Romulus Linney's "A Lesson Before Dying" is a strong message play that resonates in spite of an uneven production. It's all about self-worth and responsibility, negotiated between a young black man awaiting execution for a murder he didn't commit and a not-much-older black school teacher poised to flee the poverty and small town discrimination of 1948 Louisiana.

Jefferson (London Stanton) is a barely literate, back country boy found guilty of a murder he merely witnessed. Grant Wiggens (Chad Williams) is the school teacher who is shamed by the boy's godmother (Katie Gray) into counseling him.

Jefferson had been called a "hog" in a failed attempt by the public defender to enlist jury sympathy against finding the death penalty. Now Jefferson sees no need to rise above that label.

The irony of teaching a prisoner how to "walk like a man to the electric chair" is not lost on the characters. But over the course of their meetings, both men raise their consciousness and commitment.

Linney's play, based on the novel by Ernest J. Gaines, is directed by Laurie Tanoura.

The play deals with race relations and the societal implications of capital punishment. And there is a significant subplot in which the school teacher skulks around in a "back of town" bar with a still-married girlfriend while coming to grips with the extent of his dedication.

Stanton and Williams articulate the necessary arguments, and Gray and D. Omar Williams as the fundamentalist Reverend Ambrose have the right instincts in approaching their roles. But in a play with such charged emotion, care must be taken to let the characters, and not their speeches, drive the action.

And this is what accounts for the unevenness of the production.

We understand the arguments and we see the unjustness of the circumstances, but we don't often feel the frustration and the pain below the dialogue.

A great deal more shaping and refining is due before the actors can begin to breathe real life into the shells they inhabit. As a result, we're taken on a sort of travelogue to mid-century backwoods Louisiana, but don't experience the sharp sensations of living there.