The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer follows a boy who talks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him and then charges them for the privilege. Tom lives with his Aunt Polly, avoids school whenever the weather is good, and is courting Becky Thatcher with the seriousness of someone who has read about courtship in books.

The mischief stops in a graveyard at midnight. Tom and Huckleberry Finn are there to cure warts with a dead cat, and instead they watch a murder happen. The man arrested for it is innocent, the man who did it is still walking around town, and the two boys have sworn to each other in blood that they will never tell. What follows takes them into a courtroom, and later into a cave that neither of them knows the way out of.

Catherine Bush adapted Mark Twain's 1876 novel for a small company of actors who double across an entire town, and the play was first produced in 2009. It keeps Twain's episodes intact and much of his dryness in the dialogue, and it treats the boys' oath as the thing that matters: what the story finally weighs is the cost of keeping a promise when an innocent man is standing trial for someone else's crime.