Auditions for WNMU Fall Drama
“The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail”
The WNMU Drama Discipline will hold auditions for the Fall Production of Lawrence and Lee’s historical drama, “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.” These auditions will be held on Sunday, Aug. 27, at 1:30 p.m., and Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Aug. 28, 29, and 30 at 6:30 p.m. All auditions will be held in the Webb Theater on the WNMU campus.
“The play has roles for 11 men and five women plus a few extras,” said Jack Ellis, director of the drama discipline and the production. “There are lots of opportunities for people in the community and students to participate at many levels of experience and commitment.”
“The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” deals with the time in the life of the great American writer, naturalist and philosopher when his unpopular ideas about the Mexican-American war in the 1840s brought him into conflict with governmental authority. Thoreau refused to pay taxes to support a war he thought was unjust and he was thrown into jail. His transcendentalist philosophy of peaceful protest influenced such figures as Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Count Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King. Thoreau was the student and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whom he drew his inspiration as a teacher, philosopher, protester and human being.
The play was written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in 1971 and produced around the world as part of the protest movement during the Vietnam war.
The play will be presented in the Webb Theater on Oct. 27-29 and Nov. 2-4. Rehearsals will begin on Sept. 1, 2006. Please call 538-6502 for further information.
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