A Passion for Justice: An Encounter with Clarence Darrow

It's been three score and ten years since the mighty Clarence Darrow strode the land, surely everybody's pick for one of the great trial lawyers of all time. Actor Paul Morella brings him to life at the Olney Theatre (to 9/13) in a play co-authored with Jack Marshall, artistic director of Arlington's American Century Theater.

Let me say upfront that I'm not a big fan of one-man shows, but I am of Mr. Morella's acting and since I missed his performance at the Arts Barn in Gaithersburg last year, where I heard lots of good reports, I put it on my TTD list. And I'm glad I did!

Mr. Morella gives an energetic portrayal, delivered with self-assurance, in a role he clearly owns. It is so realistic at times I felt like I wanted to raise my hand and ask a question. The labor-of-love performance is one big workout that would have made the old jurist proud.

The play begins with the actor entering from the back of the house, proceeding toward the stage - where the out-of-kilter halls of justice backdrop, by scenic designer Christina Todesco, hovers over stacks and stacks of books, lying askew. He reviews his past and begins on a journey of his key court cases, going back and forth in time. Excellent lighting by Andrew Cissna transforms a world of gray, bringing ideas and perspectives into clear view. At the outset, it looks like a memory play from either the land of the living or the big courtroom in the sky. The folksy opening is calculated to have the lawyer bond with the audience as he did with the jury in real life.

The play works best when Mr. Morella engages the audience with details of his early family history- clearly this apple did not fall far from his formative family tree - the father, a free thinker, and mother united in a love for books and ideas. His desire to win parental approval along with two failed marriages and one free love affair pique our interest further: what makes this guy tick? When Passion for Justice moves to the courtroom, the audience seemingly changes.

The opening statements and summations to the jury (and later judges) are set pieces, which are less dramatic - Mr. Morella lets the words do the talking here. But as narratives they are more interesting, particularly for me the first two, the Oshkosh Woodworkers Strike, a conspiracy case which is transformed by Darrow into a rallying cry for liberty, and the old Wobbly Big Bill Haywood conspiracy to commit murder trial in Idaho. Mr. Darrow, a hired gun from Chicago, rode these and other labor victories for 18 years until his luck ran out, with the McNamara Brothers bombing of the LA Times. These two were clearly guilty; less certain was Darrow's complicity in two separate instances of jury tampering (read: bribing), which placed the attorney at the scene of the crime and in the defendant's box, around the close of the first act. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said there are no second acts in American lives, had obviously not considered Clarence Darrow.

For a more focused dramatic effect, Passion for Justice juggles history, skipping over the Pullman trial of 1895; omitting the second juror tampering trial which ended in a hung jury, and just about ended his legal career, if not his life by suicide; and rearranges the time line of his big three cases: Sweet (1926), Scopes (1925), and Leopold and Loeb (1924), whose famous lines from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, conclude the play. Strict issues of legality seem to subside as the big ideas of history come to the forefront: justice, freedom, and capital punishment. Indeed the cases seem to take on lives of their own - they became proxy battles for their respective champions. Mr. Morella is particularly effective in the Sweet oration, unpacking the race issue with care and eloquence for the jury. His alternating, back-and-forth portrayal of Darrow's cross examination in the Scopes trial of William Jennings Bryan, is as hilarious as it is spell-binding. And you almost feel sorry for the judge in the Leopold and Loeb trial, after Darrow eloquently paints him into the corner, then hands him the brush.

The play raises a number of important legal issues, but one in particular. Darrow clearly knew how to work a jury and the system. As we see again and again, after establishing rapport, he lays the charge in their hands: they are the only ones standing between the barbarians at the gates and civilization. So obvious is his play for jury nullification, where citizens are encouraged to acquit a defendant for a law they believe is unjust, it's not hard to see why The Attorney for the Damned has become such a hot property of late. The deck of the times was clearly stacked against the defendants. Did he have the right to reverse the imbalance through these or other dubious means? It depends on which side of the law you are sitting. What he couldn't ensure by persuasion, he accomplished with persistence, wearing them down with seven and eleven-hour speeches. Invite him to your trial but not your annual meeting!

Dramaturgically, it's unclear from the structure whether this is a memory play, magical realism (Clarence Darrow come back from the grave) or some sort of time trip. The beginning, where the audience looms large in surveying his life, does not jive with the open-ended conclusion in the courtroom, where he is making his pitch to one man. The play seems to call for closure, either with a return to the beginning or present action or some reassessment. Since the play is still evolving, I might also consider extending the jury tampering episode until the end of the first act, when the lawyer would have been about 53, and aging the actor for the second act when he would have been in his late 60s. Sound design by Jarett Pisani starts each act with off-stage murmuring of courtroom voices, but is not otherwise employed. I would use more sound and audiovisuals to break up the soliloquies to the jury and judge and chart the time line of the cases.

While public notions of determinism and heredity in crime have been replaced by CSI and court TV, and convictions once obtained on shaky or no grounds are now being been made on circumstantial evidence, the search for justice continues. It seems each month there is a fresh report of an innocent man or woman set free, either from DNA analysis or the psychology of eyewitness memory, two of many scientific advances Clarence Darrow would have undoubtedly exploited.

Sound check: Excellent, you could hear a pin drop!

Program notes: Very good with artistic director and writer comments along with Clarence Darrow quotes

Applause meter: Recommended, 3+ hands

Runtime: 1 hour and 45 minutes with an intermission

Photo credit: Stan Barouh