Theater: Passing the Prison Bar

The Castle Through Sept. 27. New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-239-6200; Sat. 5pm, $30-$45.

Molasses in high humidity is an apt metaphor for the New York theater in late August—that lazy juncture between the ending of umpteen festivals and the starting of a new season. It’s an opportune time to catch up with productions missed earlier in the year, and one—a 55-minute amuse bouche of documentary theater called The Castle—has been performing once a week at New World Stages since April, extending its run several times. It’s written by and stars four ex-cons—Vilma Ortiz Donovan, Kenneth Harrigan, Angel Ramos and Casimiro Torres—who sit on stools and recall, using bound scripts, the unusually cruel and moving rollercoaster of their lives.

The Castle is also a physical place: It’s the nickname for a gaunt Gothic structure formally called the Fortune Academy, a 62-bed residential unit that shelters once-incarcerated individuals who are homeless, a platform from which they can integrate back into society. The play has been conceived and directed by David Rothenberg, a former theater publicist whose advocacy for the Fortune Society, which runs The Castle, is well known in the entertainment world.

Documentary theater has become immensely popular on our stages, especially this decade. Surely the primary reason is economic: It’s far cheaper to eschew sets, costumes and production values while still packaging great stories as chewable entertainment. And for the theater, liberal in its tastes, the egregious grotesquerie we call our penal system is especially ripe for documenting and shredding. Indeed, the closest analog to The Castle is The Exonerated, a play in which actors also sit at stools and recite out of binders the tales of death-row inmates wrongly convicted of capital crimes and later freed. In The Exonerated, the surface drama related to the wonders of DNA testing. Underneath that, however, was the idea, constantly reinforced, that fate hangs by a thread—by the smack of a judge’s gavel, by the harsh sentencing of a mishandled jury.

Overall, though, The Castle’s spin on this model creates a more provocative enterprise. When the four cast members come on stage, they pose behind their stools and offer compact biographies that enumerate their crimes, including the duration of their prison terms. Ramos did 30 years for murder. Torres, whose neglect and abuse as a child is shocking, was arrested 67 times on various charges and served a total of 16 years. Harrigan also served 16 years for a checklist of offenses. Donovan’s story is atypical: raised middle class on Long Island, lifelong feelings of inferiority fueled a drug habit that wrecked her until early middle age.

As their four stories overlap each other, there is a visceral, almost disconcerting immediacy to the receipt of certain information. Donovan, for example, still lives at The Castle; she was released only a year ago. You wonder what stands between her receding again into drug use and crime and forging on with her life beyond sheer will—and The Castle’s intolerance for slippage. You cringe when she cries nearly every time she speaks, yet her story isn’t just personal, it’s fresh and vivid. Other stories—such as when Harrigan went from prison directly to a homeless shelter, where he met a man in the bathroom who’d slashed his carotid artery and was bleeding all over the walls—chill your bones after a while.

For law-and-order revelers—those who believe that punishment in America always suits the crime; those who see no relationship between poverty, urban blight and criminality—The Castle will seem like propaganda. Indeed, it’s a banner ad waving in the wind as the savior of lost souls. But with the evil Rockefeller laws in New York State still jailing even minor drug users instead of rehabilitating them, and with governors like George Pataki de-funding the only program teaching prisoners usable trades, who can blame Rothenberg for using theater to push back?