Haywood Patterson (Clifton Duncan) in The Scottsboro Boys at American Conservatory Theater.

PHOTO BY HENRY DIROCCO

The subversive appropriation of minstrelsy is not unique to Scottsboro —there's the San Francisco Mime Troupe's 1965 production of Minstrel Show, Or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, Suzan-Lori Parks' use of minstrel tropes in Topdog/Underdog and The America Play, and Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled, for instance — but the musical deploys it with its own intent, humanizing the young men whose lives were permanently altered by their arrest and the subsequent trials, which became international news when the Communist-led International Labor Defense got involved, sending in celebrated New York attorney Samuel Liebowitz as the new defense counsel. That the trials were themselves the lesser evil in a white Southern regime of lynching and mob justice (waiting, essentially, just outside the walls of the jailhouse) is never lost on the audience either.

Thompson's admirable book, meanwhile, in the figure of the woman at the bus stop (an unnamed Rosa Parks) bearing witness to the events of the past, draws a line from the Scottsboro case to the later Civil Rights Movement. But, ironically, the use of Rosa Parks obscures as much as it reveals if we think of her as a lone actor who sparks a revolt against an unjust system. She too was a member of a movement culture, one that had built on the activism of the 1930s that first brought the Scottsboro case to light. *

THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS

Extended through July 22, $20-$95

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

www.act-sf.org