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The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail

by SecretsAdmin   ::   posted on Mar. 23, 2006 - 12:00am

If you don't like how the government is spending your tax dollars, you could stop paying them. But that approach will only bite you in the end, as Henry David Thoreau discovered in 1846, when he withheld his taxes in protest of the United States-Mexican War. He was tossed in the clinker. This play, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (of Inherit the Wind fame) during the Vietnam War, makes a timely reappearance, but it likely won't rile up the public the way it did in the seventies, when its controversial anti-war message led to it being shut down on various stages. As for Thoreau's act of civil disobedience, he may have paid the taxman in the end, but he never did cough up the five bucks Harvard College wanted before it would issue his diploma. So there. 245 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-333-3010; www.theatreintheround.org