I first saw A Lesson Before Dying in a topnotch 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, there are two winning performances — B. Dexter Lewis' as teacher Grant Wiggins and Gloria Bailey's as Miss Emma Glenn — and as a white sheriff and his deputy, Chip Carter and Slake Counts are, at the least, solid. But in the key role of innocent Jefferson, Joshua Goff fails to show us the profound pain and confusion of a soul facing an unthinkable injustice, and if we can't believe in Jefferson's anguish, the human business around it loses its urgency.
Actually, I have to qualify this statement: in the first few minutes that he's on stage, Goff does seem appropriately burdened by his existential crisis. But as the drama unfolds, he loses this gravitas, and as the execution nears, we search in vain for a deepening of his character. Since Linney's script tends to plod along, offering little new information as one scene follows another, there are few intellectual pleasures to compensate for this emotional absence. Lesson has all the right values but only about 15 minutes' worth of substance.
Still, its premise is a rich one. Jefferson, an uneducated, seemingly unimportant laborer, is the only survivor in a shootout involving three other men, and he's convicted of murder when all he's really guilty of is a minor theft. Called a "hog" by his own public defender, he resolves to act like one during his detention — a small protest, but a potent one. Unwilling to see her godson go to the electric chair without dignity, Miss Emma Glenn persuades schoolteacher Grant Wiggins to visit with Jefferson, and to teach him to meet his absurd destiny with honor. But Jefferson resists Wiggins' teaching, and Wiggins further has to contend with a dogmatic minister — played with intermittent success by Ronn Bobb-Semple — and by his opinionated lover — played adequately by Tia Jemison. What do you say to a man who's about to lose his life for no good reason? How should he comport himself, what must he do in his last days? It's a question worthy of a Heidegger or a Camus, and the racial issues just make it more morally and socially pressing. So when the play fails to deliver, we feel that much more cheated. Why ask such a question if you don't have the merest beginning of an answer?
Anna Brennen's direction is more or less sure-handed, though there are a few too many tableaux in which the audience's needs seem to trump reality's. R. T. Williams' set of a storeroom under a courthouse is terrific, though, and Frank Chavez's excellent costumes are Southern to a T. Karla Hartley is responsible for the first-class lighting and evocative sound design.
What's most exasperating about A Lesson Before Dying is that it promises to speak to each of us in the audience. But if you're searching for a lesson before dying, you won't find it here.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2011.