The cast of Never the Sinner (Shannon Miller) |
Never the Sinner
LungFish Productions
At TPS4
Through June 20, 2015
The trial of Leopold and Loeb, in Chicago in 1924, was
referred to as the Trial of the Century, at that time. The famed lawyer,
Clarence Darrow was their defense attorney. So, Chicago was breathless at that
time to hear every tiny detail from the trial. It had scandal, murder, and rich people!
Nathan Leopold, Jr. (with an anomalous name – Jews were
expressly forbidden the habit of naming “juniors”), age 19, and Richard Loeb,
age 18, were wealthy young men. Loeb was the charismatic, mercurial one, who
was bored with life and obsessed with crime – one might say he would have been
diagnosed in later years as a sociopath.
Leopold was the constrained and clearly homosexual of the
two, an obsessively intelligent young man with a voracious appetite for detail.
He knew at least some of 15 languages and was already, at his young age, a noted
ornithologist!