Theatrical Outfit’s Lesson Before Dying schools audience on death penalty

The program for

A Lesson Before Dying takes place in 1948 Louisiana. Sixty years later, as I write this in Georgia on Sep. 22, 2008, in less than 24 hours, Troy Davis maybe put to death by lethal injection fo rhe 1989 murder of Savanahh Police Officer Mark Allen MacPhail — a murder which many believe he may not have commited. For Officer MacPhail, Mr. Davis, for their families, and for all of us, I pray that a day will come when no one would find the treatment of the character Jefferson in Ernest Gaines’ novel dramatically plausible — when there would no longer be an audience for this kind of tragedy. In the meantime, I must have hope, and I have not found another place in which it can be learned other than in this particular classroom.

(Troy Davis received a stay of execution on Oct. 24.)

Although A Lesson Before Dying involves a black man convicted for a crime he probably did not commit, it’s not a race to save Jefferson from the electric chair, like A Time to Kill. Nor does it explore the racist Southern legal system of the era along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird — the racial injustice of the system is taken as a disheartening given. Instead, it’s most like the movie Dead Man Walking, in which an outsider tries to prepare a condemned man to be executed.