Re-Telling Hamlet in a Juvenile Detention Facility

The Challenge

I began my career in learning at Crossroads - a secure juvenile detention facility in Brooklyn, NY that housed students between 10 and 17 for crimes ranging from probation violation to multiple homicide.

As a full-time language-arts teacher, my job was to help these students - most of whom had been truant on the outside and treated as nuisances by teachers when they did show up - learn to read and write. Most teachers in the jail handed out worksheets and “standard” school materials, hoping to keep the kids busy enough to avoid fights breaking out in class.

The Approach

I recognized that even if my students read at a third-grade level, their lives were rich, complex, and full of stories. They may not have mastered formal grammar, but the language they used to tell those stories was vivid and steeped in metaphor.

So the goal of my classroom was to connect their stories to literature - and to let them use forms of expression familiar to them, like rap, poetry, and graffiti, to give voice to their lives in ways that empowered them and sparked a genuine interest in the language arts.

The Build

I led the production of a “remix” of Hamlet, fusing lines from Shakespeare’s play with the students’ own life stories - expressed through murals, digital stories, and raps. The hour-long play was performed in front of the entire facility, with rival gang members performing their stories side by side.

The set featured large hanging murals and paintings, digital screens playing a recorded soundtrack, and actors in plaster masks, each representing a character from the re-written play.

Student murals and plaster masks from the production.

The Impact

The production was lauded by educational leaders and jail administrators alike, who remarked that they hadn’t thought something of that scale or quality could be achieved inside the walls of the jail.

The paintings from the performance went on to become featured pieces in outsider-art exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum. It was also the launching point for several more large-scale theatrical productions I’d lead at the jail, and for a new arts-based curriculum I went on to implement at correctional facilities across the five boroughs.

The work was featured in the dissertation of Dr. Sean Turner (University of Buffalo) and presented at numerous literacy-research and English-teaching conferences.

Student paintings from the production - several were later exhibited at the Brooklyn and Queens Museums.