Global Theatre Series: Sing Sing

About the Event

Global Theatre Series 'Sing Sing'
Curated by Cheryl Wiesenfeld

Join us at the Quick Center for an evening celebrating the transformative power of theater and storytelling.

Nominated for a 2025 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama, Colman Domingo stars in "Sing Sing." This compelling film is presented as part of the Quick’s Global Theatre Series, curated by Cheryl Wiesenfeld.

Designed to highlight social justice-driven theatre work, the Global Theatre Series has shared 10 theatre works that prove theatre does have the power to change our world. Over the years of our program, we’ve focused on social justice and incarceration in such plays as "Cell", "Gun Country," "Shared Sentences," and "Surviving Troubled Waters: From Prison to Freedom through Music."

This year we show the transformative power of theater through a film, not a play. This film is based on a prison theater program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) which started in 1996 after a small group of men in prison expressed an interest in putting on a play at the prison. Along with Katherine Vockins, the founder of RTA, the program was formed. That year, they wrote and staged their first play. The play marked the beginning of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, which is now active in eight prisons throughout New York, including men and women’s prisons with maximum and medium security. Rehabilitation Through the Arts teaches incarcerated people how to restore their lives through theater which, in stark contrast to the current system of criminal punishment, is based on respect and human dignity.

Brent Buell is a playwright, director and producer. For 10 years he volunteered with RTA directing theater in New York’s maximum-security prisons with plays ranging from John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” to original work by the prisoners. One of Brent’s plays, a comedy, “Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code” premiered at Sing Sing, and became the inspiration for A24’s film "Sing Sing" directed by Greg Kwedar and starring Oscar-nominated Domingo and Clarence Maclin. Buell is portrayed in the film by Oscar-nominated Paul Raci.

The film beautifully captures the visceral sense of seeing these men reluctantly join the cast of the play, and yielding to it, becoming part of the journey and life of the play, and through it becoming transformed.

Following the film, we will feature a discussion with Buell, and Patrick Brooks, associate professor, Visual and Performing Arts, at Fairfield University, and, hopefully, one of the gifted actors from the film.

Tickets: $25 | $15 Quick Members | $5 Fairfield University students

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