Shirley Lauro's Clarence Darrow's Last Trial is getting its world-premiere production in South Florida, and there's reasonable doubt that audiences at New Theater in Coral Gables will go away satisfied. The play is based on a 1930s murder trial notorious for its allegations and clash of cultures -- gang rape, murder, a well-connected family from America's Deep South, white U.S. sailors in a pre-statehood Hawaii. Into this steps Darrow, the legendary defender of otherwise lost causes, whose best days by this time are behind him.
This isn't the Darrow of Inherit the Wind -- and that might be an inherently significant problem. Lauro's Darrow, just a few years before his death, displays flashes of arrogance but not brilliance. Mostly, though, this Darrow seems to be operating in a cloud of late-in-life desperation. Nevertheless, actor John Felix gets everything the script has to offer, and there are some effective moments from others in the eight-person cast. Designs for sets (Rich Simone) and, especially, lighting (Micheal Foster) are big assets.
Clarence Darrow's Last Trial begins just after Darrow has been dismissed from the Scottsboro Boys defense team. This hurts both the ego and bank account of the lawyer who often worked for free, who famously faced off against William Jennings Bryan in the so-called the Scopes "Monkey Trial" that Lawrence and Lee dramatized, and who, in the Leopold and Loeb murder case, opened the way to the use of temporary insanity as a legal defense. At the start of Lauro's play, the celebrity lawyer considers selling his many autographed books. Instead, he leaves cold, Depression-era Chicago for a hefty paycheck and a posh hotel in territorial Hawaii. There he'll defend a Georgia sailor who, with his mother-in-law, is accused of murdering a native believed to have raped the lieutenent's wife. And he'll do it in a place that doesn't mandate the pretrial sharing of evidence known as discovery, and where words, as we are told more than once, "are cheaply bought and sold."
As the mother-in-law, the sailor and the wife, Angie Radosh, John Bixler and Jenny Levine do well in the tricky roles of duplicitous Atlantans. Susan Dempsey has an appealing naturalness as Darrow's encouraging wife. So does Tara Vodihn as the prosecutor, here named Naniloa Whitefield Chan -- as Lauro's Darrow describes her, a mixed-blood native, "a lady law, and one of them." This is one of Lauro's biggest dramatic liberties: In fact, the prosecutor was a man named John Kelley.
More troublesome for the play is the decision to turn a key defense witness, a psychiatrist played by William Schwartz, into comic relief. And the local radio reporter, played by Ricky J. Martinez with an accent that borders on stage-Asian, comes off as too deferential.
Lauro is widely known for her adaptation of A Piece of My Heart, about women -- nurses and others -- serving in Vietnam. This fact-based story of Clarence Darrow has been workshopped several times in Connecticut and New York since 2001, and Lauro says she went through a spate of onsite rewrites during the 35 days immediately preceding its opening in Coral Gables. The discovery process on Clarence Darrow's Last Trial might not yet be over.
