St. Ann's Warehouse

Tempest Team Joins Prison Symposium

St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, will host a free symposium on women's prison reform at the conclusion of the matinee performance of William Shakespeare's The Tempest this Sunday, February 12 at 4:30 p.m. This symposium will call upon a panel of experts to discuss alternative notions of justice and how to activate them for change in our current sociopolitical climate.

The Tempest, a London Donmar Warehouse production, is set in a women's prison and is the third in a trilogy of such staged Shakespeare plays by Director Phyllida Lloyd. She will be on the panel along with a special guest, Harriet Walter, who plays Prospero and also played Brutus in Julius Caesar and the title character of Henry IV in the first two productions of Lloyd's Shakespeare trilogy. Lloyd fashioned her inmate character—the prisoner playing Brutus, King Henry, and Prospero—on a woman serving a veritable life sentence in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York.

Elaine A. Lord, retired superintendent of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, will also be one of the panelists. The other panelists scheduled for the symposium are Miyhosi Benton, associate at the Women and Justice Project; Brett Dignam, clinical professor of law at Columbia Law School; Sister Tesa Fitzgerald, executive director of Hour Children, an organization that specializes in helping incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and their children to successfully rejoin the community; Victoria Law, journalist and author of Resistance behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women; Cheryl Wilkins, senior director of education and programs at Columbia University’s Center for Justice; and Steven Zeidman, professor of law at City University of New York School of Law.

The panelists will discuss the life cycle of incarcerated women from imprisonment to reimmersion, addressing such issues as sexual violence and abuse within the prison system, health, daily living, and the impact of incarceration on the women's families and children.

Space is limited. To reserve a seat, click here.

February 10, 2017

If you have Shakespearean news to share, e-mail [email protected]