As Divine Eye stalks around the courtyard, upkeeping his fuck-around-and-find out aire, Divine G and Mike Mike consider him, looking there across the concrete at his personhood and discussing what an invite to RTA may do to him. Domingo recalls leaning upon the wisdom and undeniable force of Maclin, who was himself incarcerated at Sing Sing for fifteen years.
“I had to lean into that because, yes, I don’t have a lived experience in that way,” he admits. “I knew that was part of his gift to the process, to help us create a depiction of these people that you never see, people who are human, who have aspirations and dreams and desires to build differently, to get tools for betterment to be of service in some way, shape or form.”
The actor goes on to praise the importance of Maclin’s first-hand knowledge, saying there was “a great balance between the two of us. What he didn’t have, I had in volume, and vice versa. The juxtaposition of it is already fascinating. They build very strong personalities, but have very different ways and different sets of tools to actually move through these spaces. But at some point they realized they need each other instead of being separate. I mean, what a beautiful message that is for people in the world… There’s nothing more powerful than when they embrace at the end and it feels like the heavens sink.”
Domingo has stated that “art might be the parachute that saves us all,” and so I asked him how acting for the stage and the screen has saved him; what he hopes art does for people, for humanity, for the species in the decades to come.
“What a question. I can immediately say that when I was doing a show called Passing Strange, I lost my mother. I was untethered in every single way. I just lost my father six months before. I was working through the biggest emotions that anyone could ever feel or experience and feeling completely lost. My art was the thing I held onto, where it helped me grieve, [to] give words to things that were unspeakable, [to] find a way and a path forward.”
