Vandalia, Mo. ? As a child, Felecia Kegler was a “tube-a-holic.” She’d watch soap operas one after the other, acting out dialogue in front of her bedroom mirror and wrapping shirts on her head to mimic the swing of long hair.

“I had a big imagination then, still do,” says Kegler, who is now 25 and serving 13 years in prison for arson. “I can build a set in my mind and not be in prison.”

But she is — in the big, barn-red maximum-security Vandalia Correctional Center, rehearsing her role in a production of “Macbeth.”

Regal and confident, Kegler is perfectly cast as the controlling, deviant Lady Macbeth, who spurs her husband to kill the king and take the throne for himself. The play’s themes of greed, ambition and wrong turns aren’t lost on the actor-inmates who say the production has given them insights into their own missteps — and potential.

Between rehearsals, Kegler and the other actors reflect on what St. Louis theater director Agnes Wilcox delivered by bringing Prison Performing Arts to Vandalia a year and a half ago.

Kegler, for example, has learned focus, leadership and humility. “She has taught me a sense of commitment and being serious,” says Kegler, a high school dropout who before joining the theater project would never finish projects and tasks. “She’s our director, but more than that, our teacher friend.”

For Janiece Moore, 28, prison theater has helped her reclaim the person she was before an abusive relationship and drugs earned her a 25-year sentence for assault.

“We’re so used to (prison) staff treating us like we’re convicts,” says Moore, whose broad smile and animation belie the torment of her character, Macbeth. “For Agnes, we’re people first. We’re not accustomed to that in here. We love her just for that.”

The prison theater program has lifted the inmate-actors’ spirits, and helped them stay straight and find hope in their lives, according to Sha-Shona Wade, who coordinates activities for the women at Vandalia.

Felicia Kegler, 25, right, goes over a scene for her role as Lady Macbeth with director Agnes Wilcox during practice for the Prison Performing Arts production of Macbeth on Feb. 10 at the maximum-security women's prison in Vandalia, Mo.

Inmates who see a play performed at their institution are lining up for the next available slots to join the program. “A lot of women see the potential to try and straighten themselves up,” Wade says. “Someday they want to participate.”

Inmates in similar programs elsewhere echo those sentiments. At the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, for example, inmates write, act, do set design, and produce a play a year that many find transforms their lives. Inmate and artist John Schiavon, set for parole this month, said the program “has helped me so much.”

Shakespeare behind bars

Vandalia’s Wilcox, a slight, Energizer Bunny of a woman, got her first peek inside a women’s prison as a girl growing up in Wisconsin, where her mother was an adviser for the state prison system. Wilcox learned that inmates were people, just like everyone else.

She went on to direct “In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes” at The Actors Studio in New York, and conceived and directed “Hey, Stay a While, The Theatre Songs of John Guare” at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Mass. She also directed at the Theatre of Latin American in New York and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, National Theatre Institute in Waterford, Conn. And she assisted Louis Malle on his critically acclaimed 1980 movie, “Atlantic City.”

As artistic director of The New Theater in St. Louis, she brought productions to prisons, juvenile detention centers and other nontraditional community stages. Then, in 1999, an inmate at the Missouri men’s prison in Pacific who had attended every performance told Wilcox: “We want to do this.”

“He probably said that to me for years, and eventually I could see that we could make that happen,” Wilcox says. “I proposed Shakespeare, and he wasn’t frightened. I proposed ‘Hamlet’ and he wasn’t frightened.”

Dana Ruff, left, Toni Sullivan and other inmates read their scripts during rehearsal for the Prison Performing Arts production of Macbeth in February at the maximum-security women's prison in Vandalia, Mo.

From that conversation sprang the Hamlet Project, weekly seminars, workshops, rehearsals and live performances of “Hamlet” by the inmates at the medium-security men’s prison, who earned college credit for their efforts.

Shakespeare is effective at other prisons as well. Ten years ago, Shakespeare Behind Bars — the subject of a 90-minute documentary that premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival — was launched at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Ky. The inmate actors relate to Shakespeare, said Curt Tofteland, program founder and producing art director of Kentucky Shakespeare Festival.

“He’s not a soapbox, he simply writes about human beings,” Tofteland said. “Guys connect with his bigness, the depth of his themes. He makes them think, and many of them discover for first time, they’re intelligent. He provides an opportunity for hope, for being a better person.”

Beyond the bard

Other prison programs go beyond Shakespeare.

Since its founding in 1990, the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has produced 178 original plays performed in 18 prisons, and 111 plays in four youth facilities. Founded by Buzz Alexander, an English professor at the university, the project uses students, faculty and community volunteers, who go to the prisons in pairs once a week.

Wilcox now spends much of her week inside Missouri prisons, directing inmates at Vandalia and Bowling Green in classic plays whose unfamiliar language is dissected, and scenes debated, rehearsed and finally performed.

“I have seen a man unable to sound out two-syllable words learn them by rote and gain confidence and literacy,” she says. “He had a reason to learn; he wanted a bigger part. Older hands at prison theater convince the new ones that they can do it, and they do, even though it’s daunting.”

The women at Vandalia are studying and performing “Macbeth,” one act per semester, while the men at Bowling Green are tackling “The Gospel at Colonus,” a musical adaptation of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, “Oedipus at Colonus,” with its powerful themes of redemption and forgiveness. Both are long-term projects involving 10 to 25 inmates as performers, designers and technicians.

Earlier this year, Wilcox began an intensive, three-week Forum Theatre workshop at a women’s prison in Chillicothe that uses improvisation and role-playing to solve real-life problems. The participants in Chillicothe, who are serving 30 years to life, looked at the challenges of long-term incarceration, such as getting along with a cellmate for life and the destructiveness of a rumor mill in a high-security, closed institution.

“They were astonishing, so open, … stronger than anything I’ve encountered,” Wilcox says. “The administration was shocked by their straightforwardness to speak the truth. They were very happy to see us.”

A great escape

This spring and summer, male inmates at the Bowling Green and Charleston prisons will use the same theater strategy to address a challenge of their choosing.

However, of the seven inmates who participated in Missouri’s prison theater and who have been released, none so far has had time to pursue a theater career. Wilcox says that they are struggling to support themselves and create a new personal routine. But the interest is definitely there.

“We’ve talked to them about forming an alumni theater company because they are really talented. At the moment, they have few creative outlets. I think by autumn their lives may be more settled,” she says.

The Missouri Department of Corrections considers the prison theater project a “great supplement” to inmates’ education, spokesman John Fougere said. “It shows them something they had not experienced on the street … they have to have a lot on the ball to take part in the program; it’s high level stuff they’re studying.”

Wilcox says the actors gain confidence, perhaps for the first time.

“They are told they are stupid, untalented and unworthy, which led to behavior that proves what they’ve been told,” she says. “This allows them to see themselves as someone different than they thought they were. I see actors who are happy in their activity because they are so stimulated. Theater work takes them outside the institution.”

The prison program has changed Wilcox, too.

“It’s taught me never to judge,” she acknowledges. “When I read news accounts of a crime now, I read it from both sides — the victim and the accused.”