Introduction to Dramatherapy: Person and Threshold Book

This book is wonderful. It looks at prison theatre programs, some of which only perform Shakespeare and one that does several playwrights including Shakespeare. Mostly, it is about the Shakespeare Behind Bars program run by Curt Tofteland in the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Kansas. There is background about these programs, but much, maybe most of the book is the author's interviews with inmates in the programs. They discuss what reading and performing Shakespeare means to them. It means a lot. For many, Shakespeare is transformative, helping them exorcise inner-demons, accept who they are and the wrongness of what they did, understand how their victims felt while they were being murdered, and challenges them see issues of justice and mercy, forgiveness and punishment from Shakespeare's perspective, or from what they imagine Shakespeare's perspective to be. This is sometimes heartbreaking, always enlightening, and these interviews are the main reason the book is wonderful. This brief summary badly fails to do justice to the range and depth of the emotions expressed or the ideas examined, nor does it adequately summarize the impact of this book on the reader. This why I am stuck with, "This book is wonderful," because it is so challenging and so moving, and, yes, so wonderful.

There are some cautions. Though written by a gifted scholar, the book is purposefully anecdotal. It does not try to be a truly scientific survey on the effects and usefulness of Shakespeare programs on prison populations. Would studies by psychologists bear out the impressions given by the author and the inmates interviewed? I have no idea. The book should not be faulted for this, for the book truly is wonderful for what it does. It is not at fault for what it does not try to do.

The author injects herself into the stories. A lot. She gives herself a wise and likable persona that allows her to serve as referee while she comments on the statements by the convicts, a warden, and the Shakespeare professionals. It is a bit like a documentary film in which the director makes him or herself a character interviewing and sometimes confronting the person interviewed. The other choice in documentaries is to keep the interviewer out of it and simply let those interviewed speak. This is often, but not always, a better choice. I have not read this book without the author's persona, obviously, so I do not know which would have been better. I do know that except for a few times when the author tells us that the speaker is wrong (she may be right, but can she know?), this approach works very well because she becomes our eyes and ears in these correctional facilities. We learn about them and the people incarcerated there along with her. Some people will object to the author interjecting herself in this way. Don't. My feeling is that something is both gained and lost with the choice. It ultimately does not matter, because this book is so wonderful.

Get this book. Read this book. It is wonderful.