This fall, John Grisham's debut novel A TIME TO KILL, one of the most celebrated courtroom dramas of the last several decades, becomes the first in his iconic collection of legal dramas to be adapted for the Broadway stage.
A TIME TO KILL is the incendiary story of a Southern community torn in half by an unspeakable crime. As the shocking news hits the public, small town America becomes the center of a media storm, where innocence is the victim, race is on trial and lives hang in the balance.
Part courtroom drama, part suspense thriller, pure theatrical dynamite, A TIME TO KILL begins performances September 28 at the Golden Theatre.
'It was my first book and the first that I have allowed to be adapted for the theatre. Rupert Holmes did an excellent job of translating it from the page to the stage, and I am happy that not only my loyal readers, but a whole new audience, will be able to experience this story in live theatre.'
- John Grisham
The play's a series of battles that don't quite add up to a war, possibly because the real enemy-Monolithic Whiteness-doesn't make an honest appearance. The show's less strenuously riveting moments, as opposed to the drowsy-making courtroom speeches, are also its best. I especially enjoyed the elliptical, only half-intelligible conversations between Jake and his mentor, disbarred, sleepily devious Lucien Wilbanks (Tom Skerritt), a progressive sot who enjoys regular regressions into Margaritaville. Skerritt is so relaxed, you can barely understand his cottony mouthfuls of dialogue, but he's a loose, disarming present in a highly staged, totally controlled environment. In A Time To Kill, every familiar beat arrives right on time-but Skerritt's always just a little late. I appreciated the spontaneity, intentional or not.
A Time to Kill,' also the basis for a memorable film, begins as a horrifying act is perpetrated upon a young black girl carrying groceries to her family. When her father, Carl Lee (here, John Douglas Thompson, excellent) finds out about the rape, he guns down the scoundrels. To keep him off death row, cocky attorney Jake Brigance (Sebastian Arcelus) will have to prove Carl Lee was temporarily insane...Arcelus ('House of Cards'), as the good Southern boy who takes on Carl Lee's case partly out of his own guilt over not preventing the crime, is lost here, almost as if he's just blandly working a table reading...Jake's wife and daughter have been mostly written out of the story; so, too, has a pivotal element of the book that had Ellen Roark's character attacked by the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, with this script, much of the action has been wrung right out of the story.
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