Four Ex-Convicts Tell of Lives Lost and Found
Filed Under Country Curtain | Posted on July 24, 2008
Before the curtain rose on Wednesday evening for “The Castle,” an oral history drama now at the New World Stages theater, a burly man lingered in the lobby. Gray hair fell in short braids over his collar.
Although the man played a small, critical part in making that night’s show possible, he was extremely taciturn when asked about himself.
“Let me sum up that part of my life,” says Kenneth Harrington, the son of an intact family who turned down a college basketball scholarship to be a D.J.
The players in “The Castle,” Vilma Ortiz Donovan, Angel Ramos, Casimiro Torres and Mr. Harrington, created the show with David Rothenberg, a former press agent on Broadway who started the Fortune Society in 1967 to lend a hand to people coming home from prison.
Mr. Harrington’s chronicle of the day he was released after his 16 years shows why. He arrived in Pennsylvania Station, took the subway to a parole office, then shuttled among city offices, finally reaching a men’s shelter on Wards Island at 2 a.m. “On that first night, a guy spouting blood out of his neck in the bathroom stall greeted me,” Mr. Harrington said. He lasted two weeks, then found his way to the Castle.
Mr. Torres, the son of an alcoholic mother who had nine children by three men, said he lived in a home where the chaos never stopped.
“When I was 5 and my brother Nino was 6, the guys that hung out in our house would make a ring, put Nino and me into it, then tell us to fight,” Mr. Torres says in the show. “We would have to keep fighting till one us was hurt or bloody enough. The men would bet on us like a dogfight.”
At age 15 and squatting in an abandoned building, he ran out of gas. “I was tired of being tired,” Mr. Torres says. “I was never scared of dying. It was living that scared me.”
Angel Ramos grew up in East Harlem, the son of a numbers runner he never met and a mother with a prescription-pill addiction. At age 13, he started a business selling pot. “Good weed, great quantity at a low price,” he said, reciting his slogan. When he was 17, he killed a friend during an argument. He spent the next 30 years in prison. “I couldn’t read the word ‘it,’ ” he said, but pushed by a friend, Mae, he learned.
Ms. Ortiz Donovan, from a stable home in Long Island, became a drug user in her teens, then a dealer; she bounced from programs to jails to prison. At the Castle, she was under the supervision of a parole officer who suggested that she go back to school.
And it so happens that the curtain for that show rose at the same moment, 8 p.m., that the parole curfew was dropping. An actor who misses an opening curtain most likely will be looking for another job. A parolee who misses curfew will be packing to go back to prison unless he or she has permission to stay out late.
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