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The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail | Introduction

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, was first published in New York in 1971 during the Vietnam War. The play, which was a clear protest against the war, used a related incident from America's history to comment on the current war. In 1846, the writer, Henry David Thoreau, spent a night in jail for not paying his taxes. Thoreau refused to pay money that would support the war that was currently being waged against Mexico. This incident later provided the basis for Thoreau's popular essay, "Civil Disobedience." Lawrence and Lee's immensely popular play, which was deliberately produced in regional theaters as opposed to on or off Broadway, struck a chord with Vietnam-era audiences. In fact, the play was so relevant to the times that it was temporarily shut down shortly after its first performances in 1970, when another anti-Vietnam protest—at Kent State University—resulted in the death of several students.

Despite the lack of critical commentary, the play continues to be one of the most popular works by Lawrence and Lee, a writing team who enjoyed a fifty-two-year collaboration and who also wrote the immensely popular play, Inherit the Wind. In The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, time and setting are shifted between each episodic scene without indication or explanation, forcing the audience or reader to pay close attention. These dream-like effects serve to highlight the main themes of the play—rebelling against authority and expressing one's individuality—universal themes that have appealed to many audiences, both nationally and internationally, since the play's first production.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail was published in a reissue edition in 1992, which is available from Bantam Books.

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Summary

Act 1
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail takes place in Concord, Massachusetts, and the surrounding area. As the stage directions note, "time and space are awash here." The play starts in one time period and then abruptly shifts around to many other times and places. At all times throughout the play, Henry David Thoreau's jail cell can be seen in the background. The play starts at its latest point in time, during a Concord winter when Ralph Waldo Emerson is an old man, walking with his wife, Lydian. With his wife's help, Waldo remembers the name of Henry (Thoreau), who was his best friend. With this realization, the action shifts to Henry's jail cell, when the writer is a young man.

Henry's mother asks Henry why he is in jail, and he gives vague answers, a tactic that he uses throughout the play. Henry shows what his mother calls his strangeness by questioning the order of the alphabet. Henry's brother, John, comes into the jail cell, and their mother leaves. The location shifts to a sunny field at an earlier time, when Henry has just returned from Harvard. Henry and John talk about Henry's education, which Henry counts as worthless except for hearing the lectures of Waldo, whom he says he wants to emulate. Back in the jail cell, Henry talks with his cellmate, Bailey, who has been accused of burning down a barn; Bailey has been waiting for his trial for three months, a fact that outrages Henry.

Henry tries to talk to Bailey about conformity, but Bailey is not an educated man. Henry teaches Bailey how to spell his name, then grabs a chair from the jail cell and moves to the front of the stage, shifting back in time to when he was a teacher. He is interrupted by Deacon Nehemiah Ball, the Chairman of the Concord School Committee, who criticizes Henry's deviations from the approved school textbooks. Henry gets into a theological argument with Ball, who is outraged at Henry's transcendentalist beliefs, and Henry provokes the class to laugh at Ball. John later tells Henry he should apologize to save his job, which Henry does. However, although Ball excuses him, he forces Henry to whip six of his students for laughing. Henry reluctantly does this, then quits teaching, just as Waldo quits his position as Unitarian pastor, in another time-space shift.

Henry proposes to John that they start their own unconventional school, which they do. Henry and John stand in a meadow teaching a number of students, including Ellen, a beautiful young woman... » Complete The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Summary