A legit stage presence before he emerged as a face on “House of Cards,” the clean-cut Arcelus brings a personable quality to Jake. The lunatic who fights for this thankless job is Jake Brigance (Sebastian Arcelus), an idealistic but also fiercely ambitious young defense lawyer Grisham has acknowledged as his alter-ego. Although the thesp asserts the father’s righteous anger with great dignity, a lawyer would have to be out of his mind to take up his defense. Here, he’s faced with Carl Lee Hailey (John Douglas Thompson, a hero for all seasons), an enraged African-American man who shot and killed the two redneck louts who raped and battered his 10-year-old daughter. Fred Dalton Thompson, a fixture on TV’s best courtroom dramas, views this wise old bird with more subtlety, as someone both amused and appalled by the human spectacle he observes from the bench. Under the whirling blades of old-fashioned ceiling fans, a stern circuit court judge with the finger-pointing name of Omar Noose is presiding over a sensational case of murder. Whenever the walls fall away to make way for additional wooden set pieces that glide on and off the stage on a turntable, the versatile set functions just as well as jail cells and law offices and the viewing site for a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning. James Noone’s expressive set, made almost entirely of polished wood and sensuously curved like the staves of a barrel, has the mellow glow (provided by lighting designer Jeff Croiter) you’d expect to find in an old country courthouse in the Deep South.
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