Act Five: An Outcast Analysis

Act five was a very interesting podcast to listen to. It really made you think about what would be going on in the lives of those inmates. What did they do to get there? How long they will be staying in prison? How has the play hamlet affected them? Listening to the podcast answered those question and many of them surprised me.
There were many parts of the podcast that interested me and one of them was Big Hutch. Without visual queues all of the people in the podcast were left up to my imagination. Big Hutch to me sounded like a very tall black guy who, if you saw him on the streets somewhere, would be a very intimidating person to see. The ways that he spoke as well gave me the same impression, especially when he was talking about the hierarchy

of the prison yard. After you are introduced to this very tough character you find out that he has some very interesting ideas about hamlet. He proposes real dilemmas in the view of a convict. He found hamlets problem to be very small when compared to the things that he had to go through or the things he would have to go through in prison. I found his point of view to be very interesting and actually very real dilemmas. This is something that I did not aspect to come from a hard criminal.
One thing that I found very powerful about this podcast is the way the prisoner talked about how the play connected to them. They found parts that made them feel better about their crimes, or connected to them in ways that we could never understand. They spoke of there work on the play as something that could change their life. They felt as if they could change their ways to be a normal person in society again. Being part of the performance made them feel human again. That part really spoke to me in a way that the rest of the podcast could not. They spoke of Agnes Wilcox a small woman who made them feel human. She made them feel as if they belonged because she would not treat them as inmates in a maximum-security prison, she would treat them like actors in a play. Their past did not affect their relationship with her, she wanted to produce a beautified play and all she had to do was treat them like she would any other person and that to me really made me think. The stories that the inmates told about their experiences in the performance and how it would change them for the better, for me, made this podcast to wonderful to listen to.