BLOCKING

"Sing Sing."

- JUSTIN CHANG

The new prison movie "Sing Sing" begins with a glorious, if short-lived, escape. There are no secret tunnels, no stolen cellblock keys. At Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in Ossining, New York, a spotlight shines down not on a yard lined with barbed wire but on a stage bathed in radiant blue. The play is "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the actors, all men, are participants in a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts, or R.T.A. For them, the chance to wear glittering costumes and ride the giddy waves of Shakespeare's verse promises a few hours of liberation.

One performer, John (Divine G) Whitfield, played by Colman Domingo, seems to capture the fleeting nature of the experience with some of Lysander's most famous lines: "And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'/The jaws of darkness do devour it up;/So quick bright things come to confusion." So quick is right. All too soon, the men have changed back into their green uniforms and returned to the daily tedium and terror of incarceration. The vastness of the stage, with its lofty view of a noisily appreciative crowd, gives way to the confines of a cell, so hushed and sealed off that it might as well be buried underground.