skills necessary to their successful reintegration to society. This dissertation explores the first three years of the Living Shakespeare program with the aim of determining whether the program aids in the prison’s stated goal: rehabilitation. The dissertation includes a brief historical account of the development of prison theatre, focusing on the use of Classical and Shakespearean drama with incarcerated populations, culminating in a case study of Shakespeare Behind Bars. The primary case study, which makes up the bulk of this dissertation, is of Living Shakespeare and its ensemble members. The author frames the study as Practice-as-Research (PAR), an approach to performance studies which values performance and theatrical practice as a valid research model. Knowledge is ascertained not solely through an account of the practice but by applying the methodology of ethnography. Observations of the process, field notes, conversations with the participants, questionnaires and interviews all figure into a qualitative analysis of the Living Shakespeare program. The author aims to demonstrate that a Shakespeare-centered theatre process provides the prisoners with the means of attaining twelve specific goals related to rehabilitation and offers rare opportunities for transcendence.