Based on Ernest J. Gaines’ National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940’s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man. The disheartened Wiggins had once harbored dreams of escaping from his impoverished youth, yet he returned to his home town after university, to teach children whose lives seemed as unpromising as Jefferson’s. The two men forge a bond as they come to understand what it means to resist and defy one’s own fate.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Rick Foucheux as Paul Bonin
Keith Glover as Grant Wiggins
Jamahl Marsh as Jefferson
Linda Powell as Vivian Baptiste
Jefferson A. Russell as Reverend Moses Ambrose
Jerry Whiddon as Sam Guidry
Beatrice Winde as Emma Glenn
Directed by Nick Olcott. Recorded at Voice of America in Washington DC.
It’s Christmas Eve, 1938, and 15-year-old Cassidy Smith is very pregnant with the child of 40ish Reed Hooker. Cassidy is desperate to marry Reed, Reed is desperate to open Louisiana’s hottest new taxi-dancing emporium and neither are prepared for the arrival of Reed’s wife, Sue Jack Hooker, a dangerous beauty who has just been let out of the penitentiary. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley spins one of her most colorful tales, as she follows a hilarious band of ne’er-do-wells trying to scratch dreams from the Louisiana mud.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Jack Black, Brandon Maggart, Jim McLure, Laurel Moglen, Elizabeth Ruscio, Jean Smart and Kurtwood Smith.
This Pulitzer Prize-winner is a deeply touching and funny play about three eccentric sisters from a small Southern town rocked by scandal when Babe, the youngest, shoots her husband. Humor and pathos abound as the sisters unite with an intense young lawyer to save Babe from a murder charge, and overcome their family’s painful past. A BBC co-production.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Ray Baker, Donna Bullock, Arye Gross, Glenne Headly, Sondra Locke and Belita Moreno.
