J.T. Glisson’s play Sigsbee about a legendary Gainesville lawyer hits the boards tonight (August 7) at the University Auditorium, curtain 7:30pm.

The play is set in the old courthouse of Alachua County, back in the days before air-conditioning, if you can imagine such a thing. Reminiscent of Hal Holbrook’s An Evening With Mark Twain, Glisson’s play is a one-man show hosted by a master raconteur.

Glisson guesses that any lifelong resident of Alachua County over the age of 55 is familiar with the legend of Sigsbee Scruggs, attorney at law.

"My dad used to say the best entertainment in town was at the courthouse," Glisson remembered during a break in rehearsals. "That was actually a cut at Gator football, which was so bad then that even Stetson was known to come up here and kick us around. But the best of the best was Sigsbee. Folks were known to put off coming to town to do their grocery shopping until Sigsbee had a case to try. The show figured to be worth the wait."

"Jury selection was Sigsbee’s forte," said Glisson. "He had a knack for people that he could communicate with."

"It’s easy to underestimate sheer genius," Glisson remarked of Scruggs’s ability to pick and work a jury. "Thirty-two times Sigsbee went to court on behalf of the fishermen of Cross Creek, and he won thirty-two times. When somebody got a bee in their bonnet about it in Tallahassee and set the wardens to laying for the boys, the judge was likely to tell the Tallahassee folks, ‘Sigsbee Scruggs is for the defense, so I just saved you some money and cancelled the trial.’"

The plays starts engagingly and with deceptive charm as Sigsbee represents both parties in a divorce case, which he wittily dismisses before it begins. This is Sigsbee in his prime, cunning, gentle, and fair-minded. Certainly not fitting the popular conception of modern day avaricious attorney.

The narrative retreats further into the past to show the young lawyer proving his mettle, successfully defending a man accused of murder in what was considered a hopeless case. The ambiguity still shrouding the case after the verdict is rendered serves to deepen the mystery of Sigsbee’s personality. It also strikes an intriguing note on which to end the first act.

Act two takes us into the enchanted land of Cross Creek. The play’s delicate dramatic structure increases in complexity as the play unfolds.

J.T. Glisson was born in Cross Creek in 1927. He considered Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings his friend and confidante. He wanted to be an artist, but his father was against it. Marjorie told him, "J.T., you go to art school and I’ll stay here at the Creek and fight with your dad." In addition to becoming a writer, Glisson became an accomplished painter, whose water colors of the Creek are considered classics.

"She was my buddy and my friend, and nobody ever had a better friend," Glisson said simply.

The play is directed by Rip Torn, one of the world’s great actors, tracing his theatrical lineage in a direct line to Tennessee Williams. Not only was he one of an elite ensemble of Williams’ actors who came to people Tennessee’s personal Dragon Country, Rip Torn was married to Geraldine Page, perhaps the pre-eminent Williams actress, from 1961 till her death in 1987.

The ultimate pro, Rip Torn is a class act with a sharp edge, personified in his portrayal of the hardboiled producer on HBO’s "The Larry Sanders Show". Then there’s his state of the art cool, as Zed in Men in Black 2.

Many thought Rip Torn’s performance as Marsh Turner in Cross Creek was Oscar worthy. But the film’s popularity is not unlike that of the Creek itself, largely hidden from sight at first and steadily growing. The movie has acquired a cult audience, adding to the number of pilgrims who troop annually to Cross Creek itself and search out J.T. Glisson.

Glisson had been on the phone back and forth to Rip Torn in New England. Updating Rip Torn’s biography is a ticklish operation, considering that the artist has credits enough to fill the Cross Creek phone book.

Rip Torn is not only one of the world’s great actors. "He’s a hell of a good fisherman," Glisson laughed. Rip Torn recently spent four or five days visiting Glisson, fishing on Lake George and rehearsing the play at night at the Ocala Civic Theatre and at Glisson’s home.

"We’ve put in some changes since the play was performed in Ocala a while back," Glisson explained.

In the play, Sigsbee is getting ready to retire. A new courthouse is being built, one with elevators and air-conditioning, can you beat that?

The University Auditorium is a stately and appropriate venue for the play. "It’s perhaps one of the most classic of all the university buildings," Glisson reminisced. "It dates back to early in the depression, if not before, because it’s obviously built too good for when things were costly."

Glisson actually met Rip Torn before the movie of Cross Creek got the green light in Hollywood. But once filming began, the two became fast friends.

"Rip didn’t like the boat they were giving him to use in the movie," Glisson related. "He wasn’t happy with it. So we built another one at my house."

Glisson recorded Fred Mullen, a veteran of the Ocala Civic Theatre, reading the role and sent the tape to Rip Torn, who marvelled, "This fella nailed it. He could get a part on Broadway."

"We just let the actor get the part," Glisson said simply of Fred Mullen’s purchase on Sigsbee’s personality. Originally, J.T. toyed with the idea of playing the part himself. Now he marvels at Mullen’s command of the role. "I could never get past the third paragraph. Fred’s a wonder."

Normally bearded, the veteran actor shaved to play Sigsbee. The effect was dramatic. "When Fred came onstage clean-shaven and in that costume, he was Sigsbee. Dessie Smith, who took Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on a trip down the St. Johns River, which is no place to fool around, came and saw the play in Ocala. She was 93 years old, and somebody asked if she recognized the fella onstage and she said, ‘Lord, yes, that’s Sigsbee Scruggs; I’ve known him since he was a youngun.’"

While growing up in Cross Creek, J.T. Glisson’s idea of the big city was Gainesville. When it came time to premier his play Sigsbee, something of the glare of bright lights still clung to Gainesville, and Glisson opted for the security of what he perceived as a softer spotlight in Ocala.

"I was a little trepidatious," admitted Glisson, "and I wanted to see how it came off before I thought about doing the play in Gainesville. I figured it was all right when my wife and the director and I couldn’t get seats because the performance was sold out."

Once the play hit the boards and was a smash, Gainesvillians took notice, in particular the faculty at the law school, where Sigsbee graduated in 1922. "Those folks upbraided me for having the premier in Ocala," Glisson related. "They said, ‘But, J.T., you know Sigsbee was ours. And that’s when Dean Mills suggested the law school might host a performance on campus."

Glisson interviewed Sigsbee Scruggs back in the seventies, intending to add the profile to an oral history project. "I also interviewed a number of other lawyers and people in the legal community, expecting to find some hostility against Sigsbee since he’d won so many cases. Just the opposite was the case. They responded with nothing but admiration. Sigsbee became something like the dean of the legal community here and everyone went to him for advice."

Scruggs earned his status with integrity. "He wouldn’t stand for a client of his lying," said Glisson. "And at the same time, he didn’t win all those cases without knowing his way around the truth. He was a master at going the long way around the truth."

Glisson had approached Scruggs hoping to get his views on the landmark Invasion of Privacy case Scruggs worked on behalf of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. But Scruggs looked askance at Glisson’s tape recorder.

The suit for slander brought against Rawlings by her neighbor Zelma Cason centered on a character sketch of the plaintiff in Rawlings’ autobiographical novel Cross Creek. Scruggs was hired on by the defense to help with jury selection and give the final summation.

"The drama of that moment put little old Gainesville on the national stage for the first time," Glisson said. "And conjuring it up, Sigsbee looked back at my tape recorder and said, ‘Aw, turn that thing on. I suppose the world ought to know.’"

In the play, Sigsbee unravels the tangled web that was the case.