The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is not just a play about rebellion and non-conformity being an essential necessity to democracy, it is an act of rebellion and non-conformity itself. It is not by mere accident that the play had its professional premiere in Washington, D.C. in 1970. The notorious Kent State shooting of unarmed students by members of the National Guard took place in May, the Chicago Seven were acquitted of conspiring to incite a riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago two years earlier and in June the voting age was officially lowered to eighteen.
Rebellion and non-conformity hung heavy in the air and the power and responsibility of the vote was extended to millions. The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail covers all these bases in its tale of a crazy guy living out in the woods refusing to pay his taxes because of opposition to a war he deemed to be politically motivated, unnecessary to the defensive interest of the country and just plain illegal. Another thing about 1970: After running for President on a promise to end the war in Vietnam in 1968, just two years later Richard Nixon expanded the scope of the conflict by ordering troops to bomb and invade Cambodia. Anti-war sentiment in the United States was about to reach an all-time high.
That the play has an obvious subtext about dissent and protest over the Vietnam War goes without saying. That Thoreau is intended to be a 19th century precursor to the hippie philosophy of dropping out of society as a way of combating its worst elements should also be pretty obvious. That mindless conformity to the majority is no worse than complacent non-conformity also speaks strongly to political divide between those blindly supporting the war no matter and those crying loudly against, but taking not active steps to change things is a bit easier to miss, but only if you were the type of person unlikely to be in the audience for this play in the first place.
A celebration of non-conformity that treks along a difficult, thorny and meandering path from complacency to activism may not necessarily be bound to fail, but it probably shouldn’t be celebrated for succeeding. To get the point of rebellious opposition to the status quo almost by definition requires that form meets content. Since it is clear that the content is a celebration of “rocking the boat” and a wholesale rejection of settling for “going along” with the crowd in order to avoid trouble, the form should reflect that ideological stance.
And so The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail does. Although co-written by the authors of Inherit the Wind which was a Broadway smash and then a critically acclaimed film, in its purest author-mandated form, this is nothing less than guerrilla theater. It is a rejection of realism and everything associated with big-time Broadway-bound drama. Some of the most important words found in the script by Jerome Lawrence and the ironically-named Robert E. Lee are not spoken as dialogue by the players, but directions and suggestions by the playwrights.
“be guided by Thoreau’s own advice: Simplify! The more you omit physically, the more your audience will be called to contribute in imagination…all of the people of the play, including the audience should be encouraged to partake in a banquet of imagining.”
This is not a Broadway show. This is guerrilla theater.
