University of Virginia Library

The Virginia Players

The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail

Authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however
measured, or far away."

— Henry David Thoreau

William Olson as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carol Hurlburt as His Wife, and Thoreau

Photography By
Roy Alson

Lee Medinets as Deacon Ball (third from left) and Thoreau With Townspeople Outside Church

March 8 - 13 8:30 Nightly

Minor Hall

Box Office Hours 2 - 8:30

Phone 924 - 3051

This week the Virginia Players will present "The Night
Thoreau Spent in Jail," a new play by Jerome Lawrence and
Robert E. Lee, authors of the Tony Award winner "Inherit the
Wind" and "Auntie Mame."

By special agreement with the American Playwrights Theater,
the Virginia Players production will be one of nearly a hundred
college, community, and resident theater productions the play
will have had before it opens on Broadway in May. The film
rights have already been purchased by Hal Wallis, producer of
such films as "Becket" and "Anne of the Thousand Days."

"The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail" is the result of seven years
of research and study by the playwrights: some of the play was
actually written on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord,
Massachusetts, along the same paths trod by Thoreau. The play is
an examination of Thoreau on the most dramatic night of his life
- the night in 1846 when he was imprisoned for refusing to pay
his poll tax to support what he considered to be an immoral war.
It was an act of civil disobedience that he later justified in a tract
that spread his ideas from Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther
King, Jr.

The director of the Virginia Players production is Robert
McLaughlin. Scenic and lighting design is by David Weiss,
costume design by Lois Garren. The cast includes Thomas Busch,
William Olson, Carol Hurlburt, Jim Carrington, J. Craig Johnson,
Helen Benham, Elizabeth Mochel, Lee Medinets, Don Gourley,
Ken Lambert, Tank Wells, Tony Gilbert, Barb Bishop, Mark
Hattan, Rick Coupe, Laura
Funkhauser, John Ledbetter,
Debbie Martin, Edgar Poe, and
Clay Guthridge.

Tickets are $1.50 Monday
through Thursday, $2.00 Friday
and Saturday, with a special
University student rate of $1.00
Monday through Wednesday.

Tank Wells as a Runaway Slave

Thomas Busch as Henry David Thoreau

Sound Man George Miller and Director Robert McLaughlin

Thomas Busch as Thoreau and Don Gourley as Edward Emerson