For This Drama, Some Actors Had to Return to Prison by Choice

Between the jangle of keys and the beeps of walkie-talkies, the men watched.

The occasion was an advance screening of the new A24 film “Sing Sing,” and at the prison it’s set in, the men were taking in a fictional version of their lives.

Amid a heat wave, the audience — a mix of the studio’s guests and incarcerated men in hunter-green pants — crowded into the correctional facility’s chapel-turned-cinema. With the sun streaming through a stained-glass window of Christ kneeling before the cross, the viewers fanned themselves with paper plates.

It was the first time Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin had been to the prison in Ossining, N.Y., since 2012, when he finished serving more than 17 years for robbery.

While incarcerated, Maclin had starred as Hamlet in the prison’s makeshift auditorium. Now he was free and returning for his screen debut. He entered the chapel with a grin and a triumphant bounce.

Based on the work of the nonprofit Rehabilitation Through the Arts, “Sing Sing,” directed by Greg Kwedar, follows the production of a prison troupe’s first comedy, a fever dream of a play featuring time travel, ancient Egypt and Shakespeare. Maclin and the recent Oscar nominee Colman Domingo star as fellow prisoners alongside Paul Raci (also an Oscar nominee) as their earnest director.