The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
By Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
A Play in Two Acts
“A superior play, a literary work as well as a theatrical experience… scene after scene
moves you to laughter or close to tears.”
—George Oppenheimer, Newsday
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is an exciting, poignant, accessible, and intellectually engrossing play in two acts, with several shifting and interpolated scenes from the real and imagined life of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). The great nineteenth century American author and poet-philosopher is one of the most beloved figures in American literary history. The play is a dramatic representation of a vital moment in our history, in which the 29-year-old Thoreau’s ardent refusal to pay taxes—in protest to the United States government’s involvement in the Mexican War—landed him in prison in his home of Concord, Massachusetts.
This famous act of civil disobedience, though it was daring and unprecedented, is merely the point of departure for Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s widely celebrated drama. As the play progresses, the audience will witness many of the formative experiences in young Thoreau’s life. The audience will come to understand what motivates this brilliant, independent, and ever-unorthodox writer and thinker, and what matters most and least to him in life and why. Perhaps most importantly, the inspiration and development of Thoreau’s personal, natural, and influential philosophy are vividly illustrated.
In another stunning double cast production, Producer/Director Mark Manley and a cast and crew of approximately forty students have the daunting task of recreating this awe-inspiring American drama.
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail will be presented November 9, 10, 11 at 7:30pm. and on November 12 at 6pm in the Xenia High School Auditorium. Over forty students comprise the talented cast and crew for The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. We are very excited about this production.
Tickets for the production will be on sale at Xenia High School beginning on Thursday, November 2 from 8:00am.-3:00pm. All seats are $7.00
Please join us for this most singular theatrical event.
Oh my, promoting an anti-American traitor? Thoreau did not back a war launched by the U.S. government. He was a yellow-bellied scofflaw who hatede our troops!
“…from the war’s very beginning, a small but highly visible group of intellectuals, clergymen, pacifists, abolitionists, and Whig and Democratic politicians denounced the war as brutal aggression against a ‘poor, feeble, distracted country.’”
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=318
[...] From the recent production of “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” [...]