Two remarkable new cinematic love letters to power of theater

The most glorious moments watching live theater do not always happen on a stage. Sometimes they play out in the audience. Or in the parking lot afterward.

Or in a prison.

Five years ago, I sat mouth agape watching a group of fully committed novice actors perform “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at the Sterling Correctional Facility 120 miles northeast of Denver. Here were several dozen incarcerated men, joined by a few fearless University of Denver theater students, playing out Ken Kesey’s subversive 1974 counterculture classic about mental patients confined to a psychiatric hospital. From deep inside the walls of Colorado’s largest state prison.

One young man in particular was acting his guts out. He was playing the paralyzingly shy mamma’s boy, Billy. In the story, when the diabolical Nurse Ratched catches a newly deflowered Billy alone with a woman and threatens to tell his overprotective mother, the stuttering Billy wrenchingly begs of her: “P-p-p-please, du-du-don’t t-t-t-tell m-m-my muh-muh-muh-mummy!” The mere threat drives the young man to slit his throat from guilt and shame. 

In that moment, I did what I often do: I reached for my program. I had to know the name of the actor who was delivering this astonishingly raw and natural performance. And I recognized it. Not from my time covering theater. From my time in the Denver Post newsroom.

Some in the audience surely knew – but most probably did not – that a teenaged Nathan Ybanez had strangled his mother back in 1998, freeing him from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of both parents that his jury was never told about. He was sentenced to life in prison. 

In this rare moment of utter theatrical honesty, the line between life and art dissolved. The performance ended in a prolonged and heartfelt standing ovation as thanks for an unforgettable cultural and life experience.

For those two hours, these men were not prisoners. They were respected actors and appreciated human beings. Who, afterward, we watched be lined up and returned single-file to their tiny prison cells.

That was the power of live theater.

Love letters to theater

For the past 20 years, any conversation about the best film or TV series to articulate the cathartic, redemptive and even comic power of live theater had to begin with “Slings and Arrows.” That 2003-06 Canadian TV series followed the triumphs and travesties of a troubled Shakespearean theater company based on the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

But as great as “Slings & Arrows” remains, it’s Insider Baseball that makes anyone who has ever risked anything for art feel seen, heard and deservedly satirized. It does not grip general  audiences in quite the same way.  

But this year, two spectacular films have emerged that must instantly rank on any list of the cinema’s greatest love letters to the theater: “Ghostlight” and “Sing Sing.” At their core, these two small stories are both universal, accessible and intertwined with the greatest storyteller in history: Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, both have come along at a time when about the most any independent film can hope to land in a proper arthouse cinema is a week. 

“Ghostlight” came and went in June, but is now streamable for $6-$7 on Apple, YouTube or Amazon Prime. “Sing Sing” is now playing at the Mayan, Alamo Sloans Lake and Boulder Cinemark theaters, and will begin screening at the Sie FilmCenter on Aug. 23.

They are legit 1-2 on my (admittedly biased) list of the best films of 2024 to date. And “Ghostlight” goes straight to the top of my list of all-time greatest love letters to the theater.   

“Sing Sing,” with its most glorious double entendre of a title, hits me where my heart lives. It’s the true story of Divine G (Colman Domingo), a man incarcerated at the Sing Sing maximum-security prison in Ossining, N.Y. Divine G and others find that acting in a prison production of “Hamlet” provides them a place to feel human again. You see the same transformation taking place in this man that I saw taking place in those actors performing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And I soon saw again when I started teaching a weekly journalism class at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City.

It’s what happens when you give an incarcerated person a purpose, a project, a reason to get up in the morning. A reason to commit. A reason to collaborate with fellow human beings. A reason to bother bettering yourself when all other hope is lost. 

“Sing Sing” stars two professional actors working alongside real-life formerly incarcerated men who were themselves participants in Sing Sing’s “Rehabilitation Through the Arts” program. That’s similar to the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative that gave me the opportunity to teach journalism at Fremont, until its contract with the state was recently and curiously voided.

I witnessed first-hand how teaching theater, music, dance, art and journalism give incarcerated people – many of whom will return to society one day – a greater sense of self by giving them both a demonstrable goal and an opportunity to see that goal through.

If you want to hear Shakespeare’s “To Be or Not to Be” monologue through the lens of people who only “be” behind barbed wire, prepare to be blown away by its enhanced meaning in this context.

“‘Sing Sing’ grants a level of humanity to people in prison that is rarely ever bestowed upon them, especially incarcerated Black men,” wrote critic James Factora.

Turn on your ‘Ghostlight’

Another small miracle of a film is “Ghostlight,” which you can be sure is not an insider artsy film because it has reached unicorn status on Rotten Tomatoes: 100% recommended. Loved by everyone.

At this cynical stage of my life, I did not think it was still possible for me to so fully fall in love with a film at first sight. But this unlikely movie articulates everything there is to articulate about the power of theater to heal an entire family – and in the most blue-collar of ways. I never say this about any piece of art, but this impossibly well-constructed film is … perfect.

“Ghostlight” stars a remarkable real-life family of Chicago actors playing a family touched by tragedy. Even the actors’ (real-life) names are quintessential Chicago middle class: Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen Kupferer and their bottle-rocket of a daughter, Katherine Mallen Kupferer.

Together they play a family lumbering through their ignored grief over the death of a son. And no one is talking about it. Instead, the quick-tempered dad is messing up his hard-hat job, his rebellious kid is doing everything she can to get kicked out of school, and mom is putting on her best forward face.

When the dad is laid off, he gets drawn into an amateur community theater group that is preparing a storefront “Romeo and Juliet” with perhaps the oldest actor in history playing Juliet. How exquisite writers Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson believably lure this dad into the ephemeral, often farcical world of community theater is sublime. And how they then use “Romeo and Juliet” to bring this dad to a fuller understanding of his own son’s death is simply masterful. And complicated. And emotionally eviscerating.

When Rita (Dolly De Leon), the leader of the theater troupe tells Dan, the dad, “It seems like you might want the chance of being somebody else,” that’s me back in 1990 trying to talk a student whose parents had literally moved to another city without her into being in my play at Machebeuf High School.

Dan is not the kind of guy who takes well to professional therapy to deal with his son’s death. For millions of us theater nerds, theater is therapy. It is for Dan.

“Many of us live our lives repressing our emotions because out there, they can be a liability,” Rita tells Dan. “But in here, we can put them to good use.”

And as Dan bravely but tentatively tiptoes into this strange new world, his reluctance to tell his family is utterly understandable. And their ultimate discovery of Dan’s secret life is everything. That is the power of live theater. Not on the stage: In the living room.

In theater, a ghostlight is a single bulb that is left on whenever a theater is not in use so that the space never goes fully dark. Some say the light’s purpose is to chase away mischievous spirits; others insist it’s to light the way for the ghosts that are said to inhabit virtually every theater.

In this film, the ghostlight is the last flickering remains of the light that once powered a family now lost in its grief over a very present ghost. It’s about finding their light again.

“Ghostlight” is all the “re's”: It’s regenerating, rehabilitating, rejuvenating, repairing, restoring. It’s a story that could never happen in real life.

But that it can happen in reel life is enough.