How ‘Sing Sing’ and ‘Ghostlight’ Highlight the Power of Theater as Venues of Survival

Theater and cinema have always had a strange symbiotic relationship. While cinema has, over the decades, become more accessible to view than theater, theater is more accessible to make. With its roots in the most basic form of storytelling, all you need to stage a theatrical production is a space and a script. At its heart, theater is about making a connection with the audience as they watch you. That live connection, the electricity between performer and audience, is perhaps the one thing cinema can’t do on its own, confined as it is by the bounds of the camera and the screen. While cinema has liberally adapted theatrical texts over the years, filmmakers have also been drawn to making films about theater, seemingly in an effort to capture the special magic that happens when people are able to make a direct connection with art in a way that film can never fully facilitate. In times of crisis, humans often turn to art to guide us through, so it should be no surprise that in the Summer of 2024, the year of the most contentious election America has seen since the 1800s, when we are more angry and divided than ever before, we have gotten two films about the healing communal power of theater. Both Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Ghostlight and Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing even pull the same metacinematic trick, pulling their casts from the local communities that inspired their screenplays: the Chicago community theater scene and the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, respectively. At the time when we need it most, cinema has reached out to its art form forebear to show us how all art can heal, how important it is for us to break out of our self-imposed bubbles and look with empathy at the world around us. It’s the unexpected double feature of the year.

*THE FOLLOWING INCLUDES SPOILERS FOR BOTH GHOSTLIGHT AND SING SING*

Ghostlight and Sing Sing share similar storylines, following someone who has never participated in theater through their first production, as they learn that there’s more to theater than merely memorizing lines. In Sing Sing, we meet Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin) when RTA program participant Divine G (Domingo) invites him to join the program after a spot opens up. Eye is wary of the acting exercises the group does, as well as their penchant for dramatic, often classical material (driven in large part by G, a writer falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit), but he has the chops to play Prince Hamlet in the group’s next original play (a comedic time travel narrative). He’s mostly a foil for G, but like most people participating in theater for the first time, Eye doesn’t fully understand that acting is about accessing deep emotions and sharing them with others, and it takes pushing from multiple members of the group for him to understand and fully open up. G even helps him prepare for his parole hearing, and on the same day that G’s own parole decision comes back negative, Eye’s is successful. This causes G to go ballistic, exploding during a rehearsal and leaving the group high and dry the week of their performance. Only when Eye breaks through his own emotional walls and gets real with G does the latter remember the point of the RTA program and puts his own hurt aside to come back to the group and make theatrical magic. 

While Sing Sing is told from G’s perspective, Ghostlight gives us the theatrical novice as our point of view character: Dan (Keith Kupferer) is a construction worker whose family has recently suffered a terrible tragedy. His daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is growing increasingly troublesome at school, and his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen, Kupferer’s real-life wife) is struggling to hold the family together. The stress finally gets to Dan, causing him to blow up on the job. He gets suspended, but his outburst catches the eye of Rita (Dolly de Leon), who drags him into her theater company’s rehearsal of Romeo & Juliet to replace the actor playing Juliet’s father. Dan doesn’t get the whole theater thing at first, but he finds himself drawn back to it, and his continued participation fosters a connection with Daisy, who used to do theater at school. Eventually, Dan ends up playing Romeo, and while it might stretch belief that Dan wouldn’t know the story of Romeo & Juliet before joining the production, he breaks down when the company starts rehearsing the play’s famous double suicide. He does not – can not – understand how anyone could do this, and he refuses to act the scene. He explodes at his castmates, and relays his own tale of woe: Rather than be separated by a cross-country move, Dan’s son Brian and his girlfriend attempted suicide together. She survived and he did not, leading Dan and Sharon to bring a wrongful death suit against the girlfriend and her family, stunting their own ability to grieve. Playing the role means coming to a place of understanding, and with Daisy’s help, Dan is able to reconcile his feelings towards his son and the girl who survived, eventually allowing his family to grieve together. 

Both Dan and Divine Eye have only the vaguest notion of why they feel drawn to participate in theater. While Eye uses a line from King Lear in an attempt to impress G when they first talk about the RTA program, he mostly seems drawn to it as a means of escape, much like Dan. While both men live very different lives, they’re both drowning in feelings they cannot express and possibly cannot even understand. Theater provides them a lifeline, a way to pretend to be someone else. In an extension of their desire to escape their lives, neither of them feels comfortable letting loose with their fellow ensemble members during warm-up exercises. Doing so requires comfort in one’s own skin, and much like many real-life actors at the beginning of their journey, both men are wracked by self-doubt. It takes constant support from the other, more experienced actors around them for them to get to a place where they can let go of the drama of their daily lives and be in the moment. For both men, finding comfort in their skin begins with finding comfort in the physical space of the theater – by spending time around their fellow actors, the language and style of the theatrical world slowly become second nature, and the space becomes more familiar. Once they feel comfortable in the space, we see the men forming bonds with their fellow castmates, dancing and laughing during rehearsals, the first sign that theater may have given them just what they wanted.

Dan and Divine Eye may share a propensity for suppressing their emotions, but both men are leading very different lives – one incarcerated, one free. They also have different reasons for wanting to escape. Divine Eye wants to escape his circumstances to provide a better example for his son, now recently incarcerated himself. Dan wants to escape from his grief, to no longer be haunted by the specter of his son’s death and the life he could have had. The theatrical process is so powerful that both men get more than they bargained for; more than merely escaping their circumstances, participating in theater gives them the means to change their circumstances. How? Through the (not-so) secret ingredient that makes art so powerful: Empathy. Both men reach a point where they have trouble playing a scene. In both cases, their castmates help them through by explicitly asking them to identify with their characters. By this point, Dan and Divine Eye are in too deep to half-ass it or leave, so they understand what they have to do. Because of their inability to access their own emotions, however, they don’t know how. Divine Eye needs the push from Divine G to remember that Hamlet is a Prince, someone who has dominion over all he sees. Through acting like he owns the room, Eye comes to actually own the room, gaining a sense of confidence and power that enables him to lift G out of his funk when his latest parole application gets denied. Likewise, Dan needs a push from Daisy to understand how someone so young could take their own life. By encouraging him to read the text of the play, Daisy teaches Dan to really listen to what the characters are saying without imposing everything he knows from his own life onto them. In turn, this allows Dan to forgive his son’s girlfriend and accept how his own actions played a part in what happened. In a twist worthy of The Wizard of Oz, these men had the tools to move through their circumstances all along; they just had to put in the work of self-acceptance before they could use them.

Part of the reason why Sing Sing and Ghostlight are able to make such beautiful displays of empathy is their genius casting. Both films went to the communities they were depicting for their talent pool, filling themselves with people who know firsthand the power of theater, and have even created it together. For Ghostlight, that meant the regional theater scene of Chicago, famous for its storefront theaters that dot the city. Not only is the theatrical troupe in the film entirely made up of Chicago-based actors (the lone exception being Dolly de Leon), but the central family is played by an actual family with deep ties to the Chicago theater scene. The Mallen-Kupferers may not be household names, but their familial bond strengthens every moment they share the screen with each other, making complex character beats feel real and understandable because of that intangible connection. Creating theater is one of the biggest team-building activities anyone can engage in, and the cast and crew of any production become as tight-knit as a family. Ghostlight perfectly captures the communal aspect of theater in how Daisy and Sharon immediately start pitching in once they discover Dan’s secret activity. The theater becomes a place where they can work together and heal together. The communal spirit of theater feels heightened because of the cast’s real-life connection to each other, and the bonds they share create a shorthand that allows the audience to feel a part of their community immediately.

The RTA program is a tried and tested program that has seen real results in America’s prison system. With a 3% recidivism rate for participants compared to the national recidivism rate of 60%, it proves beyond a doubt the power of the arts to change lives, in large part by reminding participants of their dignity and inner capacity for empathy and change. What better way to show that than by casting actual graduates of the program, and what better way to introduce them than through an audition sequence? Early in Sing Sing, each of the RTA program members enters the frame and directly addresses the camera with their name and the part they’d like to play before delivering a monologue. Despite how scary they might look, watching them give their all in their auditions is incredibly endearing, a perfect introduction to them as people as opposed to prisoners. It’s disarming when you realize that you don’t know why they’re in prison, and that you’re feeling warmly towards criminals, but that is very much the point: The theater doesn’t care about your past, it cares about you being able to act the part, and the RTA program only cares about its participants’ future. This sequence invites the audience to join the RTA family, and the men are so good-natured and dedicated that you root for them to succeed, not just in the show, but in life.

Both films sneakily use empathy to connect the audience to their characters in the same way the characters must create empathy with the roles they’re playing, putting the audience through the same journey the film’s characters are on. We see early on what Dan and Divine Eye’s regular lives look like, and the ways their circumstances have taken a toll on their psyches. We know before they do that they need help, but we can also see how difficult it will be for them to get it. All art can create empathy, and the beautiful thing about these movies is that they use the form and power of cinema to explore the way in which theater does the same. Through seemingly basic cinematic gestures – a shot of a person feeling the warmth of the sunlight here, an extreme close-up on an intimate gesture there – Sing Sing and Ghostlight connect the audience to the characters in the best way they can. If the performers aren’t making a direct connection with the audience, at least the filmmakers can convey the feeling of doing so and what it means to the characters. When Dan shares his family tragedy with his cast, he can’t even bring himself to face them, turning himself upstage and talking to the wall. Without saying a word, his castmates gather around and put their hands on his back. They understand, as we do, how difficult it must have been to say that out loud, let alone live with that truth every day. But they also understand, as we come to understand alongside Dan, that the theater has healing powers. This healing circle marks a turning point for Dan, who has finally opened himself up to the process. It’s one of the most quietly moving scenes of the year, observing silently as a community comes together to help one of its own heal. In a summer cinematic landscape full of storm chasers, serial killers, and snarky superheroes, the most potent storytelling is taking place in films about people doing something as low-fi as putting on a show.

That may be uncool in comparison to blockbuster action, but this Summer feels like the best time for these stories. It’s not a coincidence that Sing Sing is being released only a few weeks after Ghostlight. With all the real-world drama happening around us, we needed a reminder of why sharing our stories and empathizing with our fellow humans are so vital for our survival. In a time of crisis, cinema and theater have combined in an attempt to save us. Now it’s on us to listen.

Sing Sing is currently in select theaters from A24. Ghostlight is in select theaters and also available to rent or buy on Amazon.