Of Minnows and Killer Whales

In his autobiography The Life and Letters of Berlioz, Hector Berlioz says: “…imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one’s life in a coal mine.” This holds true today for every person who knows how to read. Not because Shakespeare’s Hamlet is literary genius (although it is), or even because it reflects the indecisive and rather pathetic nature of humans (although it does), but because it is one of the most famous works of literature ever written. The amount of people that hate it is as high as the amount who love it, and that is the nature of fame: if one is hated or love, one will be known; the problem lies in not being at either end. The level of Hamlet’s fame is such that it has been staged all over the world. Poor communities, illustrious theatres, high school plays, and thanks to a woman named Agnes Wilcox; prisons. A recent podcast by This American Life took the time to ask Jack Hitt, the man who studied the process of staging Hamlet in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, how this play evolved before his eyes as he saw men who were living out the consequences of committing a crime stage a play that portrays a man pondering said consequences.

The most interesting issue covered in the pod cast has to do with the actors in the staged play, and the way the characters in the play seemed to trespass Shakespeare’s world and invade the prison. . According to Jack Hitt, prison is just like Denmark in Hamlet’s world. According to Hamlet, “Denmark is a prison.” There are Claudius-like personas in the Missouri Eastern Correctional, those that crave power and do anything they can to obtain it.  There are Polonius-like characters which quietly stick to the ones with power for their own protection. There are Hamlets, who wonder aimlessly through the prison wondering what they should do. There are even some Horatios, who remain loyal to whomever they decide to attach themselves to. In the words of “Big Hutch,” who plays Horatio in the play even though he is one of the most powerful skin heads in the prison when he’s offstage, there are minnows and killer whales in the prison as there are in the world, and the minnows need to learn to hide or run if they want to survive. The truth is that the prison is just like any society in the modern world. One would like to think that it isn’t, that the people that got themselves locked up work differently, live differently; but the truth is they don’t. These people are as human as the rest of the world is, and crimes notwithstanding, they work the same way any human society does. Consider the world for a second, it may be divided up to any scale: a country, a city, a children’s playground or a high school classroom; in every society there is a hierarchy. Some are minnows and some are killer whales, some have the confidence of “Big Hutch” and call themselves the blue whales, claiming that they can “eat up the minnows” if they ever feel like they should. One can only hope to be a killer whale, or very good at hide-and-go-seek.

Furthermore, the podcast brings up a new way of seeing Hamlet which people living free lives never consider: Hamlet is nothing more than a man pondering the consequences of a violent deed, in this scenario we see his story portrayed by men who are living out these consequences, and clearly didn’t ponder them before. Hitt mentions and some point in the podcast that he didn’t really know anything about Hamlet until he saw the staging of this play, the process of making it all work. Seeing people like “Big Hutch” fully embrace acting and portray such a simple character as Horatio must be incredibly daunting and exiting at the same time. Surreal at best. Edgar Evans, who played Claudius in the fifth act of this staging says “if felt almost like {he} was praying {the} speech to God” as he acted it out. When he was incarcerated, he felt like he let down his wife and kids, and wanted them to hear that soliloquy more than anyone else It is more than likely that of the famous and prestigious actors that have starred in Hamlet had such a strong connection to the character, such a strong personal desire to make the act perfect.

Nearing the end of the podcast Hitt comments on the moment when he checked all the inmate’s files and finally got the full extent of what they had done to end up in jail. The charges fluctuated wildly from armed robbery to murder, rape, and even sodomizing young children. Hitt speaks about this experience as one of the hardest moments in the whole process, it was impossible for him to look at them the same way he had before knowing that these acts were real and committed by them only a few years or before he knew him. Before curtain he finally confronts one of the inmates about it: Brad Jones. He had been in prison for thirteen years before having the opportunity to act in the play where he took the challenge of portraying Hamlet along with other three men. He said that prison had changed him, that he couldn’t relate the man he had been before to the man he was after thirteen years of prison. Jones mentioned that all he knew was that the play kept him sane, that he figured “exercising his mind kept him from losing it” and that he knew that he had reached the lowest point of his life before; now he just had to reach the highest. When a prisoner is able to speak so deftly of his condition, it is impossible not to think that it might be time to set him free; he had learned what he should. It is harder to believe this when you think about what this an did, whether it was murder or rape, does this man deserve to be out with the rest of the world?

The truth is that there is no guaranty to the nature if good an evil inside a person, and one act cannot define one’s future as much as one word cannot describe one’s thoughts. Still it’s hard to forgive. Rape isn’t a normal every day evil act, it is worst that that by a lot. How can one forgive a man who raped? Is it possible to forgive such an animalistic, decadent act of power? “Why do we put people in jail, to rehabilitate them… or to punish them?” Even if it was the former, do we have the ability to forgive, forget, set the free, and move on?