I first saw A Lesson Before Dying in a top-notch production at Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre more than a decade ago, and my ultimate response was: Where’s the beef? After all, this was a show that promised to show us how an innocent black man, condemned to die in the electric chair, was taught by an impassioned schoolteacher how to bear his terrible fate. But there was no lesson in Lesson — it seemed to me that the promised epiphany never appeared, and that the attitudes conveyed to our falsely-convicted hero came to little more than “Keep your head up.” Fortunately, the acting was superb, so even if the script failed to deliver, the evening still offered some satisfactions.
Well, now I’ve seen Stageworks’ new version of Romulus Linney’s play – adapted from a novel by Ernest J. Gaines – and I’m sorry to say that it’s every bit as disappointing as its predecessor. Further, the acting in the Stageworks show (which I saw in a preview) is only occasionally persuasive, so there are moments in this experience when there’s very little to hold our attention. Fortunately,
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.