When Richard Hoehler first walked through the doors of a medium security prison in upstate New York, he assumed it would be a one-time thing. As a busy freelance writer, actor and teacher, he had nonetheless agreed to drive upstate to teach an acting class for inmates pro bono. At the very least he hoped the experience might give him new ideas for his teaching on the outside.
What Hoehler could not have anticipated was the beginning of an odyssey that led him to an incredibly popular series of acting and writing workshops and mounting seven full productions with prison inmates—men whom society has written off and locked away as irredeemable. In Acting Out: How a Prison Theatre Workshop Broke Free, we witness a rare kind of theatrical magic. Within the incredibly dehumanizing and often arbitrary prison system, participants work to express themselves and connect with dramatic works where anger, compassion, forgiveness and tears pour forth in the safety of the workshop.
Hoehler is a member of National Alliance of Acting Teachers and the Dramatists Guild. He is an adjunct professor of Theatre at John Jay and City College and an acting instructor at HB Studio and Stella Adler Studio.
