Hope at the Gates of Hell: Staging Dante’s Inferno behind bars

Abstract

This article documents the responses of incarcerated men and women to Dante’s Divine Comedy, who reimagine the poem as a journey from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven that parallels their own journeys from the hells they have lived through to the future heavens they hope to reach. The incarcerated readers encounter the poem in theatre workshops facilitated by the author in prisons in Italy, Indonesia and the United States. The performances are staged for incarcerated audiences as a mash-up of modern vernacular narratives written by the workshop participants interwoven with fragments of Dante’s text. The men and women in prison identify with Dante on multiple levels, knowing that, like them, the poet was convicted of crimes and sentenced to exile from his home and family. Inspired by Dante’s determination to climb out of hell, the workshop participants endeavour to use the theatrical encounter with the medieval poet as part of their own ongoing transformation behind bars. Their attempts to redefine their identities by inhabiting Dante’s story of transformation were expressed most succinctly in a scene entitled ‘Inferno USA’ written and performed by a man in a Connecticut prison: ‘Take a picture. You are history being developed. You don’t have to die as that mugshot.’ The lines might be seen as an updated translation of a passage from Canto X of Purgatory in which he speaks directly to his readers about transformation: ‘Do you not perceive that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly that flies to justice without a shield‘ (Dante/Durling 1996: 165).

Notes

1 Inferno is the first canticle of Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic poem, The Divine Comedy, which also includes Purgatory and Paradise.

2 Sing Sing is a maximum-security state prison located in Ossining, New York.

3 When working outside the US I guide the sessions alone using Dante’s text either translated into Indonesian or in the original Italian. In the US I sometimes bring my students from the Yale Divinity School or Wesleyan University to participate in the collaboration using multiple English translations of Dante’s poem. This work has been conducted with the support of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and the Institute of Sacred Music.

4 Larry White is a recipient of the Gramsci International Prize for Theatre in Prison awarded by the European magazine ‘Catarsi-Theaters of Diversities’ in collaboration with the Casa Natale Gramsci Association of Ales, the National Theatre Critics Association and the International Theatre Institute. He is also the founder of ‘Hope Lives for Lifers,’ a programme he developed under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee to help individuals navigate long prison sentences.

5 A National Public Radio feature on the Dante prison workshops documented in this article can be found at the following link. To hear the voices of the incarcerated men reading their work and discussing what Dante’s poem means to them scroll down and click on the sound cloud. https://bit.ly/34O46UE.