Although the movie Sing Sing is, as the promos say, “based on a true story,” it’s a work of art. The film, directed by Greg Kwedar and co-written by Kwedar and Clint Bentley, is also about art: in this case, a play performed inside Sing Sing prison, via a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. RTA started in 1996 and has since offered people incarcerated in a few NY State prisons the chance to forget their lives behind bars for a few hours by acting in plays. The play in question, Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, was originally performed at Sing Sing in the early 2000’s, and is a prison-ensemble mashup of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hamlet, as set in ancient Egypt, ruled by the all-powerful, “Alloten Common.”
Be that as it may. The heart of Sing Sing lives with its incarcerated people. These include Divine G, a/k/a John Whitfield, a Black man in late middle age, who has already served years for a crime he swears he did not commit, and whose last hope for release is a distant prospect of clemency. Divine G is played by Colman Domingo, one of the few professional actors in the film, who, although he does an exquisite job, is well matched, even sometimes surpassed, by his fellow actors, most of whom have spent decades in maximum-security prisons…
