Hag-Seed: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

The prison hallways are nothing like Shakespearean dungeons; rather, they’re painted an innocuous light green and seem like they could belong to a university building, except for the utter lack of decoration and their sterile cleanliness. Although the doors are closed, this is not a cellblock but rather the wing where prisoners meet with social workers, priests, and teachers like Felix. Felix doesn’t ever interact with these people, whom he thinks of as “moralizing” and judgmental.

Many of these workers see Felix as a bad influence, allowing “damaged men” to re-enact scenes of violence and carnage that might reawaken the traumas of their youth. In his head, Felix rails that theater is “the art of true illusions,” which performs trauma in order to overcome it. He knows that they would respond by saying he’s “too abstract” and naïve about the prisoners’ actual mindsets, but he feels confident that he’s doing a good thing by allowing them to exercise their hidden talents. However, he never says anything confrontational because he doesn’t want to lose his precarious security in the prison.

In the classrooms where Felix conducts his classes, there are no video cameras—he’s insisted that the actors must feel secure and not spied upon. He’s never had any serious problems with discipline, and never used his pager. At his disposal he has three small rooms to use for rehearsal, and two “demonstration cells” built for a history course, which the prisoners reinvent as army tents, throne rooms, cages, and dungeons. Staging Lady Macduff’s death there was almost too intense; for many prisoners, it triggered flashbacks to violence they experienced as children.

The last room on the hall is a large classroom where Felix holds his discussions and lectures. Thanks to Estelle’s maneuvering, it has a computer, although no Internet. It’s an unassuming room, always smelling slightly bad, but it’s also Felix’s entire domain—both his “place of exile” and his “theater.”