There are nights in the theater that are so electric, so compelling, that even critics want to weep with joy. Opening night at A Lesson Before Dying at Round House Theatre was one of those nights.

In 1993, Ernest J. Gaines won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel about an ignorant young black man on death row and the black teacher who is coerced into teaching the condemned prisoner how to “die like a man.”

Jefferson has been convicted of murdering a storekeeper in a small Louisiana town. The best defense his lawyer offered was that Jefferson is as ignorant as a hog and cannot be held accountable. But Miss Emma, the lady who raised Jefferson, refuses to allow him to go to his death believing and behaving as if he is no better than an animal. She coerces the sheriff into allowing a teacher to visit Jefferson, then commandeers a reluctant elementary school teacher, Grant Wiggins, for the job. Neither man sees any sense in the arrangement. What good is insight or dignity to a man about to die so ignobly?

Playwright Romulus Linney—the father of actor Laura Linney—has adapted Gaines’s novel for the stage with great care. This is a story so compelling that it needs no embellishments, and Linney keeps the focus where it belongs, on the two men struggling to find meaning in a miserable life and a senseless death.

This is a superb production. Shane Taylor (Jefferson) and KenYatta Rogers (Wiggins) rub up against each other like two sticks until the stage itself catches fire. Beverly A. Coshan also shines as the indomitable Miss Emma. In fact, not a single actor puts a foot wrong in this production. The set is spare. The lighting is stark. Director Timothy Douglas has the wisdom to let a compelling play and a brilliant cast speak for themselves.

A Lesson Before Dying teaches an eternal truth—that courage cannot be predicted or cowardice presumed. In the end, what Martin Luther King dreamed—that a man will be judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character—is reality on the Round House stage. The audience is the better for having seen it.