Call it a sleight of hand, a magic trick. When an actor dons a dusty, years-old robe and picks up a flimsy plastic sword, the harsh dressing room fluorescents cast his costume as make-believe. But when he steps out of the darkened wings into the spotlight, a different kind of truth reveals itself. The audience may buy in, or maybe not, but for those on stage with something to say, it’s a covenant all the same. 

In two independent films releasing this summer, Ghostlight and Sing Sing, the transformational powers of theater take center stage in Shakespeare riffs. Rather than focus on cutthroat, Broadway-caliber shows, both showcase non-professionals pouring devotion into something that will only be seen a handful of times at most. 

Ghostlight, an intimate treatise on one family’s grief and healing, follows a Chicago-area community theater rendition of Romeo and Juliet where the eponymous star-crossed lovers are both in their 50s and the time-worn plot bears striking resemblance to the male lead’s real life. Sing Sing considers what it means to find humanity in a system built on dehumanization, exploring a maximum security prison’s production of an original time-traveling musical comedy where Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy exists alongside gladiators, cowboys and an Egyptian pharaoh.

As enticing as the glimpses of the staged shows are, the end product is not exactly the point in either film, especially for the men who discover a vital outlet not easily offered to them elsewhere. Rather, it’s a matter of process: how the rehearsal room can become a form of therapy, a space intentionally created to foster empathy, vulnerability and connection. Simply, Ghostlight and Sing Sing is the most cathartic double feature to grace the screen this year.

And one already resonating with Letterboxders: in our ongoing Top 50 of 2024 list, Sing Sing currently sits at number six and Ghostlight at number thirteen. In a four-star review of the latter, Chloe shares, “To mirror my review for Sing Sing, I love men processing their feelings through theater and I love found family.”

In Ghostlight, stoic construction worker Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) inadvertently stumbles into a local production of Romeo and Juliet in the wake of a family tragedy. First, Rita (Dolly de Leon) ropes him into filling in at a table read after witnessing his repressed emotions boil over in a traffic incident. Soon, he’s Romeo. O’Sullivan met Kupferer over a decade ago when she played his daughter in a black box production of The Humans (later adapted into a feature film). When she wrote the screenplay for Ghostlight, he was the only Dan she could picture.

The casting for Dan’s fifteen-year-old daughter Daisy and wife Sharon happened more organically—a surprising detail considering that the roles are played by Kupferer’s real-life partner, Tara Mallen, and their daughter, Katherine Mallen Kupferer. “It just seemed like a slam dunk,” O’Sullivan says, noting Kupferer and Mallen’s beloved presence within the Chicago theater scene. The dynamic makes for an aching portrait of a family stranded in grief and struggling to bridge the gaps, as Dan wields his inability to address his feelings like shrapnel.

Similarly, Sing Sing mines new layers in its dramatization of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program by taking casting cues from real life. Aside from a few exceptions, the vast majority of the cast are RTA alumni who were formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, playing versions of themselves. The film revolves around an original production called Breaking the Mummy’s Code, most closely following founding member John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) as he prepares for an clemency hearing. Divine G soon finds himself challenged, then befriended by newbie Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (as himself), a lone wolf selling drugs who can intimidate someone in the yard one minute, then casually quote King Lear the next.

Director Greg Kwedar first learned about RTA after helping a friend shoot a short documentary inside a maximum security prison, where a ing glimpse of an incarcerated man raising a rescue dog sparked his interest in other rehabilitative programs. As he began the extensive research process with his creative partner and co-writer Clint Bentley, they reached out to longtime RTA volunteer Brent Buell (played by Paul Raci), and the necessity of creative input from men who had lived through the program quickly became clear.

Recalling a breakfast at Buell’s apartment with RTA alumni where he met Divine G and Divine Eye, Kwedar says, “I sitting at that table, and hearing the banter and all the personality and their own accents and the way that they never took each other too seriously, but also were all affirming and lifting each other up. I was like, ‘Whatever that is, that feeling around the table, if we can just put that into a film, we have something.’” But the feeling slipped away whenever the pair tried to put words to the page—it felt too much like an imitation.

“The thing that finally unlocked it for us was to let the writing process model a bit of what the actual process is like in the program, and that’s by extending the circle and inviting people into it,” Kwedar explains. Divine Eye and Divine G both have a story credit on the film—not as a symbolic thank you, he stresses, but because of their significant, personal contributions in helping navigate the story with honesty. The circle opened even more with Domingo, who brought his own well of experience and deep theater roots into the storytelling process.

The pair became volunteer teachers for the program and taught a film acting class. “We took several seminal movie scenes and tried to create the experience of what it would really be like on set to put them up on their feet, yet in a room where you could bring no cameras or boom poles or any kind of technology,” Kwedar says. Prison ID cards became cameras. A man’s cane became a boom. They first set up wide shots and performed the script as written, then moved in for close-ups where it was more about playing with the scene and fusing personal experiences into the material.

When the class tackled Dead Poets Society, one student was happy to volunteer to be an extra. But sensing he might have something to say, Kwedar requested their Professor Keating to direct his question—“What does carpe diem mean?”—to just that one student, who eventually itted, “I can’t even answer that, because I’m just so afraid. I don’t even know how to seize the day or how to even start,” Kwedar recalls.

“This beautiful, unlocked feeling moved through the entire room, like a shock wave,” he continues. “And this guy, Monsieur Mills, stepped into the middle of the room, and he was like, ‘Can I just say something? It feels like Christmas in here.’ I never forgot what opened up in there. Creating space for people to really have a personal moment within the work became something we chased for a long time after teaching that class.”

To that end, Sing Sing is interspersed with moments designed for improvisation from the RTA alumni, like the auditions and acting circle exercises led by Buell. There’s even a dance break. Kwedar says it’s impossible not to be endeared to these characters, because “that’s the whole experience of bringing a camera and drawing close to someone and looking them in the eyes and letting them tell their story.” For men often stereotyped or forgotten, the simple act becomes radical.

If Ghostlight and Sing Sing posit that theater and connection intertwine at the very core, that communal spirit traces back into the ethos behind their productions.

“Alex is a really good host of a party, and that is very similar to filmmaking in that you invite the people who you know are gonna not be assholes at the party,” O’Sullivan says with a laugh. “You make the space comfortable and—I’m gonna just ride this metaphor into the ground—you have everybody bring their own dish, and there is something about setting the scene for people in a way that makes them feel like they can be their silliest, most risk-taking, most authentic selves, and we really try to do that.” An example of the close-knit camaraderie: Ghostlight shot only a few months before the arrival of the co-directors’ first child. There was, of course, a baby shower thrown for O’Sullivan.

True to the scrappy, resourceful nature of the in-film Romeo and Juliet production, the Ghostlight co-directors cultivate a “budget as creativity” mindset. They found a lived-in theater space rather than building their own and borrowed the play costumes from the basement. Everyone was encouraged to bring their own everyday clothing. “So when you’re like, ‘Dexter, I love that hat!’ It’s his hat. There’s something about that that just feels…” Thompson trails off, before O’Sullivan finishes the thought: “It’s playful. It’s trying to tap back into that sense of joyful creativity that sometimes we can forget.”

Considering the current landscape, Kwedar observes that as much as independent film incubates the ideas and talent that can transform the whole industry, there’s also a “lot of scorched earth in the indie business, a lot of distrust, a lot of people who have been taken advantage of.” In his eyes, how a story is told must be as important as the story itself. “If that’s the intention, really championing community at really every level, then we must ask: how can the process better serve the community at every juncture?”

After first developing a similar pay structure for the smaller-scale Jockey, Kwedar and Bentley employed a parity model for Sing Sing based on the belief that “everyone has the same intrinsic value”, as the director puts it. Essentially, everyone involved in the film—actors, director, editors, sound designers, production assistants and so on—earned the same rate, based on SAG weekly or daily minimums, and also received equity in the film and profit shares.

“The only variable to someone earning more or less is time,” Kwedar explains. “What that alone does is a culture shift, of breaking down the hierarchy of how the movie business is normally equating value, and literally has a line between above and below the line. We took a little eraser between that and do not distinguish between all of these positions on a film and are saying that everyone has something equally meaningful to contribute… particularly for our formerly incarcerated men, they have literal ownership over their own story, and what that translates to in the work is also palpable.”

The moment hits like a gut punch. Kwedar says that the question “hits us as cruel because of how we have come to care so much about what this process is that these men are partaking in,” pointing out that the framing creates “this expectation that acting is falseness, rather than deeply honest and a baring of someone’s soul.”

In the research process, he found a parole transcript online and considered the possibility of piecing together the scene based on transcripts in the public domain. He recalls, “I calling Divine G about it, and he was like, ‘Wow, wow, that’s a really interesting idea—or you could just use my actual transcript.’ That entire scene is pulled directly from his parole transcript, and that question was actually asked of him.”

Caution: spoilers for Ghostlight follow. As the audience comes to understand, Romeo and Juliet mirrors the tragedy haunting Dan’s family, involving the suicide of his son. Through beginning to finally process his own feelings, Dan exorcizes a need to assign blame or gain some sort of retribution, a breakthrough that dismantles the wrongful death suit he filed against the other family involved.

“I believe very firmly in telling stories without villains, that the circumstances are the villain, and I knew that Dan’s great work in his emotional journey was going to be to look at his son’s decision with empathy rather than judgment,” O’Sullivan says. “Because I do think suicide is something that can be seen through a very judgmental lens. The words that are used surrounding a person who dies in that way are often very cruel… To harken back to Shakespeare, the line: ‘All are punished.’ There doesn’t need to be any more punishment. He doesn’t need to enact anything else.”

But as Sharon deservedly tells Dan, he doesn’t get to swoop in as the hero when she’s been the one putting in the work to hold their family together, and vitally, catharsis doesn’t come in the deposition room: it comes on the stage. And there, as the lights dim and the cast rises for a bow, as the sleepy family trio trudges home—a flicker of convalescence. O’Sullivan concludes that the shot of “the house with the garden half-complete in the front yard [says] they’re not healed. They’re just slowly putting brick after brick after brick. Not moving on, but moving forward.”

Fortunately, there will be another play in the spring.