Hark! The inmate angels sing

GOLDSBORO -- For his Christmas play, Freddie Cole Jr. picked a convicted murderer to play Angel No. 5, fixing a pair of white wings to his prison uniform.

He cast an inmate serving time for manslaughter as the weeping prophet Jeremiah, coaching him to loudly lament the sins of mankind.

And for a stagehand, Cole selected 58-year-old Tracey Johnson, a prisoner locked up as a habitual felon, who made his own Roman soldier helmet out of a shiny silver wrapper.

"It's a potato chip bag," said Johnson, pulling it over his eyes. "You turn it inside-out and put it on cardboard."

Underneath a set of aluminum-foil stars, the men of Wayne Correctional Center performed "What a Marvelous Night," acting out the birth of Jesus from the prison's concrete floor.

Cole wrote the play eight years ago, three decades into his own life sentence for murder, and he strives each December to build a convincing Bethlehem inside the rows of razor wire.

He doesn't get many visitors, having lived behind bars from age 19 to 55. But he stands with microphone in hand before the makeshift curtain crafted from a bedsheet, and he asks his audience of felons to keep their spirits bright at Christmas. Their savior, he reminds them, came from a lowly manger.

"We have Rastas in the cast," Cole boasts. "We have a messianic Jew. We have atheists. We all come together to talk about Christ. One pastor told me, 'Freddie, that's a little ministry.' "

Cole's drama follows the Christmas story from heaven to Earth, from the shepherd's field to the holy manger, introducing the crowd to drunken revelers at the overcrowded inn, the prophet Isaiah and archangel Michael - tattoos peeking out from under their ancient robes.

When they sing "Joy to the World," they sing it to stone-faced men whose only joy is counting the days until freedom. "We've got a tough audience," said Michael Benoy, 39, serving time for failure to return rented property. "A lot of these guys are shut down emotionally. They're hard. When we can come out and get them to laugh, it's a blessing."

To Cole, the Gospel of Luke offers a chance for rich comedy.

As Amram the wine-maker, Paul Fowler staggers across the stage, cross-eyed and woozy with drink, loudly complaining about the two shekels he received as payment for his potent spirits. "My part was fairly easy," said Fowler, a 30-year-old convicted of robbery. "I was a drunk at one time."

As Elam, also something of a lush, Curtis Keys stumbles into a brawl at the inn, then rises to perform an Egyptian hootchie dance, waggling his robed behind at the crowd. "Being in a place like this, it gave me a chance to learn a few things," said Keys, 59, a second-degree murder convict. "How good it is to be a good person rather than a bad person."

A lot of men find God in prison. They tend to lose him on the outside. It's easy to pray when you're desperate and lonesome. It's harder when life offers you a gun and the chance at a quick buck.

But these confined men will tell you what applause can do to strengthen your character and what it means to hear a compliment when society has condemned you to life in a box. Many of the actors in Cole's play have never performed onstage, not even as the back half of a reindeer in an elementary school Christmas pageant.

It means something, especially in a season of hope, to have somebody - anybody - say, "Good job." For this, the inmate players thank Superintendent Robert Hines.

"We can change," said Furman Richardson, 48, the murder convict who played an angel. "We can show society, with a little faith and confidence in us, we can try to give back to the world that we took away from."

Near the end, Christopher Largen bursts onto the stage, his head wrapped in a scarf for the role of Joseph. He had just four days to prepare for the role - to transform himself into Jesus' human father, shedding, for one night, his identity as a 23-year-old inmate with a conviction for breaking and entering. Largen throws his arms to the ceiling and calls out, "The Messiah is here! If you feel him in your hearts, please stand and give praise. Holy! Holy! Holy!"

The shepherds join him, arms outstretched, and the whole cast sings "Joy to the World" as felons in the audience clap hands.

Afterward, Largen raves about the fun he had. If he's still locked up next Christmas, he says, he'll join Cole's cast of players a second time.

But he doesn't plan on being anywhere near this prison stage. Next December, heaven willing, he'll offer praise as a free man.