The Castle: exposure to the people of unseen and the stories remained unheard
Most people would not announce, “I can say I’m a taxpayer.” However, the characters in David Rothenberg’s Off-Broadway play Castle II shouted it out loud after they got out jail. The show tells the tales of four former convicts and describes the metamorphosis they had achieved with the support from the halfway house called the Castle. Castle II, which opened on Tuesday night in the Engleman Recital Hall at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, demonstrates Rothenburg’s commitment to reforming the criminal justice system. Compared to Rothenberg’s early production Fortune and Men’s Eyes (another Off-Broadway play about a man’s experience in a youth detention center), Castle II continues Rothenberg’s focus in social justice but further explores a land that focuses on the Fortune Society.
Rothenberg’s main objective in this show is to make the audience understand that people in jail are still just people, and that they are capable of starting over. To do this, he asks the actors to give first-person narratives; the players calmly talk about their stories that led to their confinement. Mr. Rojas shared that he first tried Marijuana at the age of 12, then became a drug dealer when he was 13. Two years later, he was arrested for selling drugs, and before he turned 21 he had already been arrested 5 times. Another character, Mr. “EZ”, was 15 when he knocked up a girl two years younger. By listening to their stories, we can see how they ended up in jail: most grew up in a toxic environment where they had little option but learn how to sell drugs to make a living at an early age. Some were consumed by their desires: “But all I wanted was to have flashy cars, money, and beautiful girls,” Mr. Anderson recalled. There was also the time when people were lost but had no one to turn to when they were most in need of guidance: “I didn’t know who I was, and I tried to fool everybody…I just wanted to be loved,” Ms. Donovan murmured in a trembling voice, “everyone wanted me and I was the superstar, that’s how the drugs made me, but every night I cried to sleep, begging God for help.”
By shedding light on the criminal justice issues with this first-person narrative style, Rothenberg’s production created an intimate and conversational atmosphere. The audience was fully drawn into four characters’ touching personal stories and easily remained engaged as the performers took turns sharing their stories in monologue form. The creative oral narrative performance enabled spectators to immerse themselves in the scenes as if they were transported back to the 90s, walking through the neighborhoods in West Harlem teeming with drug dealers, hanging around the night clubs blaring Disco, the burning stench of alcohol and the yells of drunk strippers overwhelming your senses…When suddenly, gunshots ring outside the window, white cocaine powder dusting the wooden floor, and police barging through the front door. The screams of the prisoners in the jail assaults your eardrums, your eyes struggle to open, and the weak light filtering in from the cracks of the door of “The Box” is the only light you’ve seen in 7 days.
As the ‘conversation’ with the four performers progressed, a question started to form among the audience: “what on earth helped them achieve the transition?” Is that the prison that they spent half of their life at, or there is something else that conceived their transformation. The answer is clearly revealed during the performance: the halfway house, The Castle, where they now call home, has successfully created a strong and effective support system that motivates people to get back on their feet. “76 men, 3 women, they are just my brothers and sisters”, Ms. Donovan expresses with sincerity. Donovan’s mother, after witnessing her daughter’s rehabilitation, tells her “I am so proud of you.”, which causes Donovan to tear up the mother and daughter are finally able to reconcile after these many years.
Mr. Anderson became a once accustomed to using pills to wash guilt after clicking the trigger which caused a person’s death. During the time being incarcerated, he suffered from the dreadful treatment at the “box” where “people eat, pee, crap in there for days and nights.” These narratives hit a nerve and made me wonder what does the so-called “correction” existing in criminal justice system really mean to prisoners? And to what degree have they really served as a mechanism to help rehabilitate inmates? “Prison doesn’t motivate them. It’s producing negative atmosphere. It made people relationships hard.” Mr. Anderson, starting from reading Shakespeare, has benefited tremendously from the RTA (Rehabilitation Through the Arts) program outside of the prison, which helped him eventually realize that his life isn’t a tragedy as he thought. He started embracing the metamorphosis, and even continued his higher education and obtained a degree in Human Resource. Twenty years after, now he can proudly say to the world, to himself, “I am a taxpayer.”
Not only has The Castle achieved discovering a new content market, it has also succeeded in stressing a sharp issue regarding human rights as well as challenging the traditionally authoritative criminal justice system by revealing the society the real life in the prison.
