A Lesson Before Dying

From Obie Award-winning playwright Romulus Linney, adapted from the Critics Circle Award-winning novel by Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying powerfully addresses the basic predicaments of a human being striving for dignity in a world that often dismisses it. The play revolves around an illiterate, impulsive young black man living in rural Louisiana in 1948 as he awaits his execution for the death of a white man he didn’t kill. Engrossing, moving and ultimately devastating, A Lesson Before Dying brings to light the timeless subject of the death penalty and the ways in which the imprisoned find feedom even in the moment of their death.